i dream of alternate lives. have for as long as i can remember. i often wonder if those dreams are the real life or if this one is. i cannot say i always know. things are different, even as they are the same.
me and the ‘generic’ you… in all our amazing possibility… sometimes, you and i are married. sometimes, we have only just met. sometimes, we never meet, not in a grocery, not at the library, not on a street corner, not at all. or, if we do, it’s strangers passing one another without awareness. for all i know i may have met you a million times in a million dreams…. but never noted you.
i once decided to think about infinity. that every moment i am aware of actually contains every moment that i do not know as reality. that, every action unfurls a ribbon through space and time wherein every possible action is taken and un-taken. every thought is thought and un-thought. every act is manifested or un-manifested, and all options find the choice and the refusal to choose.
i followed them two or three steps before realizing that i wasn’t accounting for all the other possibilities – every conceivable/inconceivable freak happenstance both occurs and fails to occur. every moment in which i live is a moment in which i also die. the many, varied means of all my deaths both happening and un-happening as i sat there and contemplated.
needless to say, it quickly became overwhelming and i had to stop thinking about it. instead, i thought of the life in which you and i were friends and the choices that led you over the horizon were unmade. it was the sweetest delight, to know you all my life and to share with you tenderly and both give and receive care.
i never found the reason to miss you, never discovered the feeling of betrayal and abandonment, never knew what it was to feel cast off and unimportant to you, never lived the hours, days, and years emptier for the lack of your presence. sometimes, i think all the near misses and mistakes are somehow imperative to the process. how else do we learn what is most important than to experience the things we thought so and see beyond them as we move through?
i have lived entire lifetimes in dreams. but always as myself. at least, lately so. it did not used to be that way. i am not sure what that means. when i have thought upon it, the only conclusion i can reach is that, like all things, we live in fleeting flashes, glimmers in an infinite cosmos and our willingness to see “ourselves” other than as we perceive ourselves to be becomes blunted with time.
many times i have said that i believe it is all the same; that all experience is one experience and it is only our perspective that shapes it differently or seeks to apply labels to constrain it within our limited ability to understand. i still believe this to be correct, but am no less prone to falling into the trap of perspective than ever.
ultimately, this too is a comfort — it demonstrates the truth that is the experience… the moment in which i am no longer subject to perspective is very likely the moment in which this life ends. while i am still a being floundering in perspective, i count it gift that i have become able to see more than only my own and this may well be the core of the comfort that i feel about these dreams, alternate lives, other paths; any one of them could be the one i know as ‘real’ and thus any dream i would see become so i have only to embrace to make so.
this, the truest power — that humans become and what they become is the sum total of what they wish, what they will, and what they do.
did i have a point? heh. as if. just a ramble, as usual. meaning is where you find it and it is a certainty that the only meaning i have is my own.