Bugs

When I was about six or so, I did a very odd thing. And I learned a very odd lesson from it, that is very hard to explain. It has to do with how the mind functions, you might say. Though that is not quite true, cause nothing I can say about it, or anything else, is quite true.

I was in an apartment, in a city. And there were bugs now and then, roaches to be precise, which found there way into the apartment. They were big black roaches, city roaches, not like the little field roaches I see in my garden sometimes, now. They creeped me out, gave me the hebegebies, and the grown-ups reacted to them rather strongly too. They immediately attacked them, which was fine with me, and I gathered from what they said that if these creepy things were not got rid of right away, they might make many more roaches, and that was not a good thing, from my point of view.

Well, I was lying in my bed, in a room with two beds, one small, and one much larger, that my older brothers were sleeping in. My bed was near the door, and I was just kinda staring into the very dim grey of the room, toward that door. It was kinda half open, and I could just make out the rounded knob on the bedroom side, cause the window was letting in the dim light of the world outside. And the thought crossed my mind, that the part of the dark knob I could see sticking out beyond the blackness of the door and the kitchen it opened to, looked kind of like a very large roach.

And I noticed (not for the first time) that in the dim light, the illusion of such a thing sort of drifting in my visual field, was more pronounced than when the world was light. And I noticed that once I noticed that it was less "fixed" in my perception, it became even less stable. I realized that I had somehow done that, that my thoughts about it, had somehow provoked the appearance of movement to increase. I was curious then . . . very curious about how that worked, and what it "meant", about us . . .

And I decided to see just how much "control" I had over this "movement", this self triggered illusion. I stared at that partially revealed shape, and sort of "made it" move, slowly, up and down the dark edge of the dark side of the door. I could "make" it move more and more it seemed. And I was drifting off, I think, and in the dim shadows of my now fading reality, something very strange happened. I lost control, of the movement, of the nature of the shape my eyes were staring at. It moved far more than I "wanted" it to. It moved rather quickly, and became more detailed. It was alive. It was a very large roach.

And I knew something had gone "wrong", but I wasn't at all sure what had gone wrong. And the roach moved in and out of sight, and I became worried. And when I looked down toward the ground, I saw other roaches, and other creepy things, moving as creepy things do. And then things got very frightening. Most everywhere my eyes fell in the dark grey mist, there they were, the creepy things, writhing and creeping.

I remember being very repulsed, but also very skeptical. The skepticism was more potent than the fear, and I never did "panic" exactly, but didn't know what to do. I started to call to my brothers, over there, in the dim light. I don't remember what I said, or what they answered, but the interaction earned me some teasing for a few years, and the word ‘bugs', became a sort of rallying cry, for some amusement at my expense, as we say . At the time, all I remember is that they were not kind, though not particularly cruel either. I didn't want to seem scared, or crazy to them, and it dawned on me that they could not really understand. I remember realizing that it was likely that no one understood such things. That I was on my own, so to speak.

I tried to reason through what was happening, and I began looking more carefully at things. And I figured out that like the big roach, each of these creatures was born of some slight visual difference, some small shadow or highlight in my visual field. I knew they could not be real, yet there they were, quite real looking, and animated. I had no way of telling if any were real, and no way of stopping them. Realizing they were not real (as far as I could reason), didn't make them go away.

I knew in some vague way, that I was seeing "behind" a curtain of sorts. I knew that I was on the very edge of what I might now call sanity. Not the definition thing, not the idea of sanity and insanity, but the reality. In the world beyond words, and ideas, and images. In the "guts" of my own consciousness, my own existence.

I got tired of the bugs, and the fear, and the edge. I decided to just close my eyes and go to sleep. I would be normal again in the morning, when the light was back. There was no reason to linger there, in this twilight realm I had stumbled into, where the vast mysterious thing, that was not me, was making reality. So I did, I just went to sleep.

And when I opened my eyes again, it was morning, and the light was pouring into the room through the window. I looked over at my brothers, and they too were awakening, and all was well, and regular. I was sleepy though, I suppose from being awake so long, and wanted a bit more rest. So I turned over onto my belly under the covers, and kind of wrapped my arm around the pillow, to puff it up beneath my head, and there they were. Under the pillow, bugs, and worms, as clear as clear can be, in a little pile of sorts, writhing and scurrying some.

It startled me, for a moment, but I let the edge of the pillow down, and lay my head down too. And went back to sleep, knowing that the edge is never far away, really.