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98 SPIRIT AND THE MIND
S: What of the possibility of moving like this water and shooting off into space and then all of a sudden—boom! becoming the space, just becoming infinite. Would that frighten you? Or does that even have any meaning to you?
A: No, it doesn’t, it’s an abstraction. I don’t feel anything when you say that, except sort of memories of having had dreams about flying or something.
S: So you just think that once you’re up into the space without anything to hold to, you would plummet down?
A: Yes. I guess. In the dream, when I went over the waterfall nothing happened to me.
S: Do you remember falling?
A: Yes. I remember kind of going to the edge of this thing. I think there was a log jam there or something, and I was riding on a log. I remember thinking, “My God, I’m going to go over this waterfall—it’s a long way down.” But then there wasn’t anything I could do about it. I mean, not going over the waterfall was out of the question. There was nothing to grab onto. The river was going much faster than I could possibly hope to swim and buck the current so I just let it take me over the waterfall, and I said, “Well, here I am.”
And in the dream—it was one of those dreams where I am aware that I’m in a dream. I’ve done this a couple of times: I sort of say to myself, “Well, it’s only a dream, I can go over this waterfall because it’s only a dream.” I mentioned that to myself and then went over the waterfall, and that was that. Like I gave myself sort of an out from my panic. See, I kept trying to give myself outs like that all during this last week. What happened to me in here? Was it only “a this,” was it only “a that,” was it only a something or another thing, and I haven’t figured out what it was, only . . .
S: Well, what were some of these “only’s?”
A: I mentioned them before: Was I acting? Had I conjured it up myself?
S: To please me?
A: Yes, maybe. I guess mostly to please you. Or to be dramatic— to make an impression.
S: But it continued even after you left here. Jim saw it.
A: Oh, yes. I drove up to my field site and he was down at the other end of the site looking at something. So I sat down on the