SharpNose's Journal: A Vision: Found, In Darkness

Throughout my life, I have a history of having difficulty going to sleep. Ask my mother; I was a baby, she says, born to be awake. So concerned were my parents, they took me to a doctor and wired me up to an EEG. The doctor's medical opinion: I was..."nosy." Whereas there was no abnormality in my EEG patterns, it was noted that the amplitude of those patterns - if you will, the amount of electricity the machine picked up - was oddly high.

I don't know if this has anything to do with my ability to get to sleep, but when I stop moving and the eyes aren't scanning the surroundings and the ears aren't sorting the world into musical rhythms, my mind takes a bit to wind down. It starts to imagine and remember. And, although my day-to-day life is no longer wracked like this, at times such as these I sense the sadness and isolation that I carried through much of my teens and twenties. I also mourn; my more recent re-evaluation of my past that I have written of here in this journal has brought me realizations that are harsh and unkind. So many opportunities for happiness shut off by my own poor judgment and feelings of worthlessness.

It has been during such times that I will on occasion have a vision. This is very distinct from a dream, for I am wide awake when it occurs. What makes it noteworthy is that the vision seems to have entered my head out of from nowhere, as though it was planted there fully formed. It goes like this.

I am in some cluttered, hidden place where a person would not ordinarily stay; it does not seem at all like a house or an apartment. I have an impression of there being pipes and equipment like you'd find in an old building. I am not so much ill as idled, perhaps beaten down or battered. My family is gone, unknown to me and I to them, and the friends that I had belong to some largely forgotten past. I'm dirty and my clothes are old - perhaps just things I found. I don't do anything anymore; mostly I just lie around in darkness among the pipes or whatever. I have the impression that I stay away from people because I don't want to interact with them. Something must have happened to separate the person I am in the vision irrevocably from the person I am now as I write this. I don't want to have to explain who I am and I don't want to talk about my history because all of that is lost to me now and has become increasingly irrelevant.

As I lie there partially atop and partially behind some pipes or railing or whatever, I hear voices and I can tell someone is coming. I can see what little light enters the room shift a bit as someone enters, but I barely care and I don't bother to move or even look at the person. Just then, I hear someone softly and a bit fearfully call out my name - with a clear questioning inflection. It's a woman's voice. I turn my head a bit, open my eyes more fully, and try to make the woman out in what little light there is in the room, but the thing that stirs my dulled mind is that someone knows my name - a name that no one uses for me anymore, to the point that I don't even think about ever having had a name. Once she realizes I'm there and she draws closer to see who I am, I'm more able to see her in the unlit room and I can see that she's dressed for action, as though she knew she might be on foot out in the open or might have to clamber through old buildings. She seems to have gone to a great deal of trouble and taken risks to find me. She knew me long ago, and while I am having trouble placing the voice and I still can't see her well enough to recognize her (perhaps because I had long since lost my glasses?), it is somehow plain to me that she was looking for me only because she cared about me. As she is looking at me more closely and realizing that I am who she was looking for, I am still confused as to who this woman is and why she would go to the trouble of finding me. I suddenly feel embarrassed and ashamed to be seen in this condition by someone who might have known me when things were very, very different - when I was actually known by the name she called.

When I have this vision, the experience is very short. I can see the shape of the woman coming into the room and I can hear her call my name. I feel like I'm projecting some future time when my fortunes have finally collapsed and/or some change, some calamity, has occurred and has made an idle homeless drifters out of me. I have no idea who the woman could be; I don't know if it's someone I was close to many years before, someone who had fallen in love with me without my knowing it and who sought to find me after learning that I had dropped through the cracks, or someone I haven't even met yet. Is this supposed to be some future time, or is this "lifestyle," if you can call it that, an allegory for how I feel now and I'm hoping someone will come look for me, hoping to rescue me?

Is this a good or a bad vision? It has me living a ruined, bleak life, withdrawn and alone. Yet, a woman appears, apparently someone who has valued me for years - a tenuous link between myself and some long gone reality where I was vital, engaged, and worthwhile.