Behind and Beyond the Threshold of Self Awareness

It was sometime around the age of three or four, like most people I imagine, that I became aware of myself. I don’t know much about child psychology, but the big thing that separates us as a species from other animals– our ability to think objectively– doesn’t seem to come installed right off the bat. None of us really have any memories of the time before this explicitly ‘human’ element kicks in, and I imagine that few, if any adults have many memories at all for the entire surrounding birth-to-six-years era. Certainly, I’m no exception. I remember pre-school fairly well, but most of what came before it has been lost to the years.

However, around the time I became self-aware, I also became possessed with a particular obsession that has managed to survive in my memory; namely, an obsession with my own memory, and the baffling fact that I could not remember anything that happened to me just a year prior, or anything before that. Of course, I was only four, so the fact that I didn’t have much of a memory should come as no surprise…but I never felt four, and the concept of being a fresh-creation was completely lost on me in my innocence. Like most, I imagine, I could not escape a feeling of having always existed, which was quite troubling that close to the threshold, without even a fraction of a memory record to support it…but while I lacked memory, I retained a small number of very specific impressions from my pre-awareness era, which I dedicated the bulk of my time and energy to seeking out again. I remember feeling as though I had been in a sort of waking-dream that had been going on for an eternity– and that the moment I achieved self-awareness, I somehow abandoned half of this dream; the intangible, timeless aspect of it– yet retained the physical half of whatever mystical plane of existence I had been abiding in.

Of the many impressions I brought with me into my waking life, three of them stood out the most, and were the primary objects of my fixation. Although I’ll describe them in physical detail, all three had something else in common– a fuzziness, and a vague sense of floating and attachment. The first was a wooded valley; a small dip in a hillside, with a perfect orange floor of dead maple leaves. Tall, branchless trees sprouted here and there, on the sides of the hill, and shot high into the sky where they formed a natural canopy, subduing the sunlight. The second impression was also made of hills, though it included no trees. It was just a vast, endless, rolling meadow of soft golden grass…with cotton clouds, sunshine, and a clear blue sky above it. The last one was a bit more perplexing, and slight disturbing…it was a damp and dimly lit room of blue stone, or concrete, and had the scent of mold and lime deposits. Although that one gave me the creeps, slightly, it never slowed my pursuit of it…to this day, in fact.

Indeed, it seems as though that unusual childhood fixation never left me…and whether I’ve been aware of it or not, I think I have always been searching for that valley in the woods; that meadow in the hills; and even that blue concrete room, somewhere in a darker corner of my primitive mind. I wonder if we rejoin that segue between nothingness and existence on the way out…and if heaven is little more than whatever impressions we’re able to bring across with us, from our self-aware years.