Most nights I slept chewing those rectangular substances of Husserlian pre-reflective consciousness—now I know, I can clearly visualize, that was not psychosis (higher revelation) but ontological apprenticeship; I was hired by the pre-conceptual ground of Being. I was not there to be terrified or overwhelmed but to grasp that (rectangular-fantasy) as the first contact with the sublime recognition of less-freedom. This way I was trapped and dragged to the custody of Bergson's durée. I had lost time. I had lost vision. I had lost the concept of being alive, even in those early years I had that concept of being alive (irony is it not!?) Through clay and taste I met Being before language. Unseen—untouched—unbuilt. I had written that phenomenology of language, how we can center (or specially, I) our being within the concept of unseen-unbuilt and untouched-unseen.

When I see that 'her' behind the door, or rectangular sponge or blue wall's taste—I did not re-buff but I hugged it all the way, I accepted the concept of being 'fearful', I recollected the entire phenomena while was composing my The Outsider. When I was staring at television set that time, entirely gazing right to Mr. Bald man, I knew it, I wasn't staring at cinema, I was beginning to fracture what Schopenhauer called 'the representation as will', before representation, before Upanishadic pratyakṣa (direct perception) and later when I had that dream, it (that direct perception) went through not mind but mouth, I tasted its fundamental intellect, which 'the wall of Ontology' became Plato's sweet taste of the cave (but now I am confused after so many years, like 30 years later, when I am writing this, was I creating freedom of my own mind or just trying to bridge the gap between ineffable mind and matter!). Had I escaped the cave? No, never. I had always this pit behind my skull, it's called 'Posterior cranial fossa'—seer's seeing throne, I once was a king there but I had lost my kingship and 'The Pit of Seeing Twice' is hovering over like Kali—that last incarnation of human psyche. I am trapped behind my own skull.

After many years end of the Exile of the Second Sun period, which lasted for 13 years, difficult time, I started to have another dream, which lasted for another 3 years until I cross my 'the best period', Le Gray Bastion. Before talking about that recurring dream let's unfold few things first:

That splits of the moments (years), it's not like Dostoyevsky's The Double or Artaud's Body Without Organs, but it was ontological multiplication — the self divided by awareness. I know I wasn't aware like in a traditional human-being sense, but I had that inner-flapping sense (which I had tried to explain in my latest book) for example, in Hindu metaphysics, this moment echoes the dvaita within advaita, I had first conflict with my own consciousness. My child-self's "itchy skull"—the desire to peel away the skin of reality—is that exact metaphysical discomfort Plato hinted at in the Allegory of the Cave?! I had read Symposium in one long breath staring in 14" Windows screen, tear would course through cheeks not being aware of the cave but being aware of not getting out of it. Hadn't I been trapped there? Are you not, my readers, trapped in there? I wasn't merely dreaming but I was undergoing initiation. Later I was aware that those dreams were the introduction to multiplicity through the terror of duplication, without that awareness I hadn't been able to dig out through that deep chamber of ignorance (Which I am developing in my next book, this concept of Abhinevesa.)

Hecate at the threshold - the old crone calling from across the road

Now, another dream: it started from 2011 until 2018. The old woman (old crone) outposted on the other side of the road, calling me (waving her hand), slightly smiling. This 'across the road' felt like the repetition of the blue wall of ontology in anthropomorphic form. She was the Anima, the Jungian shadow carrying the maternal charge of the first encounter. When I had enough knowledge about Greek myths I sensed that old crone was a Hecate, goddess of the crossroads, the one who calls from the threshold. I immediately started frolicking (not with joy but with fearness) when I had that 'threshold'.

"Arise, awake, and learn from the wise." I pretended every time when I had that dream.

But the 'wise', later, I got its true meaning, that it was an invitation to return, not to death, but to the depth of the first experience. I had never tasted the true meaning of appearance since The Age of The Double. I had this 'gesture' in my head for a long time, it was waving, calling, screaming sometime (it was that moment I used to scream in my dream). After my first recurring dream which lasted for 14 years, I started reading (in around 2007/08) Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and Jung's The Red Book because, initially, I was trying to interpret my own dream. Later vigorously reading these gentlemen I conceived the idea of my second book (I had finished that manuscript in 2 months in that winter of 2013, which later published in 2019) based on that second recurring dream gesture.

