2:05am April 3, 2012

How I travel without leaving bed

So… that last song reminds me of a skill I have. I’ve learned to cultivate it because of being in bed all the time, but I’ve had it as long as I could remember. I want to be clear that I’m not talking about anything conventionally considered an out of body experience – something I consider dangerous to even attempt. It’s not the same as a daydream either, as those tend to be detached from reality in a way this isn’t. They have effects because of that detachment, that this doesn’t. This has an extreme clarity that daydreams don’t. But language doesn’t give me a lot of words for what I do mean.

Most of the time, I can just go places. Especially outdoor places, especially places I’ve already been. It’s a little like having Google Earth inside my head. The sensory experiences of the place may be jumbled, but the basic feel of the place is always intact. So I can be in bed, and feel exactly like I am curled up in the roots of a huge redwood tree. Or sitting in the mud by a mountain lake. Or lying down in a place where the sun hits a granite mountainside. Or inside a dark, cramped cave. Normally it takes no time at all for this to happen. And in every way that matters, I am there.

I think it stems from something I started doing when I was very little. I have a memory of playing on some wooden bars in an indoor playground. But there was a locked gate in between me and those bars. It felt real, or more than real. And I wasn’t limited to what I could physically do on the bars: I could swing upside down too.

I used to do the same thing with an electrical substation next to a highway in San Jose. Our car would pass it and I’d be swinging through things that would have killed me in real life. I did the same thing with electrical pylons. I don’t know what was up with the electricity thing. :-P

That stuff seems to originally stem from my inability to know where I was physically located. Both autism and central pain can cause difficulty relating to one’s body. I remember being completely unable to differentiate something I did physically from something I did “in my head” like that. As I got older the distinction became more clear, but I never lost that less-than-physical way of connecting to places.

I can also go places I’ve never been. All I need is something, like usually a photo, that shows me the feel of the place. Then I can go there all I want. I swear I’ve traveled more since being stuck in bed 24/7 than I ever traveled beforehand. My intense desire to physically explore the world, which used to make me unhappy that I didn’t travel more, is surprisingly well satisfied by this non-physical form of exploration.

A lot of the photos I post on this tumblr are places I discover that I love going to – without leaving my bed. And that song I just posted reminds me of it too, despite a sense that this is neither dream nor daydream in any normal use of the word. What it is, I think maybe the word isn’t invented yet, so it’s easy to confuse with things it’s not. Either way, I can write this from that granite mountainside, without leaving bed, without daydreaming, without leaving my body.

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