consciousness.

Quite the busy week.  Need to upload more doodles, but until then…

Consciousness.

Just kinda a strange observation, not necessarily a funny one.  I slept badly the other night.  Or is it bad?  But I couldn’t really remember why, just woke up more groggy for the fact.

Later that evening, my roommate informs me that there was a lot of commotion across the street.  Apparently, some ambulances and firetrucks had showed up around 3:30 and were tearing down the street, blaring their horns as they traveled.  Which, of course, is totally unnecessary on a one-way neighborhood street at 3:30am.  But I digress.

Point is, as soon as he told me this, I remembered briefly hearing this blaring and then passing back out.  I’m a heavy sleeper.  It’s not uncommon for loud noises to wake me up (which sounds totally contradictory to what I just said) but they wake me up quite literally for a matter of seconds.  As long as I’ve determined the room is not on fire, I easily fall back asleep.  Same thing with loud thunderstorms.  No fire, no need to stay awake.

But I thought it was interesting how I had erased this from my conscious memory altogether.  It wasn’t until I was told about the night’s events that I remembered hearing those sirens.  Which leads me to wonder – is that memory real?  Or did I just construct that given this information?  It feels authentic, but on the same hand, I can imagine a lot of memories could be easily constructed.  I’d wager that a lot of my childhood memories did not ever actually occur as they remain committed to my memory, and some events, I’ve discovered through endless arguing with those involved, I’ve made up entirely.

Memory is an interesting thing.  Not only is it subject to perspective – two people can remember the same event in completely different ways – but it’s subject to conscious recording too.  Take the sirens, for example.  The ambulances came, I heard them arrive, I was conscious when they arrived, but as my window of consciousness was so short, it soon shut and relegated that memory to my subconscious thought.  So when I woke up a few hours later wondering why I was tired, I could not remember exactly why I had woken up for a few seconds at 3:30am, but just that I had and something had prompted it.

It’s somewhat akin to sleepwalking.  I’ve only been prone to an act of sleepwalking one time in my life – that I know of anyway.  I’m pretty sure I’m not a sleepwalker.  But how would you really know, right?  If the act was not witnessed by another party?  Anyway, I must have been eight or nine years old, and I managed to sleepwalk from my room upstairs, down to the main level and into the family room, where legend has it I tried to drink from a silver candleholder before my parents figured out I wasn’t fully awake and beat me mercilessly.  Just kidding, they just shook me awake.  Legend has it.

So I mean, while obviously there was some level of conscious processing for me to be able to navigate the staircase and hallways, to identify and grab the candleholder, obviously these memories were never retained once I regained full conscious processing.  They were relegated.  Yet little memories – a re-telling or re-witnessing – from others filled in the gaps and brought these occurrences back to the surface.

I suppose what fascinates me the most about this idea is that, if no one else witnesses these events or tells you something that prompts that miniature epiphany, did you really see or hear it?  Is it really stored in your memory?  Will you ever randomly access it or will your subconscious dispose of it entirely?  Could you, theoretically, retain the description of a criminal’s license plate in between spans of consciousness if you were assaulted?  I don’t know.  I don’t think a lot of people know how we gain access to these things.  But it’s crazy, it really is, how powerful the brain is, how much it can store than we can’t even process or access or comprehend.

down.

It’s probably going to sound like I’m making this up.  But I’m not.

(Then again, if I made this up, I would probably be more gonzo than the counter-reality of actually experiencing this crap.  Even if in dreams.)

I had a nightmare a few nights ago about dogs and balloons.

Specifically, dogs being tethered to balloons and sent skyward.  Some guy in some suburban neighborhood was rounding up dogs and tying them to balloons and sending dozens, hundreds of them into the clouds.  Hell, people were giving their dogs to him.  There were cars, vans, trucks lined up down his street for miles, bumper-to-bumper toward the horizon.  Handing over their dogs to be sent up to heaven.  All dogs go.

It seems like a funny visual in retrospect, but the feeling of doom was so damn palpable in the dream.  What goes up after all.  I knew all these dogs were being sent up only to have that balloon pop and send them plummeting back to earth.  I could hear them barking and yelping.  The images, they were so vivid.  Tremendous.  Literary to the point of poetic prose on the pupils.  But the sensation behind this ludicrous act, it was horrible.  Just a wretched feeling, watching these dogs be sent up just to come back down to their death.

I don’t understand the symbolism, if there was any.

At one point, my old dog Junior fell from the sky.  My family put Junior down last summer.  He was 12 years old and suffering from canine Alzheimer’s.  I didn’t know dogs could get it until he did.  Still remember the day we put him down.  August 6, the day my childhood was euthanized.

But for some reason, as he fell, a hawk swooped in and scooped him up.  And I happened to be in the backseat of my first car for whatever reason (not getting laid in that clunker, assuredly), and the hawk deposited him through the open window.

So here’s the creepy part, for me.  And maybe that I haven’t found any of the preceding to be “the creepy part” is indicative of how uncontrollably FUBAR this whole dream was.

He was exactly like he was before he got sick.  I mean, he looked the same.  Same gray, wispy hair.  Same Butterball body.  Same slicked-back ears, same eyes searching darkness for the unseen.  I held him and my lap and petted him, and I remembered what it was like to pet my dog.  Wow, that seems like a euphemism.

So while it was a nightmare, and the idea of these dogs all going ker-splat on the ground was dreadful, I woke up reaching for an invisible dog curled up against my ankle.  It was stunning, it really was, how realistic it was.  Like nothing was exaggerated whatsoever, and for whatever reason, I chose to recall a moment with my childhood dog, and I could remember exactly what he looked and felt like.

Just amazed me, the power of a dream to emulate the already realized past.