It was sometime in his mid-fifties that it struck him. Sitting one night, bored behind his computer screen, he suddenly had an idea.
Increasingly feeling isolated and alone, he had begun to feel as if, somehow, life wasn’t really real. Reality wasn’t real. The feeling had started in his thirties and intensified as he got older. Life seemed out of control, beyond his sphere of influence. It was as if the world had been created just to keep him afraid and controlled. Or was it occupied? Yes, occupied. The more wars, threats of war, strikes, accidents and so on, the more occupied humans become with fear. Then there was the rise of social media and its avalanche of idiots who suddenly thought they knew more than the experts. This manifested itself as conspiracy theories, Flat Earthers, and even more bewildering and bizarre religious types who would believe that somehow and one day they would ascend physically to Heaven leaving everyone else behind. The world had slowly gone insane.
The insanity of it all was what finally broke the spell that had held him. Yes – insanity.
As he sat there that night feeling helpless, as he watched and read all sorts of fearsome news and opinions, he suddenly knew. It was as if he had always known – but some trigger had brought this knowing to the forefront of his brain. Reality simply wasn’t real. The thing was, though, when he had this realization it wasn’t simply a thought or a germinating idea. It wasn’t simply another dead end to keep him occupied. No, it was simply that he just knew that nothing he had ever believed, been told, taught or exposed to was actually reality. The effect of this sudden knowing was, of course, profound.
The idea caused him to fall into a deep and lasting sickness. Those around him were concerned for his welfare and their own. A man in a coma presents a problem on many levels – it keeps one occupied.
The man in the coma wasn’t. The man in what looked to everyone else like a coma was actually beyond reality. As the knowing or the idea hit him, he was able to exit the supposed reality and enter another version of it. Better, superior and more complete in every respect – but, in leaving prematurely, he had left his physical shell in the ‘reality’ that he exited. To his family and friends and the hospital staff, he was simply a comatose individual. His body was there and it still functioned to some degree, but his mind was elsewhere. Actually, his essence was elsewhere and his body was simply on autopilot. His essential self – what he really was – actually inhabited another place altogether. He had escaped at the very moment of his idea – his profound realization about reality.
“You see,” he thought to himself as he scanned a page of Internet, bored, “this is my dream. I am the dreamer!”
As words starkly written in typeface on white paper, it’s sort of a meaningless idea, benign even. But for his mind, it was a shock that shook his core. It sent his awareness to another place.
In that instant, he had connected a lot of dots: Dots that he had been collecting through his life as a curious questioner of stuff. Yes, people had thought him a bit dotty, or perhaps even mad, to study magic, alchemy, dreams, psychology, physics and an awful lot more but in the end… Well, it was self-apparent wasn’t it?
Dots. The dots had become a line and the line quickly became a shape, a malleable shape. He had simply made a doorway shape and stepped through it and, in doing so, he had jumped a dimension or perhaps several. He had met there his long-dead parents and many friends whom he had never expected to see again. At first, there was consternation among them; after all, it was not yet his ‘time.’
There, wherever there was, he had understood that ‘life’ really is nothing but a dream – and the aim of the dream is first to know that it is just a dream and secondly to see how to connect the dots as he had done. There was then no real need for the life-dreaming at all. While he knew that many of his newly re-found friends and relatives would soon opt to go back to life-reality-dreaming to gain the idea as he had, he no longer had any use for it. He had recognized the signs, joined the dots and seen the fear-based, occupying program for what it was – the enemy to advancement. He had advanced. Prematurely perhaps, but he had.
From “The Pink Bus” by G. Michael Vasey