Glgrrrrgg

 ffssshhhhhh… 

and back to bed.

Try to recall the dream, what was it? 

Write down, “Paul and I on a raft, looking for something, friends?” maybe I can get back there if I fall asleep again… 

…

nothing, blank, maybe if I hit the vaporizer…huuuuhhhuhhhh… 

grrrggg again…. 

too awake now.

Easier to remember if my stomach wakes up in the middle of it, bringing me straight from the REM to waking life without gradually gearing down, dreams from indigestion. Try to write them down before I forget so that I can recognize patterns and perform a reality check to trigger lucidity, like looking at my hands to see if they look right. Also check clocks, mirrors, and words on the page to see if they hold shape. Once lucidity is achieved, the experience becomes memorable and just as real as waking life but without the corporeal constraints, the only limitation being the inability to share the experience with someone else, but if I can consistently access lucidity, then I can have a place to go while my body is stuck in the hospital. I read about how weed suppresses REM sleep and then it rebounds when you stop smoking so that must have been why those hospital dreams came on strong. Can’t smoke in the hospital after anesthesia, will need my lungs at peak performance given my current lack of cardiovascular activity, since pulmonary complications are the biggest risk and main reason I have to sign the waiver that says I might not wake up. I can make sure my dreamstate is a utopic Xanadu as opposed to traumatic nightmare if I expose my amygdala and hippocampus to beautiful works of art because in dreams we visualize ideas from the residue of stimuli we have encountered during waking life that have stuck themselves in our subconscious, and so if we have mental autonomy, that gives us the ability to curate our dreamscape, and what is a work of art if not an experience that someone tried to capture before they forgot, and they must have put the great effort in transcribing that vision on to some medium because they thought it had particular resonance or beauty since it had solidified and raised itself to float above all the bodily distractions and myriad musings that ran through their mind from the moment of experience until the transcription was complete. Wish I could make it over to the Met just a few blocks from the hospital, but there are large crowds and I know they have that big bathroom in the basement but I don’t know if I could make it there from the impressionist wing on the top floor, but fortunately I have the great archive ready at my fingertips so I can choose carefully and try to implant visions that will bring beautiful dreamscapes if my body isn’t working, open high-def pdf and zoom in to see each brushstroke closer than in person with the lines on the floor in front of the painting that you cannot cross because sweat and breath carbon denatures the paint.

No one knows what happens when we die but all hypotheses can be divided into two categories: either there is nothing, timeless void of sensation, like before we were born, which no one remembers as unpleasant, or there is something. If there is something, then most likely it is our subconscious collection of sensations and memories from waking life that have been jumbled together like in a dream, so a sailor’s afterlife might be on an ocean with interludes in foreign port towns, while a rich man’s afterlife might be confined by repressed avarice to an unspendable vault of coins. By this logic, our afterlife is created by what we are subjected to in our waking life, and this explains the golden rule that all religions agree on: if you subject someone else to trauma, then you are inflicting an experience that can turn their dreamscape into a nightmarish hell at any moment, and so any act that inflicts trauma on purpose is an evil act. Conversely, any act that helps foster a peaceful existence for others, such as creating an engaging work of art that contributes to a pleasant subconscious for those who experience it, is virtuous. As mom has told me often, “knowledge is something that no one can ever take away from you,” and so it is as if the accumulation of life’s experiences was preparation for this task ahead of me, which I must go through with no matter how daunting. 

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