It’s not long ago that this happened to me. I’m not sure if it is a dream of something else. Anyway, I will tell it to you and let you decide. I was travelling in the country and we stopped overnight. During the night I awoke suddenly and felt something heavy pressing on my chest. I couldn’t move; I couldn’t do anything. I thought I was in that state between awareness and sleep, you know when suddenly you wake up and get the feeling that someone is in the room with you or sitting on your chest and you are totally paralysed. This was almost like that but I didn’t get the feeling of a nearby presence. I tried to move, tried to call out but my throat was unable to make any sound. My heart was beating rapidly when all of a sudden I felt my body disintegrate into what seemed a million/billion particles though my mind remained intact. My totality was present even in its broken pieces. I seemed to travel at an enormous speed when suddenly everything came to a stop and I came back into myself.

There was a sinking feeling in my stomach, like the one you get when you’re on a roller coaster. I was floating in space. I could see the stars above and below me. I could see earth – it was so beautiful and it glowed with a living light. I felt so free. I told myself I was dreaming and that any moment I would wake up but nothing happened. I was able to freely move my limbs and head and although I could move I was somehow confined in the space where I floated. My perspective was rather odd, there were no walls, yet there were. Place and distance ceased to be of interest. My mind was perceiving my surroundings in a different light. Space was still there but it had begun to lose its meaning. I began to feel really nauseous and vomited. It was strange to see the vomit float from my mouth, breaking into separate pieces. It was almost beautiful in its movement! The nausea didn’t ease up and I felt angry with myself as I wanted to enjoy this freedom of floating.

Shimmering apparitions moved around me, I felt their touch, which was gentle almost butterfly-like. My body was restrained within their grip. I felt movement within my body – there was no pain - I was terrified of the movement within myself. It almost felt as if someone had their hands within me and were shuffling my insides around. The movement ceased. I was panting hard, my nose was clogged- when I felt the movement within my mind. I can only describe it as a wormlike movement. Everything felt clearer, brighter. I felt profound changes in consciousness and as I made connections, my thoughts moved rapidly, my life moved in cinematic colour which was so intense, so intrinsically meaningful, from child to adult. I was capable of remembering my conception, my birth and perceived at the same time everything that was happening in the universe. Life and death became intrinsically bound.

Feelings were awoken within myself. I cried, I laughed. I discovered that there was an inside to experience as well as an outside. For the first time I truly felt myself. I felt everything that made myself. I felt one with everything. I became everything, moved within everything. I became one with myself and with whatever moved within my mind. We were together, we acted and reacted to one another. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies, information, experiences became an island of shared universes. I was on the verge of the ultimate revelation and felt mutual empathy. My mind became its own place. I as a person did not exist. I became one with the earth, with the stars. It was a wondrous this feeling, a moment by moment naked existence – it was nothing more, and nothing less - a transience that was eternal life. Like myself, a bundle of minute particles, a divine source of all existence. I moved deeper and deeper into meaning. For the first time I understood, precisely and completely my place in the universe. When the wormlike movement suddenly disappeared, I felt sad and bitterly alone. My inner world seemed curiously drab, limited and uninteresting. I was back to my normal self and I felt that my mind had been stripped of colour.

Again, I felt my body disintegrate and travel at fast speed, the stars moved rapidly becoming one when I felt a sudden jolt and came back within myself. I found myself in bed. I could move my arms and legs and I rose feeling faint and weak legged and walked shakily to the bathroom. Looking in the mirror, I was myself. Other than my face being slightly swollen there were no marks upon myself. I just stared at my image. I gazed without knowing, even without wishing to know what it was that confronted me. I was so completely absorbed, so thunderstruck, pushing my experience into something appalling, something diabolical that it couldn’t be contemplated. I felt myself on the brink of panic. My fear in retrospect was of being overwhelmed with reality.

There was nothing to say that the experience if indefinite duration had been real yet it felt real. I told myself it was just a dream … nothing more than a dream but I wonder …