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I need to know what is going on. I think I do but I am getting a little
scattered. So I laid down and closed my
eyes. And I thought I was tired enough
to get some sleep but as I lay in bed, I couldn’t sleep. I forced
my eyes to stay closed and tried to focus on the random blobs I saw floating in
the dark behind my eyelids. They were
like the stuff of the old lava lamps, or the beginning of the old TV show The Prisoner, solid white but changing their shapes, splitting
off from each other and rejoining in a slowly moving symphony. I watched, trying to empty my mind of
thoughts, of thinking, just going downward.
But I was still conscious of being awake, still aware of my body lying
in bed. The blobs started to coalesce
into shapes, less fluid, more rigid, that began to seem understandable but were
just out of reach. I thought I should
know what they are but I didn’t. One
changed further, into a snake, eating its own tail, a circular thing, but it
wasn’t alarming. Later, when I woke I
knew that was my clever little reference to Kekule and his discovery of the
benzene ring – which happened for him as he slept. But all the images started to become circular
and I realized they weren’t snakes but were starting to look like snowflakes, all
sizes big and small, floating down my field of vision, against a field of
black.
And like a holiday movie my field of vision pulled back,
pulled back through a window into a room where the snow was falling outside, into
a classroom with Father Blearly.
And so what do you think hell is he asked and looked at me
at his face grew larger and larger until it was almost floating in front of me
where I was sitting in my old spot back in my fourth grade’s classroom. His face receded, “Dante said Hell is
frozen.” And he gestured outside. “The center of Hell is a frozen place where
Satan sits, trapped, without a voice without any power. As Virgil said those in Hell have
lost the good of intellect; the substance of evil, the loss of humanity,
intelligence, good will, and the capacity to love.”
“They have no connection with another, no connectedness with
anyone else,” the priest looked around.
“Have any of you experienced that feeling? Have any of you felt that place?” And I thought he looked at me “no one else
there. Certainly not love. And not even hate.” His voice dropped. “No feeling at all. Nothing to touch, no one to feel.”
And I sensed in the dream classroom
rather than saw Maria’s face looking at me, and still the snow outside the
window fell and fell and the florescent classroom lights cast an artificial
pallor, an artificial green pallor within he room.
And the green grew stronger but it wasn’t a healthy green it
was a sick artificial light green. And
the room got larger and larger about me, but the things in it got simpler and
simpler and fewer and fewer, and the only people I actually knew as people, the
others were just shadows, were Blearly and sort of Maria in the background
radiating feelings of concern I could feel.
My breath got shorter and shorter and I had to get out because
I had been in that place and was there now devoid of feeling, empty, hell felt
so empty nothing, and now I felt nothing from anyone Maria’s sympathy gone no
feeling.
I woke up. I lay there
still breathing hard and the images faded but not so quickly that I couldn’t
remember them and I forced myself to get up and write them down here.
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