Hodge and Podge

As explained in Nothing Unreal Exists, I lack a certain confidence in the realness of reality. I do not know the reasons for this, but a few experiences in my childhood definitely reinforced that doubt. This is one of the more bizarre ones.

Six years old, I woke with my face pressed against the straw mat upon which I had taken my afternoon nap. I saw something translucent and huge, taking up most of my visual field (though I could see through it). Its complexity and dynamism led the eye constantly, so that I could not focus on any part of it.

The Hodge-Podge.

It was not any thing that I could (or can) identify, but it looked like chaos and decay. My six-year-old mind compared it to the rotting corpse of a sparrow I had recently found while digging in my grandmother's flower trough. The vision grew more and more intense and menacing. Then, it changed.

A similarly translucent, equally indescribable vision of order and stasis replaced it. Its smooth perfection proved felt as monstrous as what came before. My eyes could find no purchase on its featureless...featurelessness. As a child, I compared it to an ornament belonging to my mother--a wooden bird meticulously covered with pure white feathers, lifeless and unyielding.

Just when the vision of order grew unbearably intense, it changed back into chaos, then to order, and so on. It kept flip-flopping faster and faster, which produced an odd sensation of involuntary movement, like free-falling without direction. Then, it just stopped.

I do not remember what I thought at the time, once the terror left me. When it recurred a few months later, however, I grew anxious. I decided that there was something wrong with me--probably a malignant brain tumor. When my grandmother and parents dismissed my concerns and other symptoms failed to manifest, I gradually forgot about the incident.

Every few years, it would happen again. Sometimes it comes while I lie in bed trying to sleep or wake, but I also experience it while meditating or just sitting quietly. I can discern no warning signs, but always recognize it when it starts--sometimes with one vision, sometimes with the other. Though objectively I know it never lasts more than five minutes, the hallucination suspends my perception of time and feels unsettlingly eternal.

I have tried to explain it away or attribute meaning to it, but nothing seems to stick. If a hypnogogic or hynopompic hallucination, why does it happen while I am wide awake? Did I accidentally ingest some mind-altering substance? Just as the vision defies description, so it defies my other attempts to make it fit into my worldview of the moment.