-29; VISION IMPAIRED (This is What I do Instead of Dream)

“VISION IMPAIRED”

or

“This is What I do Instead of Dream”

*

I could write about many things this week.

The Congressional Inquiry into UFO‘s.. Robotdebt.. the Northern Hemisphere burning down as a prelude to the looming Climate Change Apocalypse.. the growing Societal Cognitive Dissonance as people still try to pretend its not happening.

All worthy Subjects, and perhaps I’ll tackle them next week, should the Fates spare us, but today I thought I’d share with you an odd & inexplicable Vision I had recently.

*

Now I am prey to Visions, as my long-suffering Personal Assistant will affirm. She’s used to seeing me slumped in my chair, hands folded in lap, or leaning over, elbows on the table, head in hands. Eyes closed, but still Conscious. Well able to answer questions but gets irritable if the talk starts to interrupt the visual flow of High Definition Images flowing before me.

“Where are you now?” She’ll ask with a sort of dry tolerance, “Flying over a Rainforest?”.

And indeed, I do get a lot of Landscapey Visions where I appear to be skimming over endless forests or oceans or jungle ranges. Places I’ve never seen in Real Life (whatever that is) but there they are before me in Real Time /High Definition /Pixel Perfect detail. I have a certain amount of limited control in these Visions so I can often zoom in to examine the scenes more closely..every tree, every leaf, every stone. But generally it’s better just to let the scenes flow by.

Where does all this Stuff I’m seeing come from, I often wonder. Where does my soft, squishy Brain get all the visual material it is so adept at presenting to me? Much of it is like drone footage but I was seeing this a stuff years before such images became ubiquitous. Is it just random neurons firing off and my brain making a pattern out of Habit? But why does it show me perfectly rendered scenes of Places I’ve never been to or seen?

And for all the money my Brain has spent on Production Values for these Visions, they are curiously lacking in Plot & Theme. Only occasionally does there seem to be some sort of Point to them or Meaning underlying the Action. Mostly they’re more like one of those 10 hour “Slow” Documentries, where they just put a camera on a train and let it roll. But yeah, sometimes I will get a full length Documentry or Action Drama type of Vision that can be quite entertaining.

Alas though, if I ever learnt the Future or the Secret of the Universe from one of my Visions I’ve forgotten it now,

but if I remember I’ll let you know.

Anyhoo, this Vision is perhaps notable for it’s strange Ordinariness, being that it’s Content or if you will, Subject Matter, was but a slight jump sideways in Space & Time to present a Scene not that very much different from where I actually was & what I was actually doing. And yet.. there was a kind of strange Transformation that occured, so that the Real became somehow infused with the Magical, and vice versa, and in doing so revealed something of it’s true Nature.

Or so it seemed to me Then.

So. Let me place the Vision in it’s Context;

It was late in the evening and it had been a long day. Now, after coming home from work I’d eaten, taken a long shower, had a smoke and was now feeling warm & langorous as,I sat on the edge of my bed

wrapped in my comfiest dressing gown,

trying to decide if I was too tired

to read one of the many books

on & beneath the bedside table.

My eyes must have closed without me noticing (you’d be surprised how often that happens) for eventually it occurred to me that the Scene I was looking at had changed somewhat and I was not where I had been.

This was followed by the realisation

that my eyes were actually closed.

“Oh ho! We’re doing that are we!?” I thought, and metaphorically speaking, sat back to enjoy the Show.

I was in fact still sitting in this Vision (mostly I’m a Disembodied Presence in these things, a non-participant) the same way that I had been perched on the edge of my bed, legs slightly apart, arms resting lightly on my knees as I studied the pile of books at my feet but now I’m in a greenhouse or perhaps on a verandha, plants all around instead of books. An afternoon Sun has replaced the desk lamp, and a cloud of golden dust motes are dancing before me, illuminated by a beam of brilliant sunlight.

It is a stunningly ordinary scene, almost banal, one you might see any day, but it was beautiful in it’s Simplicity and I felt at Peace. The graceful dance of the illuminated particles- mere dust, dirt, dross, the dull components of a Material World- became transformed in that moment to reveal them in their True Form.. as Energy itself!

All those Electrons & Photons

& Higgs-Bosun Particles,

All those Quarks with their Strangeness

& Charm

were there, dancing in the Clear Light

of the Sun’s perenial Nuclear explosions..

Yes, like a Silhouette reversed,

against the darker shadows of the verandha

those Particles danced & glowed, their true essence, the Quintessence, revealed.

I was entranced by the Spectacle, but more was in store, for, at some point or other

the Vision subtly shifted the Scenery again,

and though I was still sitting as before, now the golden motes of Dust had transformed into drops of water

showering down from somewhere beyond the edge of my Field of Vision (I didn’t care to turn my Vision head) Perhaps this spray came from a hose, or a sprinkler or even a passing sun-shower.

I don’t know, but like the dust motes,

the water droplets passing before me were also illuminated by the sun’s light, and shone like a sparkling curtain of diamond & crystal. And each drop contained

within it a Rainbow and a fishbowl simulcrum of the Outer World. Yes each droplet passing by was a Fishbowl World containing a minature Me in a minature Garden illuminated by a Minature Sun.

The shining, translucent Worlds passed by swiftly.

The Golden Particles danced in the Light

Earth & Air, Fire & Water,

all the Elemental manifestations of Energy

seemed contained within my Vision

as I sat drowsily on the edge of my bed.

***

***

The Reverend Hellfire is a practised performance Poet,

an Ordained Minister of the Church of Spiritual Humanism,

and Vox/Wordperson for esteemed Alt/Pop Primitivists “The Tapeloops”.

Better Late than Never, Baby.

***

~ by reverendhellfire on July 24, 2023.