“Oops, sorry,” I mumble, apologizing to the woman that I’m pretty sure was out of ear shot by the time I realized I’d bumped into her. People everywhere, walking in groups, in pairs, alone. Heads busily scanning the environment searching for something, anything. Like me. Except I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for. But I was supposed to get six of them. Or was it seven? Maybe in there? No, too expensive. Over there? Nope, would never fly. Wait, what’s that? I push through the crowd. Oh, no. That’s not at all I expected.
Like when I was driving down the freeway, jamming along. Radio up high. Light traffic. I’m in the number two lane. Doing about seventy. Saturday afternoon. Warm. Clear. All day to play. Good mood. I see a truck in my peripheral vision coming up slowly on my left. Dog in the back. Probably feeling the same as me about now. Able to just let go, and relax. Everything is in it’s place. Except that’s not a dog in the back of that truck.
Does that ever happen to you? You see something, you’re pretty sure you know that, and you don’t even bother to double check, you just kind of assume it’s there, the way you think it is. But it never really is, is it?Those things that you were pretty sure that you had a handle on, once you allow yourself to see from a different perspective, you begin to imagine different things. And it’s not like when you are reading something, and just following along as your mind is wandering. It’s when you see something, but you don’t really notice it. I imagine that if you recall, now, the times that has happened to you, you might begin to understand what I’m talking about.
Like when I was watching this psychologist give a lecture about the reason that thoughts which come in dreams are different from the normal order. Something with the way the lattice structure of the brain is connected. Certain thoughts are resting on top of other thoughts, and the way the brain organizes it self, sometimes things that are right next to each other, they don’t even communicate well. Like when you pull up to your house, and see your neighbor, and you think to yourself, do I really even know that guy?
So I’m dead even with the truck, and I’m about ready to look over at the previosly assumed canine in the back, complete with it’s assumed tongue wagging out of it’s mouth, and even an imagined name on his hallucinated dog collar. It is a bit of an understatement to say I was shocked when I looked to see that it was a pig. Without a collar. I didn’t think to ask what it’s name was. And it didn’t seem to be at all concerned with mine.
And my eyes must have really been getting tired, because that day in the mall what I thought were some kind of new age toys, were really decorations laying around the christmas trees waiting their turn to get put up. I guess my blood sugar was lower that I had planned for it to be. But I did turn into a Sharper Image, and some shop based on the Discovery Channel, and was able to take care of everything there. And when I left, it seemed that all those people were still wandering around looking for what I assumed they would find eventually.
When this happens to you, how long does it take to realize that something really strange is going on?