A Million Years Away
I was driving about the suburban road. The sky was flaming in tints of red and paler blue and the hiss of the engine felt monotonous and overbearing in the soft silence. There were many trees and gorges and valleys to my right and pale birds hooting upon high branches and the sun shining in its frail sunrays which transformed the surrounding dust into magical, faintly glaring sunshine. My car wobbled and turned and shifted upward and down and veered over the uneven surface of the road while I pulled the clutch and turned the wheel until I came upon a familiar mowed down clearing, pulled the parking brake, got out my tent, locked the car and commenced to gaze over the brow of a particular hill sprayed with fainter and darker green.
I had been to this clearing often and slept in the darkness of night and heard the familiar birds hoot and other animals scurry while the stars gazed down upon me overbearingly and I dreamt of unfamiliar spaces and portrayals of light and cubical nightly forms which existed only on the outskirts of the cosmos. It had been a monotonous experience, stirred vaguely by science fiction and the distant dreams that come to us unexpectedly and leave the imagination scarred by lurid imagery, evermore curious, evermore undetached. An incomparable and quivering prelude to the encompassing and illuminating happenings which would diminish the meaning of those earlier dreams and times, of my adventurous and ebullient temperament, and in their new light make me think again.
Tonight was no different. When the clock hit ten o’clock it was already dark; that uncertain premature blue darkness that wafts gone leaves down forgotten tracks and through which the first stars cast indefinite shadows; within which the mind softly portrays the deafened and overbearing silhouettes of beautiful and regretful contemplations from immemorial days. It was cool to let one’s eyes close and drift on away to sleep and feel the faint hiss of the nearby lake and imagine a fuller, mightier sky where the stars seeped down golden octagons of light and the magic of the surrounding scenery brought breathless ventures to the mind. It was beautiful and strangely incommunicable; much like the incalculable glories of space that weave golden dreams and emboss innumerable sci-fi novels, glaring movies and papered worlds, gliding through the endless blackness and developing softer portrayals of glamorous hidden entities, reaching with infinite power to the somber and secluded verges of the cosmic intellect, gathering from the depthless verges of space the somber revelations of life and death.
Suddenly, I woke up. There was a gray disc, illuminated by fainter moonlight, hovering over the distant trees. The blood in my veins froze. I began to shake wildly and closed my eyes. I felt weightless, as though my body were brought into a different plane of reality of which physical reasoning and law partook no longer. I felt as though I were shuddering and convulsing and that the darkened corners of space throbbed with a million irreversible signs and irrefutable logic, glaring upon my mind from millions of dusky, interstellar corners, veiled in a somber prehistoric pall. I opened up my eyes only to be dazzled out of my state of contemplations by a frail yellow light. I swiftly turned my head backwards and saw the top of the trees. Frightened, I realized in seconds that I was above them and being dragged remorselessly forward into the sky. The gray disc was right above me and I could see the faint yellow light protracting endlessly from a round circular portal at its bottom. I blinked once, twice…
When I woke up, I was upon a dark bed in a dark room. I could feel as though my body was travelling a million miles per hour and felt the unreality of reality hit me and capture my perceptions in a vile grip. I heard thunder and in time saw innumerable biting little lights around me; I heard the chanting of barbaric trumpets and was able to make out a tiny screen on the wall in front of me. On it flashed images of human skulls and the paler verges of space and low monotonous mumbles issued out from the walls. I felt dizzy and weak. Suddenly, a gloomy dark microphone appeared on the screen and then the images panned slowly away to unravel a lonely black pulpit on which the microphone was erected inside of a tall darkened auditorium, seamlessly bound within a questionable building. Then, from another perspective, there appeared the building, like a half-forgotten dream bleakly surfacing and fading out steeply before comprehension could arrive; yet stamped surely upon the memory, like the deafening silence outlining endlessly the turn of the clock. The building was black and cubical and from within were issued out darkened booming sounds which shook and it seemed that from that lonesome, unimaginable microphone, covered in remorseless darkness, trickled down unheard of and foreboding tunes into the timeless, indefinite edges of space.
It seemed as though the technology inside of the gray disc was primordial and controlled all sound, all vision, every aspect, tint and outline that had ever arisen from the monstrous, shadowy, unprobed depths of the darker side of space. Suddenly, I heard light crackling sounds, barely above the field of perception, edging into the room. Then I saw fallen stars; heard barbaric melodies and jumpy, irresistible laughter. I saw a thousand earths explode and a million suns collapse and murky waters and gloom-filled spaces and innumerable microphones shuddering in darkened, unattainable places, bordering on the edge of lucid dreams into the spaces our minds had heretofore left unpenetrated. Then I heard a loud booming sound and a brief shudder of white stars. I closed my eyes and felt like falling through a million years in time.
I still remember those times. I remember waking up in my tent in the morning and getting into my car and driving automatically all the way home. My mind had been into a different place, a place I thought was impossible to exist. Many a time I thought I had dreamt the entire thing, but upon thinking again that thought had always become dissuaded. My life didn’t change a lot, except my vicarious perceptions about the world had shifted all the laughable and fictional improbabilities into potential possibilities and my outlook upon the undefined strata of the universe had become broader, fueled by my experience. I still ate my breakfast in the morning with the rays of the sun covering my plate and got my work done through most of the day and came back home in the evening, tired and thinking about a lot of things. Sometimes when I slept, I would dream. And sometimes I would still hear the faint echoes and see that darkened place. The place with the building and the auditorium and the microphone. And I would drift away; and I would drift away…