Translation into Catalan and Spanish on the navigation bar / Traducción al español accesible desde la barra de navegación / Traducció al català accessible des de la barra de navegació.
The levels of air contamination were particularly high that day; at over 1200, it was way beyond the air quality index’s (AQI) upper limit, constituting a historical contamination that not only surpassed the hazardous but had become a serious threat to life.
We, the wakeful, we are breathless.
A young woman was lying awake on the 14th floor of a tower block. The city’s desperate thirst for electricity had reached a point of no return, and the deep hum of the city’s millions of motors and engines seemed to be coming from inside her own cranium. Over the years, although she had grown insensitive to the sound, the deep visceral murmur had been resonating at a cellular level, stressing her body, preventing her melatonin levels from rising, and denying her the somnolence that she desperately craved.
We, the wakeful, we follow the night.
Fatigue was swaying her mind in and out of dreamtime, a place of multiple overlappings with other beings, other experiences, and other realities. It was here that she first conjoined with the Insomnious, their inability to sleep and their desperate search for remedies, a common obsession. All over the city they united in this ethereal space through their shared activity; their growing numbers moving towards a tipping point. She felt her body sinking into the mattress, while her mind stretched out behind her closed eyes.
We, the wakeful, we wish for oblivion.
Their communal desire for dormancy had produced a thought-collective, that, by vigilance and repetition, gave birth to an unidentifiable energy of singular character: the Egregore, which could weave its own will, cementing the determinations of the group into a bedrock of unanimity and creating for its coadunates an unlimited appetite for future devotion. The young woman’s sense of self was undone, and she melted into it willingly. In such an unpredictable interlacing of minds, it was the Egregore who decided how the future would unfold.
We, the wakeful, we influence the probability of events.
She could not see it, but her room was full of infinitesimal particles of dust that had accumulated from the traffic, the building sites, the fires, and the other many pollutants that made up the smog. From this height, as evening fell, the city seemed to be motionless, movement only occasionally visible as a snaking line of red car brake lights or a skytrain winding its way above the streets between the perpendicular buildings. As the night advanced, the landscape became illuminated by a blanket of electric lights, an artificial Milky Way that prevented the darkness from deepening to blackness and created a perpetual dusk, a misalignment of day and night. Time and space were no longer definable for her.
We, the wakeful, we do not remember our dreams.
In this penumbra, her circadian chaos exercised a further negative effect on her melatonin levels, generating a different kind of dreaming. As she slipped between lucidity and hallucination, in the dark reverie of her warping mind, scenes of ruin and failure mixed with her most intimate fears and further debilitated her. She was losing her ability to know where her body ended and the world began. Shocking sounds occasionally punctured the droning of the city: the high-pitched whine of a motorbike accelerating, a plane flying low, or the song of the Asian Koel, its penetrating calls the only providential sign amidst all the disheartenment. Time stretched the crepuscular visions into an infinite waiting, an elastic distortion of reality. All this will be forgotten.
We, the wakeful, we view the future.
With every half-awake breath, the toxic dust penetrated deeper into her lungs and her body. The city surrounded her with its deep guttural groaning, and the sound accelerated a chain of chemical reactions that had begun between the components of the smog. This collision of matter and vibration produced unthinkable changes in the world of the wakeful. All that was once air was now a thick, completely new substance that was gently but consistently solidifying. She felt herself communing with the Insomnious throughout the city; she felt how the space that used to surround them was now encasing them. They had become interconnected in this transparent plasma; one united body, ‘all for one and one for all.’
We, the wakeful, we are watching over you.
In the city, from horizon to horizon, the wakeful had become embraced in a wholly separate dimension. In the stillness of the purple half-light, the young woman’s pineal gland, attempting to self-regulate, went from total inactivity to a surging hyperactivity in just a few seconds. The Ancient Greeks who first discovered the pineal gland believed it to be a valve, guarding not only the right flow of breath but also the spirit or psyche. Buried deep within her brain, this tiny, mysterious, photosensitive organ began to glow. A faint light could just be seen through the skin in the middle of her forehead, gradually growing brighter. An inner clarity germinated and grew within her, blossoming in the hearts of the wakeful. The Egregore directed them towards the perpetual cycle of death and birth.
We, the wakeful, we open our third eye.
A simultaneous rush of melatonin shimmered through the substance and triggered an emotional euphoria in the unsleepers. A huge energy of unconditional love and connection to all life, channelled directly through them. Golden lights shone on their every forehead. The Insomnious were illuminated: shafts of light beaming out beyond the planet like lasers into infinite space. A light that will travel into the galaxies for aeons: light that carries and magnifies boundless bliss. A portal for the transit of the vital life force that comes into this world and that leaves it for other worlds.
We, the wakeful, we are in transit
The Insomnious were slowly synchronising their breath as the Egregore drew them from the physical world and into the spiritual. There were now millions of prostrated bodies, held between sleep and wakefulness. Their third eyes aglow, the substance around them and within them interlacing with the immeasurable light of love.
We, the wakeful, we are the time givers.
We are the synchronisers of all substance and no substance.
We are infinitely free.
‘Just as our soul (psyche), being air (aer), holds us together, so do breath (pneuma) and air (aer) encompass the whole world.’
Fabulous
Another gem!