My lucid dream - reality, space and the laws of nature

I slide on the ice, it turns to mud, I slide lower and lower, I look back. Keeping my balance and analyzing the situation. I'm in the backyard I played in when I was growing up. DREAM, I'm probably in a dream right now. The yard I'm in has long since been built over by a house and it's not cold. My mind is waking up to what I know, to the context of my current situation, the paradoxes are so many that I wake up and the dream is conscious.

            I used to have lucid dreams almost every sleep. It's about reinforcing what I pay attention to, I've been paying a lot of attention to it. I've actually given a couple of lectures in the tea room on the subject. I tried to convey the experience of waking up in a dream in them. I have spent more time in dreams than in reality, the one I am writing in now, the one where the kind reader is reading these lines. In a reality conditioned by time, space, and the laws of nature.

            Currently, summer of 2022, I am 35 years old. I pay more attention to reality than to lucid dreams. I don't miss them. All it takes is an occasional fleeting touch, like mine and your attention in the previous paragraph. A touch as a reminder of a world beyond time, space, gravity, and all that is bounded and describable. 

            I look around me, I stand firm and I don't fall anymore. There's a tree next to the yard I'm stuck in, a pear tree. I walk towards it. I realize that in reality it has been gone for over 20 years. But now I'm dreaming and I can see it and I can touch it. I stroke the bark of the tree, feel the unevenness, and see the broken branch I used to climb into the treetop when I wanted to be alone as a child. At that moment I am no longer me, but I am the tree, I feel its roots deeper than the tree's crown, mysterious, gaining energy for all that is visible to the eye on the surface, I am the trunk and the crown, I feel connected to the earth and growing stronger.

            That yard and that tree were at one of the busiest intersections in Prague. The intersection of Kbelská and Kolbenova. The year was 1998, it was the twelfth of May, it was my eleventh birthday and I wanted to be alone for a while on the day I became a teenager. I went to the pear tree in the garden, climbed into the crown of the tree, and sat on a comfortable branch. Wondering about the age thing. I liked a boy from the junkyard at the time, Honza, he was 17 and I used to ride with him occasionally in an old Goliath 100 that no longer officially existed, it had been scrapped. I loved him, but he said something about being too old for me. I thought the time was illusory on that tree. That it was bullshit that someone was old, someone else was young, or a child. For a moment time disappeared and I felt myself to be the roots, trunk, and crown of the tree. Then I came home and happily reported that the tree was calming me down. My mom looked at me a little bit scared and said, "You have the look of a grandpa."

            I'm in the tree, by the tree, through the tree. Time doesn't exist. Something gives me strength. Maybe an abstract love that I project over time onto various people I can't spend time with for various reasons. A LOVE for the impermanent, time-bounded world. The love of a trapped soul for its reality. I detach myself from the tree and float above the house. From above I can see the house as it looked when I was 11, I can see the intersection of Kbelská and Kolbenova, then I float even higher, I can see as far as Nusle where my parents live now, I can see as far as Průhonice where I work, but they are too far in the distance and blurred. Going higher I can see like from an airplane, buildings and areas in the distance. And further away. All I can see is the difference in color between the land and the sea. I climb even higher and I'm at a place from where I can see a few stars and the cosmically bright color of interplanetary light. And for a moment, I think this is reality, too. It's okay that there's no time or gravity here.

            I'm moving seamlessly from dream to reality. It's the summer of 2022, I'm not going to work today, so I'm going home to my parents. I haven't seen them in about a week, I try to see them as often as possible even though I'm staying close to work. I only have them 12 km away, that's the perfect distance for a normal run. I come home and my mom looks at me a little scared. She says, "You're looking like Grandpa again today." 

I was playing in the tree again, you know.