Walking in the Dark

I thought I might be in for a rough night. I've had difficulty sleeping for the last two nights, with no clear idea why. Last night I copied out a whole page of Chinese characters, because that tends to put me to sleep whether I like it or not. It sure made me sleepy, but I still couldn't sleep. I was awake for hours feeling too sleepy to do anything, too sleepy even to make a decision to try to do anything.

This evening I decided to go for a walk after Min was settled in bed for the night. A walk would settle my nervous system and help me sleep.

We have friends staying at our house this week, so naturally I got Min to bed later than usual and then sat around chatting until well after dark.

A walk alone in the dark doesn't necessarily settle my nervous system, rather the opposite, but the exercise can still help me sleep. I chose to go darkwalking.

Shoes are key. It's no fun stepping on sharp things in the dark. I added my reflective vest for road safety. It's much easier to navigate along the road than on the forest trails, which get truly dark. All equipped, I almost stepped out the door, then went back and stuck a flashlight in my pocket. One never knows when one might meet a ghost, or a neighbour who needs first aid.

Maybe I let my imagination linger too long on the topic of unexpected uses for a flashlight. I imagined finding a corpse on the beach. I imagined feeling too shocked to take a close look at it, or to fully trust my own senses.

To bring that thought process to a kind of completion that would help me let it go, I started planning what I would do next if I did see something that looked like a corpse on the beach. The plan had to account for two possibilities: that there was a real corpse, or that I'd half-hallucinated, half-imagined one. I wasn't sure which was worse.

The plan that occurred to me was to run to the nearest house, knock loudly on the door and yell for help until someone answered. I'd tell them that I thought there was a corpse on the beach, but I wasn't sure, and I needed someone to go with me to find out. It seemed reasonable to be transparent about not trusting my senses. It didn't seem reasonable to assume they'd be willing to go down to the beach to check out what I'd seen. Instead, I could ask them to call 911 and say, "This is a non-emergency call. We just need help figuring out what to do next." On an island with no police station, the most likely person to show up in response to that call would be the fire chief...

As I was walking toward the beach reviewing this plan, my invisible friend joined me, and I said "Hi" out loud. I've decided it's okay to have an invisible friend as long as we're both clear that he's not part of consensus reality. He asked whether this whole plan about the corpse was really what I wanted to be thinking about right then. It wasn't.

He walked beside me down the road toward the beach. We tried interpreting the scenario as a metaphor for my writing about marginalized spiritual experiences and harsh awakenings. I'm not sure which would be worse: if what I'm writing about is a real and serious thing for other people, or if I have the kind of mind that spontaneously invents that kind of stuff. The metaphor fit and worked because I'm sort of looking for someone to go back with me and check. It seemed like my invisible friend was game to engage with that exploration in some way. He's very much the only one.

I could call him my imaginary friend, but he prefers to self-identify as invisible, and anyway, there's no proof that he's imaginary. He is definitely invisible.

There was still a decision to make, whether to go look at the part of the beach where the hypothetical corpse was, or not. I chose to stay on the road.

My imagination always fills the darkness with beings. The main skill of darkwalking is choosing how I relate to them. I know that almost none of them have any substance in consensus reality. I know that I'll never know for sure which ones do.

Staying found is another important skill of darkwalking, though I rarely challenge my ability to navigate alone in the dark. The line between slightly challenged and really lost is too fine. On the other hand, as I write this, I'm realizing that darkness is one situation where having a compass could be really useful. On a very dark night, even with a flashlight, I could get truly lost for a long time in a relatively small patch of forest, close to home. A flashlight doesn't light up enough space to really help me orient myself. On the other hand, if I had a flashlight and a compass, I could always walk a bearing and eventually get to a road or a beach.

The spookiest moments are when I'm most unsure whether a being I'm perceiving lives in consensus reality or not. One of those moments occurred as I came close to where I would have crossed the road, going from the beach where I'd imagined I might find a corpse to the house where I'd planned I might ask for help. There's a big cedar tree right beside the road, and in the shadow of that cedar tree, I thought I saw a pale thing and a dark thing on the road. I mean, I was seeing a dark patch and a light patch. The question was whether they were really two beings, creatures or objects on the road, coming slowly towards me. They might just be effects of light and shadow. I couldn't see them clearly enough for depth perception, so I interpreted them as being at least as far away as the big cedar tree. If they were making any noise, it was drowned out by the sound of waves on the beach near the road. The tide was high, and a light wind was blowing off the water.

I kept walking at my usual pace. Stopping to wonder about an imaginary being gives it a power I don't want it to have. Like the Gloamglozer in the Edge Chronicles, figments of my imagination have power in the form of my reactions to them.

These two were looking real. I said, "Hello."

They didn't answer. Now they were quite close, and I still couldn't tell what they were. The pale one was at least as big as me. I called a bit louder, over the sound of the waves, "Hello!"

A man's voice answered, "Wha! Oh, sorry, I was daydreaming."

Suddenly the two mysterious figures became a man in a pale shirt with a big, quiet black dog.

"Thanks for calling out," he added.

"Yeah," I answered, "If we'd gotten much closer, it would've been a scream. Have a great evening!"

"You too."

We both kept walking, each grateful for the sound of the other's voice.

Farther along, I saw a large pale shape way ahead. I didn't really want to go toward it. It was probably an alien monster. I considered turning back. Preventing the big, pale, alien monster from haunting my dreams was a high priority. Another priority was to avoid empowering the Gloamglozer. I made a choice to go check it out, and made sure I was really experiencing that as a free choice.

It was a camper van. I knew that all along. Time to go home.

Just before I got to the house, I stopped to lie down in a dry, gravelly clearing and look at the sky. Draco, Ursa, Hercules, Lyra, Cygnus and may others were all in their places, and so was the Milky Way.

A car drove by, and a few minutes later, another. I wondered whether anyone in the cars saw me and thought, "Maybe that's a corpse," since I was lying down in an unexpected place. I don't think they saw me at all. No one stopped to check on me, anyway.

I saw a few meteors, and a lot of satellites. It occurred to me that I never consented to have so many satellites in my sky. I wonder whether the people who build them ever think of that?

As I stepped into the patch of light by the front door, I paused and turned to my invisible friend.

"Thanks for walking with me," I said aloud, "Goodnight."

He's not invited into the house, except maybe on special occasions.