I woke up in Somebody else's head Monday morning. Rather, perhaps, somebody woke up in mine. It was a strange experience. I know dreams tend to hang on a bit, but this was unlike a dream. I laid awake on my bed a moment, experiencing her world, trying to get the memories etched into my mind, before finally shaking off the remnants and sitting up. Even at that point, I was reliving the experience in my mind, again trying to keep it fresh so I could write about it here. Of course, by the time I got to work there was very little left, and by the time I sat down to write it, now, on Tuesday morning, most of the experience is gone.
I still feel it was not a dream. I knew I was waking up, the fog of a late night reading spree amid the seven a.m. alarm. I could see myself in my body laying there, from the eyes of this woman, even though through her eyes I was watching the mirror, applying the last of the makeup, walking through an apartment not my own. Like I said, it was a bizarre experience.
And no, it was not a sexual thing. There was no craving to be a woman, and she was not some lipstick lesbian fantasy dream girl I was occupying at the time. I was thinking she was stocky, if women can be called stocky. There was no sense of beeauty or ugliness, that is just who I was at the time. Older than me, but let's say under sixty. I was thinking perhaps Miss Marple, as Kristi has been reading an Agatha Christie book the past few nights, but I always pictured her much older. The woman whose mind I was co-opting was heading to work. Now I can imagine that the marathon of Monty Python's Flying Circus episodes we have been watching this week must have slipped into my consciousness. It was that kind of woman, the older British housewife character from those skits.
Yet I have a feeling that the experience was real. It wasn't me, dressed in drag, acting out some play. It lasted three or four minutes, the woman seemingly having no idea that i was in her brain. but as I sat up on the edge of my bed, I could not shake the additional feeling that she had inhabited mine; that around the same time as I was placing my feet onto the hardwood floor, Kristi already up and starting the coffee, that she was reentering her own body, fully aware of the surroundings in my one bedroom apartment, looking at the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling, and the books piled up on the desk to the left of my bed, the sound of Kristi in the kitchen. I know she experienced all those things as surely as I walked around her apartment during her absence.
Like I said, it was really weird. It comes close to a seemingly recurring theme of my fiction writing. My great american novel, which is still unwritten,. the one that wraps around Rachel Callahan and her dad, has a serial killer, a Jack the Ripper type person inhabiting bodies through centuries to pop up and commit his crimes and delve back into the soup of humanity. The Nano novel I wrote last year, the serial killer (note that serial killers also tend to be recurring themes in my fiction!) believes in the idea of "one soul", where we are all interconnected in a similar way.
Nano comes up in November. Write a novel in a onth again. I really cannot wait for it! You are not allowed to write anything before hand. Of course, an outline and notes are encouraged, if you are that kind of writer. I can even write a few chapters, flesh out the ideas of where it is going, as long as I rewrite them come november, and not cut and paste what i have already written. I decided my story is going to be a travel piece. We drove to San Antonio at the end of June. It was too fast a trip, not enough time to soak in and absorb some of the crazy real life characters I could have come across. So I figure to write about driving out there again, or some place farther. That would give me a chance to invent some characters, to incorporate some of my hitchhiking experiences from way back. There is a hotel in Louisianna, a holiday inn or Travel lodge, just a regular hotel, that I figured was a secret opening into the pits of hell, and I can play with that theme as well.
Yeah, it will be that kind of novel. But if there is any sort of body possession or mind swapping involved, i might actually start to get worried for myself.
