Chapter 14: Awakening

I wasn’t dreaming, I was sure of that, but at the same time, I somehow knew I wasn’t awake.

Have you ever had one of those moments in the middle of the night where you’re dreaming and you suddenly just KNOW that you’re in bed and asleep? In that state, you can try to do something, like get out of bed, or just sit up, but it’s like you end up dreaming about doing it rather than actually doing it. It’s as though the signals in your brain get a bit crossed due to your sleep-addled state, and you end up falling back into slumber when you mean to wake up, then as soon as you start to sleep properly you end up feeling awake.

It was sort of like that. I was aware that I was asleep, but my thoughts drifted along far too chaotically for me to be able to form any sort of coherent thoughts. Instead, I seemed to drift from one thought to the next, with no control, just aimless wandering.

I wasn’t quite sure how long I stayed like that. Keeping track of time was a futile effort, my only certainty of the passage of time was the changes I felt.

It started when I became aware of something other than the darkness of my oblivion.

I saw . . . well, I don’t think ‘saw’ was the right word. Perceived was closer to the mark. It was like an awareness of concepts and truths without the necessity for interpretation by the senses. I was aware of so much more than I could have gleaned with mere organs such as eyes, skin or eardrums. I was aware of things that I had no name for. I was aware of so much, and I was aware of my awareness.

What I perceived was not the world as I knew it. What I was aware of was nothingness, a state of being that was the opposite of existence. Nothingness was all there was, and I felt my new awareness twist and turn as it tried to grasp it. How can you see, or even perceive, something when there is nothing there to see? If my mind hadn’t been in such a strangely augmented state, just experiencing that alone might have been enough to break it.

Time didn’t pass as my awareness hung in that incomprehensible emptiness. How could it? Without the existence of anything the very concepts of space or even time were irrelevant. An eternity could pass in an instant, or an instant in an eternity. Then something changed, my expanded understanding making me aware of it as a new perspective slammed into me. The nothingness seemed to unfold as dimensions that had not previously existed forced themselves upon the infinite emptiness, driving the nothingness back.

Then, without warning, the nothingness was gone, and in its place, there was darkness, a vast endless sweeping void of absolute darkness that had replaced the absence of anything that had previously seemed to choke all that my expanded senses could grasp. The darkness though . . . it wasn’t like the emptiness before. That nothingness, that absolute absence of anything, had been stagnant. It was nothing, it would always be nothing, and it could never be anything other than nothing. The blackness, the new void that had spread out, it was different. It seethed with possibilities, potential surging through it like impossibly vast undercurrents in the ocean. It was all, and it was nothing, but it was a living nothing, not the dead emptiness of silenced eternity, a nothingness that contained everything.

I wasn’t aware of the passage of time, as time had not yet formed. Instead, I was aware of the rise and fall of possibilities within the great ocean of chaos. Wild turmoil reigned, causality, reason, any sort of structure or order unborn. For what could have been an instant, or another eternity all existence was pure and untainted chaos.

Then it all changed as the wild black abyss of possibility unfolded once more. This time it was not to another change, but to the manifestation of a will. A will so vast and implacable that the immeasurable chaos bent away from it as a blade of grass would before the hurricane.

And that will imposed itself upon the chaos, its force utterly irresistible, and a command was given. It wasn’t in anything as crude as language or even sound, it was a massive imperative that my expanded consciousness could only barely comprehend.

It was ‘VOID CEASE BE!’ It was ‘ILLUMINATION EXALTATION CREATION!’ It was ‘NOW BE NOT!’ It was ‘RADIANCE CASCADE BECOME!’ It meant all of these things and yet none of them at the same time. It was a huge desire that contained a vast number of complex concepts interwoven together in a manner that no human language could ever hope to even approach in complexity or subtlety. It was the desire for creation, for what was to change, for something new to come forth, for something old to be renewed.

I suppose that if you were to very, very loosely translate it then it might mean ‘Let there be light.’

And light there was, so much so that it would have been blinding had I been witnessing this with merely my sight. There was so much light that it seemed as though the void would barely be able to contain it. But the light was only a side effect of what was really going on.

