Tiny Glimpses

It happened two nights ago.

I know it’s odd, but for years I’ve complained about inexplicably losing consciousness while trying to accomplish life. Other people call it falling asleep.

So, what happened?

I fell asleep. More precisely, I awoke from a sleep I hadn’t realized I’d fallen into. I think it was the uncomfortable, slouchy position that first roused me. But then I noticed I couldn’t move my left arm. Something heavy was on it. Not just heavy, but rolling slightly.

I glanced down and found Cloyde’s head resting on my arm as I drowsed half-sitting up in bed. He lay on his back and looked up at me with that amused puppy dog face he made whenever he teased me.

Surprised, I demanded, “What are you doing here?”

“Where else should I be?” he grinned

I felt not only the weight, but the heat of his large heavy head, and that wonderful almost imperceptible aroma of his skin that was his alone. I ran my right hand across his face and into his hair where I buried my fingers in a handful of his soft warm curls.

He chuckled at my incredulity and spoke loving words in that voice I hadn’t heard in 16 months.

“But, you died! You’re gone!” I said.

“Oh, you must have been dreaming,” he countered. “I’m right here, with you. Lie down and go back to sleep.”

And suddenly I remembered how dreams distort time and space, and how all of that running around and fighting dragons which refuse to be vanquished for 16 months was the dream, while this awakening was reality. And I immediately fell back into sleep – and reawakened in Cloyde’s broken recliner.

That’s why my back was in knots. I’d fallen asleep in front of the TV again.

I looked around and wondered which was the dream and which the reality. I pondered what an inordinate relief it would be to find I’d awakened from what seemed like a long, long nightmare, but had all happened in less than an hour of dreaming.

Then I remembered a movie which I absolutely hated, “Vanilla Skies” with Tom Cruise. He’d had himself put into a dream state until his wrecked body could be repaired, but he could never tell which was the dream state and which was his real life. It was a nightmare without end.

I thought, how sweet to find I’d been in a nightmare, but how horrible to not know the truth, and how horrible to live your life wishing it away.

Perhaps the most basic solace is knowing that the ground or the floor beneath your feet is real, that gravity is true and we are not going to fly off the face of the Earth with nothing to hold us steady. Even if you do not particularly like where your feet are planted, just to say, “What is IS,” might be the ultimate Earthly consolation.

Who can say that Cloyde did not actually reach out to me in my dream state? Who can say with authority that there are no truths beyond the veil between physical life and the spirit world that we get rare and unproven glimpses of? This certainly FELT real.

There is no “My Truth” vs “Universal Truth.” It’s just that when you have only flashes of the full reality, you cannot fully understand or describe it. I refer to the story of a blind man describing an elephant as being like a tree, when he had felt only its leg. He knew only the part that he’d experienced. It wasn’t a lie, but it also was not the whole truth.

So, while I wait to wake up from this “dream” of the horrible mess that Cloyde left when he died, I need to find the solutions and continue to move forward, just in can this isn’t the dream.