Into The Mystic

And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return we can only look
Behind from where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game
And go round and round and round
In the circle game

                                                      --Joni Mitchell

For the Phantom's parents, the 1930's were the formative years. For the Phantom, it was the 1960's, when people were trying to explore other worldliness and the Phantom was trying to figure out how to deal with this world.  But, as much as one might try to dig into the brown earth of the here and now, there are times when you have look up and see the blue above.

For the Phantom, there have been at least three instances which made him wonder, two occurred during "normal" sleep and one with a different kind of sleep.

As a nine year old,  the Phantom went to bed one night and dreamed he had died, but there was no ascent to Heaven; the next thing, in the dream, the Phantom found himself wailing as he was delivered as a new baby, in his brother's room, down the hall. Sitting up in bed the Phantom realized he was still alive, in his own body--it had only been a dream. But in the dream, he had been reborn as a new baby into his own family. Where that idea had come from, who knows? What persists to this day, decades later is the vividness of that dream, the sense of frustration that he'd have to start all over again, but, on balance it was better than being simply gone.

Then there was a recurrent dream, which occurred when the Phantom was in his eleventh year, of flying. It was a simple dream, running down the steep hill of Bannockburn Drive and flapping his arms like wings and simply lifting off. There was the feeling of not wanting to be seen, the sense of embarrassment of having to explain what he was doing flying above the trees, but most of all the sense of exhilaration of being able to soar above the branches and look down, and to travel so effortlessly, but there was also some fear of falling. The strangest part of the dream was the internal conversation: You are going to think this never happened--after all, flying! But remember this, remember you have flown and don't tell yourself later this never happened.  The Phantom was reminded of this dream watching Band of Brothers and scenes of falling to earth gently on a parachute and landing safely.

The last incident occurred when the Phantom was 38, and he awakened from general anesthesia, in the hospital, and suddenly the beautiful face of a nurse--a black woman who laughed at him when he said, "Oh, I'm back. You look so beautiful." But the important part was,  as the Phantom regained his bearings, there was the deep sense of wonder, dread, astonishment: Where had the Phantom been? It was just lights out, lights on. But where had consciousness vanished? And how had it simply reappeared, with all memories, feelings, thoughts intact?

Freud suggested dreams were a brain exercise in wish fulfillment, the emergence of repressed, socially unacceptable desires.  But that does not explain these particular dreams to the Phantom. He had not been, to memory, thinking about dying when he had fallen asleep, and never had never fantasized about flying. These dreams seemed to simply emerge from nowhere, like the Phantom awakening from anesthesia.

Of course, anesthesia is very different from sleep, at least the memory of it is. When you awaken from that REM sleep, you remember having had an experience, sensation, emotion, fear, delight, wonder. Coming out of anesthesia, you look back and there was nothing, or the closest thing to nothingness a living human being can have experienced, or not experienced, as one might argue.

Nothingness was not unpleasant. It was simply a void. No joy, but no sorrow or pain.

And that reminds the Phantom of a conversation he had with a woman who had manic depression, which we would now call "bipolar disorder."  She had done what people with that disorder do: shopped wildly, buying dozens of pairs of shoes, and dresses and stuff she could not even fit into her closets, making phone calls at all hours, not sleeping,  drinking, having sex with as many men as she could hook up with, driving her car around, running down the beach. But then came the crash, and she fell into a deep dark hole. 

And the Phantom asked her how it felt to be on lithium, which had righted her ship, and allowed her to sail on a placid sea.

"Well," she said. "I'm certainly grateful to be out of that black hole, the most dreadful, bleak place I've ever been. And it certainly is easy to be where I am now. Calm is better than that."  She looked around at the trees, leaves moving in the wind, and she cast her glance across the sun-lit,  green lawns of the Westchester psychiatric hospital, and then she looked back and met the Phantom's  eyes, and there was a smile playing around the edges, which only furtively stole down to raise the corners of her lips.  "But," she said, looking over her shoulder and back  again to the Phantom, as if she was delivering a very naughty secret, "I do miss the highs."