Time, space, matter, energy, all of them were being born from the void in an enormous cacophony of creation of such magnitude that it felt as though this new reality was going to tear itself apart. The black abyss of the darkness screamed in a wail that transcended the newly forming planes of existence, but it was no scream of pain or torture if such concepts could be applied to an event infinitely more primal than an earthquake or a tidal wave. This was the roar of origin, of creation, of beginnings, the birth cry of existence.

And all through this I could also perceive the form of the vast will that had set it all into motion. The will stood with the emerging light at its back, and as the radiance blazed forth I could see the form of the will as the brightness of a billion suns seemed to outline it.

The form I saw was human-like in shape. It had the limbs and form of a human, the proportions and posture of one, but beyond that, I found the details hard to grasp. There was no masculinity or femininity to its form. I couldn’t even make out the features of its face through the light that blazed about them. This was good for me though, as I had the impression of both beauty and majesty that made me oddly glad that I could not see them.

Was it a ‘he’ . . . ? Despite the strange neutrality of the being it felt like a ‘he’ to me, some sense of masculinity clinging to it even though there were absolutely no features that should have prompted such a feeling. Yet, at the same time, that sense felt . . . hollow, false, as though it didn’t truly belong.

It took me a moment to understand what made me feel that way. It suddenly clicked into place as the figure moved. It felt as though I was only seeing part of it, as though there was more just beyond my range of perception, so much more that I couldn’t even begin to grasp it. The sense of masculinity . . . it was a reflection, a shadow cast upon this figure by me, the one observing it. To me, it seemed to be male because I was male. And I was certain that a woman seeing this sight would perceive it as female.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

It was more of a matter of my own limitations rather than the titanic being before me. Perhaps I was only able to comprehend it by colouring its existence with concepts my mind could handle.

Then the being completed his motion, and all other thoughts fled from me.

The sheer vast size of the being was difficult to put into words, but as the great light seemed to stabilize and steady into a constant shine rather than a burning burst, it grew easier to have some frame of reference to work with. The light that had poured into the abyss, the light that now swirled about itself was vast, bright, the illumination of every sun that could be, would be or never were. And the gargantuan figure held it in his left hand, his fingers half clenched and the light swirling around them.

His right hand was extended away from him, out into the remaining darkness. The light had been separated from the dark, and now the darkness, the chaos that came before creation, was being . . . reforged, remade. Its nature remained the same, but there was a structure to it now, a loose framework of order that made it stronger yet did not tame its wild nature. The alteration to its essence was almost paradoxical, yet it was necessary for the universe that I saw coming into existence.

I could see the foundations of the universe being laid down, the laws that governed the forms and interactions of matter and energy, the nature of the framework that created sequence and causality. Little by little the cosmos emerged from the seething cauldron of light and darkness, chaos and order.

But it was still incomplete. I could sense that as clearly as I could sense what had taken place already. The foundations were laid, the framework prepared, but the true construction, the formalization of creation, was not yet begun.

Even as the process continued around me, I turned my attention back to the great architect, to the one that was directing this birth of something from nothing.

I could feel my senses expanding once more as I focused on the vast human-shaped silhouette.

He had form and shape, but whatever he was composed of, it was not the matter and energy that he was pouring into the infant universe. He was something else, something more, but even as I looked at him, I couldn’t understand him. It was just too much, too big, too deep, too complex. He stood there, his feet supported by nothing, and no universal force acting upon him. With one hand he pulled all that was into what had been nothing, and with the other, he shaped it into what could be.

Then his right hand flexed slightly, and I could feel the last of the universe slide into place. I can’t think of how to describe it, but a woefully inadequate analogy might have been as a jigsaw. Imagine if someone solved a jigsaw, but didn’t connect all the pieces, just left them in more or less the right position, slightly on top of each other, some gaps here, some overlap there. You could see the completed picture, but it was muddled, imperfect, and more of an impression that a proper image. Then the last piece was placed, and suddenly all the other pieces snapped into position, clicking together to form a perfect picture. And that didn’t even begin to describe the complexity and intricacy of what I was witnessing.