When (nearly end of the exile of the second sun, it means beginning of the Le Grey Bastion) I started to have that feeling Between the wall and the old woman stretches a long phenomenological road — the journey from tactile immediacy to symbolic distance, from direct taste to hermeneutic reflection was in fact the perception and the representation of the duality I had been infected.

After that I haven't seen any dream. I am absent with, probably, sub-conscious visualizations. I felt now, can distinguish, those two periods how Schreber distinguishes his mental breakdown: as a 'first divine judgment' and '…further divine judgments'. Now, think that absent subconscious visualizations as retrograde of being-ness. It pushes you further to the nothingness (not as completely as Sartre's concept, not negating Being) but at the same time it pulls you back to that Being (not as Sartre's static Being) and tells you to stand on the edge of existence. This evacuation of the image (phenomenologists love to call it) when consciousness ceases to project. It's not a loss but a withdrawal, a return to the zero-degree of perception. I had stopped worrying too much about suffering but learned which Sartre's Being and Nothingness warned that consciousness is always haunted by its own nothingness. Even now, I can't conceive the full orchestra of experience that everyone listen, or touch, or taste. It doesn't mean that my "absent subconscious visualization" is the point where that 'haunting' exhausts itself. Actually, it starts from that vantage point—To lose the dream is perhaps to become the dreamer who knows he is dreamt.

"Happy birthday headless worm" - ontological recoil as incarnation

And yes, every morning when I wake up, the first thing that hits my mind is "shit, I'm still in Saigon." It's not metaphorical, it's life-affirming deep acceptance, believing that you are in that deep pit of self-loathing realm of your (mine) time. Let's curl back to the Saigon. What it taught me, actually? First, The Blue Wall, it has no tongue but I had, I licked it anyway, mean I had that rigor to taste the primal experience of mind (gaze, or Sartrean terms—look)—later I realized I just didn't lick the wall, the wall licked my initial consciousness of 'knowing'—like, for example, we can find this 'inversion of the gaze'—turning back to yourself (but the difference is this time you are being watched). It echoes Lacan's objet petit a and Sartre's "look" (le regard): the moment you realize that you, too, are an object in someone else's consciousness. The wall, every night after dinner, stared me, in my eyes, but it had no question in its heart, that was relief. It never questioned my authenticity but offered me its amorous taste of "The world is my representation." I started representing my own realm—without being afraid, that wall taught me that. It stared at me, I stared back to the blue wall of ontology and we were.

Through that mutual taste—the blue wall—I began to live what the Upanishads call Tat Tvam Asi—"Thou art that." I felt the rawness of the awareness of the outside—I felt it, called it, and embraced it. After years, I still had that feeling to grasp that 'spongy rectangular' or lick back to the blue wall, and its voidness gave me back nausea and gnawing feeling to have it anyway—that primal consciousness. Although the blue wall became my first metaphysical text or say Guru—before I could read philosophy or watch Saigon—I could taste it. It took time (many of my periods), but I discovered ontology through the tongue, through the body, before the intellect had any language for it—I discovered it along the way but I never learned "I almost carried away with the vagueness of being-alive-in-future,"—that's what I lost in the blue wall. That is what 'shit, I'm still in Saigon' taught me because that will to grasp the form of realness (which is devoid of The Double) incomplete me from the rest of the entire knowledge.

What is this ontological recoil—isn't it the taste of one's being-ness? After dreams were gone, the walls were shattered, and even the silence was silenced—left—these recoiling urges. I often feel like I am incarnating into something thousand-legged, centipeded and coiling itself to devour its own fear. When I was conceiving Who Will Bury the Dead God, one evening outside my apartment, next to the lift, after heavy rain, a few earthworms were lying (God knows where they had landed from) and I unknowingly stepped on them… they died recoiling… I watched them… and wrote 'Happy birthday headless worm' for the dedication of the book later. Exactly when the dreams were gone and the walls were shattered, I coiled in disgust more than ever, but that ontological recoil-duplication marks the end of innocent being. I began to live not reflectively but no longer as an existential being—felt like I had been forced to be the character of The Age of The Double.

Foreword - "Happy birthday headless worm!" from Who Will Bury the Dead God

What I recall is: where the first dream was mouth (as symbolically: the wall without tongue) and the second was gesture, and I, from taste to calling, passed from ontology to ethic—the responsibility to respond to Being's invitation. And the rest—the long road—was a phenomenological exile, with no taste and no representations. I often discuss with my own soul, what is awakening? Where does this Nothingness touch the fingertips of Being? So how did I avoid and gain back the yips?

It will be the topic of the next post.