An excerpt from How to know if you’re crazy. A recurring dream makes her question the nature of her existence. She wakes in a familiar state of unknowing. Can she make sense of her surroundings enough to move forward? Or will she stay trapped in the past?

One is sharply conscious, yet without regret, of the limits to the possibility of mutual understanding and sympathy with one's fellow creatures. Such a person no doubt loses something in the way of geniality and lightheartedness; on the other hand, he is largely independent of the opinions, habits, and judgments of his fellows and avoids the temptation to take his stand on such insecure foundations.

-Albert Einstein

All throughout my childhood I had this recurring nightmare. Perhaps nightmare isn’t the correct designation. A recurring very intense dream. I guess it started around the time I was seven, when I first started to hear the voices, or know I was hearing them, and persisted until I was at least 14 and became distracted by puberty. Every time I had this dream, it would startle me awake and I became more certain that it was not a dream but in fact a memory. And I could tell no one of it because it was a memory from outside the space and time of my physical life on this Earth, although not far from it, in fact, from just the few final moments before my existence, my incarnation. The dream goes like this:

I’m hovering in some immense space; practically nonexistent, blissfully immersed in this intense calm, a constant humming certainty, like if there were a white noise machine that whispered algorithmic equations into a room full of chalkboards. There’s darkness all around me, but I can see, or sense, into it. In an instant, I have this crisp feeling like crawling out from underneath a down comforter after 7 solid hours of sleep to stand in a cold, empty room and I’m covered in spidery tingles. Without moving an inch, I’ve suddenly appeared out of nowhere. In the dark, it’s not that there is light, it’s that I am light. But no physical form. I try to blink, no eyes. Try to reach out and touch the air, no hands. I gasp from panic but even my chest feels empty. No stomach to turn. I am and I am not. The nothing moves right through me.

In the distance all around me, there are other things, orbs, like light. Not quite like stars, more like points. Of consciousness. Imagine a black sky filled with clusters of white specks, but more contrived than what we see when we look up, perfect spheres on X- and Y-axes. And they’re not exactly light because they do not shine necessarily. But they emanate something I can sense. If I focus, I can hear them. All at once. Or one at a time. I’m only different than them by a decision. To be separate. They, and I, only are…by a decision to be. The dark in between us is not dark like outer space. It’s dark like nothing, like a deep, rich, bending fabric of nothing.

There’s a light-orb entity beside me, much larger than I am. I cannot quite look directly at it. I’m in the middle of an argument with it, I think. This moment feels something like the “coming to” that I know in my physical life. I get the sense that I just separated from this larger entity, became an individual thing, and what was a nanosecond prior a shared knowing became a very animated conversation. Not an argument so much as a warning. It is warning me, and I do not heed it.

“To take form, you must forget. You won’t know this place when you wake. You will have to find it again on your own. You might not.” It says to me in a manner that is not quite words. In fact, there are and have been many words I could put on the transaction. But truly it is an exchange of feelings, sensations, visions, not only non-verbal but not even much like what we know of as conscious thought. Nonetheless, it communicates with me, and I respond.

“I won’t forget. Not entirely. I’ll take the memories with me.”

“That can be much worse. That entails the mission of the oracles, the seers.”

“I can do it.” I’m filled with this feeling like inspiration, but more like becoming a sputtering of electrical charges, like being the quarter inch of uninsulated wire in a long cord.

“Still to take form you’ll forget almost entirely. You’ll doubt severely. You still may not even fulfill your mission.”

“It’s okay. I can do it,” I more urge than say.

“You’ve not been in a body, on a planet in a very long time.” I more feel than hear.

“I don’t care. I want to,” I insist.

Then there’s this overwhelming feeling like a shrug. And instantly what isn’t my stomach lurches and I’m hurtling through a tunnel. With no voice, no mouth, I scream, “Wait, I’m not reeeeeaaaaadyyyy!” The sound of what isn’t air but just staticky particles moving through some soft, but impenetrable border in space is deafening. I flail and reach out, but I have no limbs to grab. I am traveling so fast and yet going nowhere. It’s not like travel from point A to point B through space over time. It’s like descending through many layers of dimension, from something very diffuse, vibrating very quickly, whose form is nothing more than a choice, a collection of consciousness, to something that is very dense, very small, very slow. I went nowhere in time and space. I transformed from something that could know anything, be anywhere, without any real limits on size or shape, to something that knew nothing, or could not know what it knew, and had a miniscule, immobile form. It felt like I had ceased to exist.

My eyes shoot wide open, heavy and stiff, breaking the crust of sleep. My mind reels at how fresh the shock of this dream stays after so many years. “Why can’t I just dream of falling off of stepladders like other people?” Becoming aware of my surroundings, I see only white, hear only my heartbeat and breathing. I have is this feeling that I’ve lost something precious, that I’m trapped on this rock, in this meatsuit, surrounded by other stacks of flesh and bones, cells dividing and dying, happily asleep in a collective dream of unreality.

