Somatic remembrance, my hips felt like a basket full of stone fruit. I’d forget that I had to stretch and ground myself often. Because I’m a membrane, a living thing with needs and necessities. I forget often how utterly irritating occupying a body is. How needing nourishment is my responsibility as if I’d like to stay here longer than desired.

There was a long era of life where my body was more than a pest to me but a complete wasteland, there was no stream of connection between my consciousness and this vessel of mine. I was not even at war but total abandonment.

The out of body was the only reality I lived, completely cerebral and far from the present. It wasn’t that the present was bad, it wasn’t good either. There was something else, it was this echoing of reverie. A constant deja vu or a deep knowing that this had already all happened and I somehow got put back here when I was close to something else. That something else that I had known of but will never know the name of because it’s not exactly some.. thing. It is not a somewhere or someone or somehow or somewhat, even… No. It’s inexplicable to the logical, it comes in small bursts and the only way I can reach it is to reach in.

The best way I can put it is a stream, and the stream is warm it’s a warm stream like that of an underwater current or perhaps a glimmering stream. It moves, its always moving forward. Streamline. It can be a turquoise, an ether blue, and a sharp magenta that is unmistakable. It can be, and it does change often. When I dive into it, you see it’s not even a real stream its encased in the darkness of my mind room. Outer space… inner space. The stream I jump into and that’s where I would go and it was often, no I lie, it was perpetual. It’s stronger before bed, Anyone can see the stream when they close their eyes and choose to not think actively. No, I don’t do that. I don’t conjure any thoughts I don’t will myself to think. I simply let what the mind does when left alone.. wander. And the stream comes to me.This particular phenomenon is what I learned as the image stream. Its quite accessible to a quiet mind. My mind is quiet but not in the sense that I’m not present in it. Its that I’m fully present in it, and it gives me great pleasure to know that this is my inner sanctuary a peaceful palace that I can hold onto the remembrance of soul. They’re talking about making connections between mind and technology, where we can begin to think what others think and see what others see inside of themselves. At one point in my youth I wanted to show my dreams to the world because they felt like where we were all supposed to go. But now… the reality of this invasiveness is just another stone fruit in my hip basket. Heavy. When we live in the stream for so long the reality of the stream becomes almost perverse. It becomes formed and tangible, something not so divine and holy, but terrestrial and laden. Clad in form and therefore subject to objectification and ruin of essence. I cannot think of anything more tragic. The safest place is inward. I see crabs and snails and turtles as holy because we don’t know the warmth of their shells the way they do. Just the way the mind is encased in bone. I do not want visitors here.

Rebekah Rubalcava (La Jolla, 1996) is a self-taught surrealist painter and writer. Her work both in paint and word focuses on the subjective internal dreamscape, personal symbolism, and the phenomenology of consciousness.

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