Holy Moments

Sitting in a dark hotel room for over a day with nothing meaningful to do, trapped by pouring rain in an entirely new country with only all of me for company, doesn’t seem to agree with me. An overwhelmingly unreal feeling. Like I’m in another skin, by myself, in my shoes, but entirely unrecognisable. Maybe it’s the movie I’m watching. Or the silence. Or that unshakeable feeling that I’m not really awake. Like I’m sleepwalking through these strange, alien moments.

You would expect change to become familiar after a while, after moments and moments of relentless change -- days, weeks, months, people, language, the view from your window, the way you spend your waking hours, the tumult of thoughts and feelings swirling in your head, your experience of things, the way your head feels between your palms, the amount of white sprinkled in your hair, the shape of your face, the look in your eyes. You’d imagine you’d stop feeling so… uncomfortably different. You’d think it’d all make more sense as time goes by.

Maybe it’s just transition that I struggle with. It takes a while for things to settle down, to be daubed with the slightest tinge of familiarity. But isn’t that process change as well? Does change really ever stop? Or does it just blend into recognition? And what defines the boundaries of these segments of recognition? At what point does transience morph into habit? Does it ever get easier? Would it be a life less worth living if it were easier?

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There’s a well-known, much-recycled opinion, a pervasive theme about dreams that I think I’m only just starting to completely comprehend, to consciously assimilate. The one that contends that every single thing we dream about while we’re asleep has to have originated from our own minds. Everything we ‘know’ in a dream, every absurd idea, every ludicrous action, every horrific dream-monster, exists in each of our heads, somewhere, even if just as tiny seeds. Every stranger’s face in every unfamiliar place is one you’ve seen before, felt before, thought of before, have known of, in entirety, or in entirely unrelated bits and pieces randomly glued together. And they are as real and as much a part of our consciousness as multiplication tables, or memories of faces, or lyrics to favourite songs. Yet, somehow, by some inscrutable filtering process, they’ve been imprisoned, confined, tied up, and exiled to the dark corners of our minds, forming the pillars of an alternate consciousness, one that bides its time until the rigours of surviving the day have finally enervated the ‘conscious’ mind and body and plunged both into this alternate reality.

Even as I write this, I know that I’m incapable of saying exactly what it is I want to say, of lucidly defining every single intangible smudge in my head. The inevitable failure – Thoughts, always, lost in translation.