4:00 a.m. and I'm Not Dreaming

Carl Gustav sat down, winded. He was never in great shape. His eyes were wild and he looked at me, trying to speak, until I waved a hand at him and ordered him a glass of wine. Always the snob, he made a face when he took a sip, but drained the glass anyway.

For years he's made these unannounced visits to me, spouting a new theory and expecting me to follow his mostly incoherent thoughts down the twisted aisles of his reasoning to understanding, and I almost always get lost. I frustrate the poor man. Today, however, he is much more substantial than ever before as he sputters into the explanation for his visit.

"At the beginning of man's evolution he was a single cell, struggling to exist, reacting and reaching out to his environment for clues to survival. This information was absorbed and when this single cell developed into a more complex association he took with him the knowledge, mostly useless now, of how to cope. And he learned, again, how to survive, adding to this basic information skills that multiplied as fast as his physical manifestation. At every stage of development an awareness was present and then added to his memory."

I must have looked confused because he began to pound the table for emphasis with every sentence, thinking this would drive home the point he was trying to make.

"At every stage of development the cells of this body are aware of the conditions in which it exists. Even you, you begin as a single cell, coping in your environment, becoming more sophisticated with each step on your way to becoming the uncomprehending blob I'm looking at right now. You have the knowledge of what it's like to be an amoeba within the structure of your cells. You contain the information needed to survive as an invertebrate, a fish, a lizard simply because you have been all these things at some point in your in utero life."

At this point I became aware that he wasn't even talking to me anymore, but instead was formulating the sentences, stringing together the ideas as they came to him. Perhaps somehow consulting the very cells he was thinking about for verification.

"This means that as we become fully human we have already passed through the various stages of evolution and still posses the necessary information to be each of these incarnations. That would explain why we dream of the womb, why we 'know' things not taught to us and why we can communicate with images from within a primordial perspective."

And then he was gone. Having forgotten what he was trying to explain to me to careen through his own memories formulating as he went. His visits are always short and sweet, I have to add. He often leaves me with a headache, though. His words, he's left behind, and it may take me days to sort it all out. I'm not as quick as he is. Any way, I have things to do and my own environment to tame for now. Maybe I'll sit down later and try to make some sense of it all.