I had a peculiar experience recently, towards the end of a perfectly ordinary day. I had talked my friend "C" into taking a moderately long walk to try a new Middle Eastern restaurant. I also knew that, for his cooking adventures, he had been wanting to find a store selling sesame paste, and I knew there was an Asian store near the restaurant.
As we passed the store, C suggested we stop in on the way back, but I insisted that we take care of this item first, since we might forget, or the shop might be closed later. So we wandered up and down the aisles. I mentioned the sesame paste and C said that's not what he had been looking for, but something else. I am sure he originally wanted sesame paste, but I shrugged. He told me what he actually wanted now. I went into the next aisle, and was looking up and down, and realized I couldn't recall what he had just said. I figured it would come to me, but when I moved to yet another aisle, and still couldn't remember, I had to ask. With a small chuckle, he named the item yet again. I stepped into the next aisle, searching diligently, but realized I didn't know what he had just said. He finally found a jar of whatever it was, and as we stood in line, I realized I had no idea what he was buying now, but I just kept quiet.
We went into the restaurant, ordered our dinners, and had a sporadic conversation about our adventures of the day. But as we were talking, out of the corner of my mind, so to speak, I caught a glimpse of a host of images that seemed to have some meaning, but whose origins I could not deduce. I kept on talking, but could still regard these vague, insubstantial ideas floating like fallen leaves along my stream of consciousness, neither demanding or avoiding attention. They were just passing through. But now my mind felt like it had company, that there was some second mental process nearby, which was occupied by these images, and which had inadvertently let me see them. One image was of two yellow elliptical disks, on a concrete floor, each of which had originally been a stack of 12. What is one to make of this? Where did it come from? How could it mean anything?
Meanwhile, of course, I was chatting with C, and enjoying my dinner, but wondering whether I was somehow catching the final fragments of an unfinished dream, or just experiencing the warning signs of a mental disintegration. As it happened, the restaurant was divided by a partition into two eating areas, and I thought that it was as though there was a second me in the other room, and that I could occasionally hear fragments of his conversation.
The half-perceived mental images lingered in my mind, and were something like the hints, on waking up, of a dream, about to melt away, but whose meaning was still recoverable if I concentrated. However, in this case, there just wasn't enough to focus on, except for the single image of the two elliptical disks, for which my only reward was the extra information that originally there had been 24. So part of me remained submerged in this other world, without interrupting my conversation and dinner, watching and sensing these unusual events.
This peculiar feeling lasted for ten or fifteen minutes, and then simply drifted away, leaving me baffled as to its cause or meaning.
Last revised on 07 October 2022.