on thinking

I’ve been thinking lately about, well, thinking. Particularly the kind of thinking you do when you are almost asleep. A few days ago I was hovering between the realms of consciousness and I could tell that something was wrong with my thoughts. And the strange thing was, I had just enough awareness to realize how crazy they were. Does anyone else understand what I’m talking about? Imagine that you’re falling asleep. You begin to dream, but you see these dreams through the eyes of a sane man. Part of you is dreaming, and part of you can’t believe what he sees. This is what I’m talking about. If your brain is like mine, then it is always very active. Near sleep I start to lose track of my thoughts. They are like dogs, getting off their leashes. Sometimes, I’m awake enough to realize that they’re getting away, even if I can’t catch them. All I can remember from a few days ago is thinking about a woman. This is hard to describe and even harder to recall. She had a line coming out of her side. I kept imagining this glowing line shooting up from her hip. She was a blur and I don’t know why I was thinking of her, or what else my impressions were. But let me be clear, I was AWAKE. This kind of strange thought is usually reserved for dreams. In that semi-conscious state I thought of other things too. Those didn’t make any sense either. It was something about me re-naming myself and claiming a name for humanity. I know, it sounds stupid, and it probably was, but it made so much sense. It was profound. It was epic. At least I think it was.

I realize while writing this that I’m using the word “think” a lot. And I THINK that this might be part of the problem. The English language only has one word to describe the richness of activity in the human mind. How can we constrain the idea of thought so? There is so much to think about. There are so many kinds of thought. Even without emotions, we as humans can think in a million ways. We can imagine, we can conjecture, we can analyze, we can synthesize and we can split concepts. And yet all I can say is that my THINKING was strange. It was so many things. I guess you could call it unconstrained thought. Thought that was not limited by physics, or practicality or the world. These were the thoughts that we keep caged until we sleep, until we dream. Sometimes I’m lucky enough to see these thoughts come out and play. It’s just a shame that I always forget what they look like.