Week Fifteen: Functions of the brain, like sleep, that are innate but not understood

WHAT TO DO WHEN YOU ARE FALLING FROM THE SKY

In my childhood and early teen years I was plagued by visceral dreams of falling. The plunge, the ground rushing toward me, the horror of acceptance that this is it.

Usually, if I could just “assume the position” (I actually used these words) and turn myself so that I was plummeting through the air flat and on my back, I knew I would land softly in my bed at the last possible instant. I fell out of tree branches, in cars over cliffs, and from the top of the atmosphere. Always the horror, and then acceptance.

* * *

My dad used to be a Scientologist. Technically I suppose he still is, but he can’t afford all the books and audio programs you’re required to buy in order to progress to the upper levels. I remember being hooked up once or twice to an electric meter that was supposed to measure the level of psychic clutter that arose when asked about past hurts, traumas.

“Well, where do you think the idea for ESP and magic and all that crap came from?” my father asked me, rhetorically, during one summer visit many years later. “Someone at some point must have been able to do that.” I had wanted to know what was the deal, anyway, with all that Scientology stuff I remembered from the early years, post-divorce. During our conversation, it became clear to me that his interest in Scientology truly stemmed from the tantalizing possibility of someday being able to do some “Star Wars shit.”

I was skeptical. But I also badly wanted to believe.

According to the Church of Scientology, electricity encounters resistance when it tries to pass through the things in your life that have hurt you. Even as a small child with no knowledge whatever of basic science, this sounded fishy. L. Ron Hubbard (who was a successful author of science fiction, it bears noting) believed that you do not have a soul—you are the soul. You are the immortal consciousness that flits from body to body over time, accumulating so many bad memories along the way that you’ll never ascend to the highest levels without a trained Scientologist auditor to help you tackle your past lives.

Once you reach the highest levels, freed at last from the shackles of flesh and time, you can see and do things no mere mortal can.

What things? Well, you cannot know until you have reached these levels.

It’s true that energy can never be destroyed, only converted, but unfortunately I don’t think the cluster of atoms that makes us us gets to take the ride from host to host. I wish that were the case. I wished it then and I wish it today.

When I let myself actually consider that, one day, I won’t only not be here but, in fact, not be anywhere at all, even in a sense of floating sometimes-awareness, I feel a sharp jerk and then a plunge in my chest, as if I were starting to fall off the edge of something... and then am miraculously pulled back, relieved but shaken.

While not a Scientologist, my mother does believe in some of things my father does. During a recent discussion about nature and nurture, she said something like “And who even knows how much junk we’re carrying with us from past lives?” In the past, maybe, I would have agreed and then really thought about it. Incorporated it into my worldview, perhaps. 

But when she said it, I smiled and nodded... and knew immediately that I thought she was wrong. These were not my beliefs.

Here is what I do believe: Memory is fluid. Time is relative. Deja vu is weird, sure, but it’s only your brain getting confused about what happened when. In all likelihood there is no such thing as ESP, telekinesis, astral projection, etc. There are no past lives. There is imagination, but there is no magic.

I am pretty sure that we’re just growing and then, after a point, decomposing, and when we die that is the end of consciousness. Horror. Acceptance. And then...

* * *

I no longer dream about falling, but sometimes I dream that I can fly. The trick is to stop thinking about it and just know you can do it.

The heaviest substance on Earth is doubt. Unable to shut off my brain, I’m always pulled back down before I can get any higher than the lowest branches of a tree.

But I keep trying. If you can remember to forget that it’s impossible, flight is the easiest thing in the world.