Sometimes things seem so normal and natural that you don’t realize that they might be something else until they are gone. As a rather young child I had a strange ritual that put me to sleep every night. I would lie in my bed and imagine that I was sitting in an invisible chair suspended in a dark and featureless place somewhere in a space somewhere above or within me. When I felt very comfortable I would then pretend that I was revolving on my axis in a forward direction until it felt very natural and easy. Then came the difficult part. I would imagine that while still revolving in a vertical direction I would begin to feel myself spinning sideways and around a horizontal axis.
It was a very strange mental feeling that took a little while to get just right and after it did then things started to happen on their own. I would get a strange ‘whooshing’ sensation and begin to move forward at a very fast speed, at least it was a feeling of rolling forward at a fast speed, except I wasn’t really moving everything was rolling around me and my vision remained straight ahead. It felt a little like being a bowling ball moving in an unstoppable line going faster and faster. When I hit a certain speed everything turned into blurred straight lines and small square lights. That was it, but it happened night after night for several years until one night it didn’t happen. It just stopped. I tried to recreate the experience but it never happened again so I just let it go. Forty years later I sat in a cinema in Henderson, Nevada watching Robert Zemeckis’ film “Contact’.
The movie was based on Carl Sagen’s Sci-fi novel and starred Jody Foster and suddenly the movie recreated this experience for me in vivid cinematic terms. Jody Foster sat in a chair and the entire process was reenacted as a physical experience. It was a stunning moment and my memories flooded back to me with such power that I started to cry as I sat there surrounded by my family in the half empty movie theatre. My eyes filled with tears and I wept and wept like a child, excited and amazed that my childhood memories were not mine alone and they had been recreated and shared. I intuitively realized watching the movie that the motion and basis of the experience was intimately connected with the movements within an atom. All my life I have felt strangely driven but without any particular goal or direction other than a curious conviction that if time was going in a forward direction then I was moving in the opposite one. For a moment or two sitting weeping in that theatre everything came together for me and although I couldn’t have articulated it I knew who and what I wasn’t. For about fifteen years I had been reading books about quantum mechanics and puzzling my mind about the sub-atomic level of being. Sitting in that cinema everything came together for me. I realized that the nuclear/sub atomic world wasn’t something you read about or thought about. It wasn’t something to be analyzed it was something to be experienced. It was something that you were.
