Dream State
by Allen McGill
While my body lies dormant, I float at will to hover and soar and move with ease through life and the world. I’ve seen births and deaths, happiness and sorrow, love and rage. I decide where I want to be, and when.
Buddha as a young man was serene, as serene as Moses and Jesus, who were also strong and brave and admirable. But there were other men, powerful rulers who merited no respect.
I was there when Caligula fought his way into the world amid torrents of blood and piercing screams, a foreshadowing of his maniacal life and gruesome death. He was puny, yet managed to rise to the pinnacle of Roman debauchery, slaying his own child while still within his sister’s womb.
The child could have been one of the great lights of history.
You see, time is no barrier for me. Times past or present, that is. Oh, I can visit the future, too, but I have a curious feeling that what I see there comes mostly from my imagination. All the rest is real.
I’ve visited all the time-periods of our world and all parts of the world, too. There’s always something new and different and exciting to see.
I watched thousands upon thousands of men strain to haul enormous blocks of stone across the Egyptian desert to honor their living god, Pharaoh, and to make secure the glory of his afterlife. So, too, did I witness the incredible undertaking of the Chinese peasants as they blockaded their country with the Great Wall. I watched as early man roam throughout Europe, creating the beginning of civilized life with their bare hands. All great feats of this world.
It’s likely that I will attempt to leave our world, to visit others. I’m invincible, you see. Being as I am, nothing and no one can harm me, or even affect me. Sometimes I see things that begin to upset me, but I’m learning to control that, too.
My heart felt caught in a vice when I saw the poor innocents dying from gas in Bhopal. The children who couldn’t understand what was happening mercifully died quickly — unlike the lingering deaths of the AIDS victims in Africa now. Oh, my heart aches for them all, but I cannot allow myself to weep.
Despite all the tragedy I must witness, I almost never return to where I started. There’s too much personal pain there, memories. Sometimes I can’t keep the pain at bay. If I pause beneath a stand of trees, or near a lake, if I touch a toy rabbit, a picnic table — I want to die.
Don’t they understand? There’s nothing there for me any longer. I don’t want to go back. Everybody’s gone now — and all because of me.
The state of omniscience is my realm now, a realm where I can study at first hand the wonders and horrors of eternity. The beauty, love and caring. But also the evil and neglect. There are parents who sacrifice themselves for their children, and others who sacrifice their children for profit. Children abandoned, neglected, abused.
No, I will stay in my “dream state,” as I now call it. The doctors claim my body is in a coma, but they don’t know. My state is voluntary. I’ve chosen to exist within it. When I’m off somewhere, I can see and hear everything, but there is no obligation to feel anything at all. Intellect without emotion.
I believe this is the way God must see us — watching and judging without feeling, a perfect state of being. Existence without involvement. So different from the hospital’s world, where they want to awaken me — to a life of mourning for those I lost in the fire. The doctors probably don’t even think of that, but that’s what it would be. As it is, I force myself not to remember, but sometimes flashes of memory come unbidden.
A vacation in the country, we thought, away from city heat. How wonderful for the children as well as ourselves. A remote cabin without modern amenities. The breeze off the lake was so fresh and cool in the mornings, warming to swimsuit temperatures as the day wore on, with sweater — cool evenings. The smell of steaks grilling over charcoal outdoors. A pie baking in the old gas stove inside. Idyllic.
No, no, no! It’s not as if I did it on purpose! I’d had a few beers after everyone else had gone to bed, and then took a walk along the shore to have a cigarette. Returning through the woods to the cabin, I flipped the butt off the path onto a patch of dirt behind the house, no danger of starting a brush fire. Nearby, stood a latticed fence. I didn’t know that it hid the gas tank for the water heater and stove — a leaky tank.
The explosion blew me off the path, unconscious for I don’t know how long. When I finally came to and dragged myself upright, the cabin was an inferno. I heard my daughter’s screams through the side window. I tried to reach her, but the window was too high, so I raced to the front door and shoved open the front door. Flames shot out at me as if from a blowtorch, blasting me off my feet.
Days later, after begging, I convinced the hospital staff in the burn unit to tell me all that had happened. It was then that I rejected the world as I’d known it. I withdrew into my consciousness, freed from my corporeal self.
That’s enough! It’s torture! I won’t remember, and I’ll never go back. Ever. I’m leaving now. I’ve got to go away from here. Now. Anywhere I can just observe — not judge or feel, just watch. I won’t wake up. I won’t let them drag me back. It’s too hard! No. I’ll just float on until it’s over. Just float...
Copyright © 2006 by Allen McGill
