It's so quiet!
It's like being in the country!
There's no sidewalks!
Let's pelt peanuts at the joggers and see if they notice!
In other words, it's quiet and reserved. I'd say it's woodland-suburban-chic...which is true in the daytime. At night? Not so much.
Starting at 12:30am last night (Thursday night/Friday morning) a neighborhood party kicked in. Kicked! In! Thumping, grinding music. Yelling. Laughing. Whooping. Cars. It continued going strong until after 2am. Who parties on a Thursday?
You may be wondering why I'm complaining, if I didn't call the police. But that's just the thing. I did. Or so I thought. See, last night was the perfect time for me to have false awakenings, which means I was awakened by the party over and over and over again, thinking that I was really conscious and calling to complain - but I wasn't. Over. And over. And over again. There was no escaping it.
I have to believe there's some evolutionary point to false awakenings - though everything I come up with seems like a stretch. Are they nothing but a weird, parasitic experience in which you begin to distrust your own awareness? Or are they something more? The film Waking Life suggests that you know you're dreaming when you can't turn on a light switch. I'd never heard that before, but last night I kept trying to turn on lights and couldn't. My reaction was Dangnabbit. Stupid dreaming, as I flicked the light switch with futility. Wake up wake up wake up.
Many ancient philosophies point to false awakening as a conduit to understanding waking consciousness. (Life is but a dream, yadda yadda.) The more experience I have with this sort of in-betweenness, the more I see their point. When I'm in-between, I have all my waking mental capacities - including the perception of my body. Unlike lucid dreaming, when I'm in-between, I am limited to "real world" space and time perception. No flying. No visiting Venus. No having tea with Amanda Palmer. It really feels like everyday life, except for weird anomolies like being unable to turn on lights and using telephones when people can't hear me on the other end.
So, for the heck of it, today I'm going to go see an early showing of Premonition. Why? Because deep in my heart of hearts, I believe Sandra Bullock will understand my pain.