And yet despite the sheer scale of what had been created, despite the myriad of levels and dimensions that the creation had been constructed upon, it didn’t change the simple flaw that was an intrinsic part of all that this grand effort had created.

It was unmoving.

That was, again, the best word that I could think of, but at the same time, I knew it was inaccurate. Atoms moved, energy raced from one spot or state to another, and the fledgling matter of creation spun through space as the newly imposed rule of gravity affected it. There was movement, but there was no . . . freedom, no life. What I was looking at was a vast model of impossible scope and complexity, but it was as lifeless as a toy representation of the solar system that children would play with. It could spin and it could move, but that was it, it was tied to metaphorical rails and unable to be more.

Then the figure moved once more and . . . I felt my mind draw back at what I was witnessing.

It was as though the figure was bleeding out. Essence flowed from it out into the infant cosmos, and I saw it grant vigour and life. Where the essence spread, the potential that had been a part of the darkness before the light quickened into motion. Chance, luck, fortune, whatever you want to call it, the random element of existence that made the universe more than simply a supremely complex machine, that was what was coming into being. The vast figure, the creator of this creation, he’d opened up his metaphysical veins to bleed power and animation into his fresh creation.

Out and out the flow continued, spreading all through the new creation until it seemed to eclipse even the vast form of its creator. And despite the continual flow of power, the figure seemed undiminished.

It was all so hard to take in. For all his overwhelming stature and power there should be a limit to what he possessed, but it seemed as though it was infinite. Yet my own expanded senses were telling me that that couldn’t be, that even a being of such vast scope had to follow certain rules. It was paradoxical, and I felt an all-consuming need to understand.

I turned all of the strange and unfamiliar senses my experience was granting me upon the vast figure of the creator. I tried to perceive further, to understand what was happening, to learn how it was all being done.

There was something there, something that I couldn’t quite reach with my senses. It was . . . behind/above/within/outside/through the figure I was seeing. I couldn’t put a direction on it, not when it seemed to be operating in more dimensions than I could possibly understand, but I kept trying to push through just a bit more, just a bit harder . . .

And then I managed to push through.

I perceived what lay beyond, and for a moment even as expanded as my mind was in this state, I felt the moorings of my very sanity creaking under the pressure of what I was grasping.

It was . . . it was like some beautifully cut gemstone, that was the first thing that came to mind. The figure before me, the being that had forged the cosmos from nothing with the force of his will and who had given it life with the potency of his essence, that vast titanic figure whose stature was comparable to the very universe he had created, he was just a single facet of the jewel. This was the facet in this place, this existence, but it was just a part of something else. What I had taken to be the entirety of the being was only a fingertip, a tiny extrusion into this place where there had been nothing.

Vast, huge, endless, infinite, I thought I had some grasp upon such concepts after seeing the creation of existence, but this . . . this was too much. It was too huge, too massive to get my mind around. All I could do was retreat into a stupor as the mere memory of that immensity sat upon my mind. So huge, so vast, so much.

About me the universe spun into being, full being, the stars burning, the earliest planets forming, the vast clouds of dust that would condense into younger stars spinning through the void between the newly born suns. This was only the beginning, but I knew that the rest was not for me to see. It was a bone-deep certainty that sprang up in me just as my senses began to fade into the darkness of sleep. I wanted to stay, I wanted to witness more, the dawning of life, the birth of the earliest gods and angels, the division of the mortal and immortal, there was so much I wanted to see, so much I wanted to understand!

But I was tired now, so very, very tired. What I had seen was enough to break me, but the same power that had let me see it at all had protected my sanity. However that had not come without a price. Though I could not perceive my body I still felt more bone weary than I ever had in my life. I felt slumber reach up with soft and gentle arms to pull me inexorably down into the darkness of dreams and sleep, and I was just too tired to fight it.

The last thing I perceived before my mind drifted off was that vast titanic figure.

Had it been looking at me?