I had long since been a believer in what you might call “collective consciousness,” and I had believed in it so long that I had developed a neurological theory for it. The theory was rooted in the fact that human consciousness is an aggregation of electromagnetic frequencies produced by the “firing” of individual neurons, each of which fires at a specific frequency. You can think of these frequencies like pixels in a photograph, a single digit of information that contributes to a larger structure, your thought. Since we all inhabit the same reality and our brains are all similar on a biological level, it is intuitive that shared experiences will result in similar webs of neurons, firing at similar frequencies. When you and a friend watch a TV show together, for example, you will be constructing neuronal webs with similar firing frequencies corresponding to things like color, the shape of a character’s face, the shape of the television, the sound of the theme song. It is a proven fact that neurons can be made to fire when they are exposed to electromagnetism in the same range as their firing frequency, and it is also a proven fact that disparate parts of our brain resonate with each other. Is it so far-fetched to imagine this influence extending outside the brittle container of our skulls?
Lets say that a day later you start to think of that same TV show, activating those new neuronal webs as you think about it. Is it so unreasonable to think that your friend, who watched the same show in the same room and shares similar neuronal structures corresponding to that experience, might have their own neuronal webs affected by the electromagnetic field of your thought? Of course they would never think that you had anything to do with it. Neither of you is psychic. Neither of you is a mind-reader. But, without either of you knowing it, there is a synchronicity and a correspondence between your neurological processes and, consequently, your thoughts.
My new dream theory depended on the same concept. In my malleable dream state I was having a neurological correspondence with my future self, but this correspondence could only be mediated by those neuronal webs which my future self and present self already had in common. Obviously, I had never before heard of an instagram account called “isabellegorilla,” so there was no reason I would think of it during my dream, even if my future self was thinking about it intensely. I had, however, heard of gorillas and of instagram, and so it was conceivable that my future self had unknowingly activated these two neuronal webs as I dreamt. I became convinced that I had, for lack of a better term, a telepathic connection with my future self.
By now I’m sure it probably sounds like I’m insane, or, worse, that I’ve told you all this as some sort of superhero back story. I believed whole-heartedly that there was a real, physical connection between disparate times and disparate minds, but I’d be lying if I told you that this new theory of mine led to any tangible benefits. I can’t even say that I had “foresight” in the way we usually think of it. Many things that I dreamt were manifested in my waking life, but I never knew which details would be the ones to reappear. Most things I dreamt never came true in even an indirect way, and the aspects that did reappear in my waking life were always completely random. Even if I had known exactly which dream symbols to expect, they still wouldn’t have helped me in any practical way. They had no thematic thread tying them together, and like the Gorilla-Instagram dream they seemed to have no practical value or metaphorical significance.
Needless to say, my newfound confidence in the prophetic nature of my dreams did not turn me into a superhero, nor even a properly functioning person. If anything, it was psychologically debilitating, as my panic attacks started up again, even without the weed to trigger them. I’m sure the idea of several subsequent panic attacks must seem nonsensical to most people. Why would someone continue to think that they are going to die of heart failure when they didn’t die any of the other times? The only way I can explain it is that a panic attack, for me, consisted of several essential elements: the uncomfortable knowledge that my mental state affected my physical state, the consequent belief that my negative mental state would result in my death, a depressing and borderline-nihilistic rumination on the sad consequences of my imminent death, and, now, a temporary psychosis that allowed me to believe that I knew the future, that allowed me to believe that my thoughts were out of my control precisely because they were part of a predetermined structure connecting past, present, and future. When a panic attack ends, I would think, “Oh thank God, it was a false prophecy,” but as soon as the next one would begin, I’d realize anew that each of the prophecies were connected, looking forward to each other. My past prophecies of death weren’t wrong, they were just a foreshadowing of the real event, the real death, which could very well come in this new wave of terror.
My parents knew that I’d had panic attacks and that I was a little nuts, but they understandably assumed that I was just getting high all the time and psyching myself out. They became considerably more concerned one night when the three of us went to the Elmwood AMC to watch that God-awful Matt Damon movie, The Martian. Everyone we’d spoken to beforehand (just like everyone I’ve spoken too since), had all unanimously called it a great movie, a “must see,” so I went into it with the expectation that it would be just as mediocre and vainglorious as the critically-acclaimed novel I’d perused in some overpriced airport book shop. I was pleasantly surprised with the first twenty minutes of the movie, but it rapidly turned into a standard home improvement show except with Matt Damon on Mars, growing plants and making videologs full of insufferable attempts at comic relief. It wasn’t the mundanity of it that disturbed me so much as the inevitability, the false pretense of uncertainty. The by-line of the movie poster was “BRING HIM HOME,” and at no point could one be expected to doubt that they would get him home in one piece. Something about that inevitability, the unassailable knowledge of what was to come, brought me back to the same state of mind I’d begun to associate with my panic attacks, and as soon as I started trying to suppress that mental connection it blossomed in response, and soon my heart was pounding so hard I was sure my parents would hear it over that David Bowie “Starman” song they’d played in every commercial and now, oh boy, in the film.
I breathlessly excused myself for the bathroom in the middle of the de facto climax of the movie, and I spent the next twenty minutes pacing around in the purple-carpeted hallway and drinking from the water fountain, chest thundering as I tried not to die and prayed, genuinely prayed, that the visions I was having of my death were merely hallucinations and not, as I once again suspected, glimpses of the future.
TO BE CONTINUED TOMORROW