I choke down a small, nagging fear and focus. There’s an arrhythmic whirring and a warm breeze. I smell some fresh morning air, laced with a relaxing stench of cigarettes and coffee. I have to tilt my head back on the bed to see the ceiling fan with one loose bolt, so it doesn’t spin in a tight, perfect circle but rattles back and forth in an oblong pattern, clank, clink, clank, clink. I fan my arms out beside me and discover crisp, cool sheets. I’m surprised I can move my arms and then feel silly for being surprised.

My life has been a long sequence of coming to. Waking and racing madly through the catacombs of my mind searching for clues, finding in the corridors terrifying screams and flashes that send me running in the other direction, or worse, finding nothing, just free-falling darkness and flailing out for a bit of earth to grab to onto. All as I lie there and stare blankly at the ceiling through the clank, clink of the ceiling fan. “Where the fuck am I?” A thought as dear to me as an old friend, and as I let it wash over me, the fear takes hold of me finally.

…if you can’t remember the answer, just ask the question again. You never forget the question.

I sit bolt upright, hyperventilating a little. I dart my eyes around the room, making myself lightheaded. But slowly the familiarity of the place starts to sink in, although, I’m not home. I haven’t had one of those for a very long while. The walls are white, but not the sterile blank of hospitals. Just a few country home wall hangings with bible quotes and flowers on them here and there. A boxy old TV with knobs to change the stations and volume. A rocking chair with an Afghan throw draped over the back of it. And an antique writing desk that I’ve crowded with my eMac and notebooks.

On the computer, sits open a Word document, the cursor still blinking mid-sentence on the screen. A notebook rests open to the right of the keyboard. In the crux between the pages, a pen, cap still off. I was writing. The handwriting is hard to read—desperate, messy scrawls as though I couldn’t write fast enough. Sentence fragments. Piled in a box on the floor are different journals. The box appears well-rifled through. I pick up an older-looking journal and sift through the pages. Complete sentences and paragraphs, in a girl’s practiced penmanship, almost like calligraphy, the ends of letters with a little curl and all having the same slant. The pages tell coherent stories, from only one perspective, sad and serious, but sweet. Another journal is a handwritten book of short stories.

I remember.

A waft of cigarette smoke comes through the window on a breeze. I snap out of it a little and head toward it, running my hand over the crisp covers of the bed along the way. It’s as though I’m touching things to make sure they are real, and I’m not in a cell somewhere imagining this. I hear conversing outside, hear pauses to take drags off cigarettes, quick gasps followed by long puffs, then the murmuring resumes. Resolute to leave the room, I march back to the door, put my hand on the knob but hesitate to look over my shoulder at the boxes of journals, at the blinking cursor on the computer screen. I toss a net out in my mind and draw it back in, sifting for any image or sound from the days or weeks before waking up here.

I can feel myself shuffling down a hospital corridor in nothing but socks and a gown, mouth drooping and eyes glazed over, running my hands against the wall for support as I make my way to lay down. I see a flash of a woman and her boyfriend in their living room, shouting at each other. He walks away, but she pursues him. He slams the door in her face, and she drops to the ground in angry sobs. I’m on a bus in the middle of the night headed to where, I don’t know. I’m being made to keep my head down so as not to see the route. I can see myself on an exam table surrounded by medical staff telling me it will all be okay as I drift out of consciousness. I see a little girl at a makeshift altar in the dark save one small reading lamp, her bible turned open, her hands clasped in prayer. I see out from on top of a boulder people running in every direction, pushing and tripping over each other. I feel the voice straining to speak the urgent but reassuring messages of salvation over the screaming and chaos as cracks open in the earth and molten lava spews forth.

I see a woman working in a coffee shop on a smoke break in the alley out back. A man approaches her. They stand close and trade something from their hands. She goes into the bathroom, takes out a tin full of little supplies and pills. She puts one of the pills in a folded dollar, smashes it with a smooth rock until it’s a fine dust. Then she takes a little straw and snorts the pile into her nose. She looks in the mirror, and my heart skips a beat.

My consciousness returns to standing there with my hand on the doorknob, frozen. Shaking it off a little bit, I open the door just enough to peer out into the hallway. Across the hall, I can see the sitting room, the big, comfy Barcalounger my grandma sits in all the time. It sits empty for the moment, but I imagine back to when I was very young. I can see her sitting in the chair; I walk up next to her and move to sit myself in her lap.

She tells me I’m too big to sit up there. But I tell her I’ve had a bad dream. So, she scooches over a bit and pats for me to hop up next to her. What did I dream about, she asks me? I tell her it’s like dreams where you’re falling off a ladder, but instead I was falling through some tunnel. At light speed. Through outer space. And I had no arms or feet to grab the sides of the tunnel and stop myself from falling. And then I just woke up. Woke up scared.

She put my head to her chest and gave my back a little pat this time. “Sounds like nothing, baby. Nothing to be afraid of.”