Mind Your Measures

Our waking experience is mostly if not wholly in the past. In waking consciousness, when I focus on my mind’s experience, only on my thoughts or imagination, there is perhaps a synchronicity of experience and the thing I am considering in the sense that the clock of my experience is not a clock outside my mind’s sense of the passage of time. If I take the clock of my now to be the experience itself as it occurs with no reference to time passing outside the experience itself I can claim synchronized coincidence of a present, a moment of now, and my experience. I may claim simultaneity of my experience of thought and the thought itself, of feeling, experiencing the feeling and the sentiment as I have it if I use as the measure of time the sequence of sentience itself. Then perhaps I can say the present is what I am experiencing without a lag in time for the senses to bring perception to me for interpretation. Is it possible in waking life for that to be truly simultaneous or is it always genuinely always a bit behind the actual moment of now? Is there always actually a sense of outside time, a lapse between the synaptic moment and what the activity of the brain and mind considers? What is the mathematical rendering, the expression in calculus of that?

What about dreams? In dream time does that outside reference, that inkling of outside time disappear or at least narrow further, bringing closer the clock of instants passing, the distance between the thing and the thought, that gap of conveyance of information to the mind from the object considered? Is the stuff of dreams perhaps closer to a simultaneous experience of now, of the present moment? If we could put a clock on our dreams solely in the mind would there still be that same lag between the mechanics of the mind and the objects generated solely in the mind? Can we claim the only valid clock of a dream is the present experience of the dream itself and therefore the dreamer experiences the lapse between brain activity and the generation of dream content and the experience of those dream things as one and the same? Or does the waking sense of time impose itself there in the dream as well? Are the same chemical transfers in the brain required in the dream as in the outside world for us to respond to dream things which are things only in the mind? The mind works only with that lag perhaps. What is our subjective impression, even in a dream? Could the lapse in a dream be an illusion carried over from waking consciousness, even though in sleep the reality the dreamer dreams and experiences, the dream itself happen simultaneously? Has the dreamer in fact caught up with now, thereby gaining rest? Is it perhaps the lag in time when we are awake which makes us tired?

In the morning I wake and try to recall the dream moments, the recollected experience of the present, an experience of a now left behind, a simultaneity in the moment, a now now lost. I am always seeking a place nearer to now, approaching the moment, falling short, perhaps only in dreams achieving that place somewhere nearer to now.

What about the experience in the womb, the dream state in the womb, and experiences not wholly asleep, not wholly waking? What is the valid clock of those moments for consciousness? The mind is only forming and at the first moment of consciousness could there be a first instance where the lapse is less or nonexistent? Just prior to that could there be a true simultaneous moment, a now we experience even as it occurs, and is that similar to the actual act of conception itself, if only as a half remembered dream?

Now I search my mind for that moment of initial conception with the firm knowledge that as I approach it, however closely, even as I touch it, it is an illusion of now, an illusion in memory dissipating in a lapsed experience of infinitesimal time I can never bridge, the atom of my first self on my own eve of being, my spark of an essence once touched never to be reached, a snowflake, a light particle escaping my effort to grasp it by the very act of experiencing, melting away in the passion to regain its infinitely remote intimacy.