Running over the same old ground.
What have we found?
The same old fears.–Pink Floyd/Wish You Were Here
Whatever gets you through the night is alright.
–John Lennon
As someone who is slow to both fall asleep and wake up, I spend a lot of time in what I think of as the in-between space of life. The space between being asleep and being awake. It’s not quite a dream space, but it isn’t quite consciousness either. It’s almost-but-not-quite-asleep. If someone were to talk to me, I think I’d respond, but it’d take me a second to shake out of it.
For me it seems to be kind of a what-if space. I have conversations there I wish I could really have. Or that I wish I hadn’t had. Or that I did have and wish had gone differently. Or sometimes theg just seem like random discussions about life. It’s pretty much always a conversation, rather than anything film-like or full of images. I’m not sure there even are images. Sometimes there are snippets of gestures, but I feel them more than see them. A caress. A hand brushing my hair back.
The in-between space doesn’t feel dreamlike, but it doesn’t feel like reality either. I don’t have, I don’t think, much control over what is said there. It’s often related to something I’ve been thinking about, or maybe trying not to think about, in my awake life. Often I know who I’m talking with, but a lot of the time I don’t. Sometimes I can’t even distinguish specific words, it’s just a sort of reassuring whisper nuzzled against my ear. Words just kind of stream into my head.
Very occasionally a phrase will sort of pop out at me that I feel like I need to remember, so I’ll get up and write it down. Often I’ll remember segments of the conversation, but they’re mostly ephemeral. I’ll remember the mood more than the precise content.
I think the internal conversations help me sort through things that I need to work out. They’re part of my internal CPU. I used to think it held me back to hear people speaking to me from the past. Now I think if I really listen to what they’re saying I can process the lesson and move forward. Whatever they say, I would really miss them all if they went away. It’s not a bad way to start and end the day most of the time.
Then again, if I Googled it, I’m sure I’d find out that it’s a symptom of incipient psychosis.
Please don’t tell me if it is.