One of the stranger aspects of the coma was the absence of "a past". Regardless of how we are "present" in the now, we are all comprised of our experiences and our past. Who would we be without who were were in order to change into who we will become. The coma changed my understanding of this.
When I woke up in another place/time/person, inevitably I would be stuck. It didn't matter whether I was awakening in the alpine desert in Montana or if I was waking up in the deep woods of Pennsylvania.... I would wake up stuck. Paralyzed, trapped, unable to move. Initially that comprised my world. What could I see or hear from that position? Who was nearby? Could I understand what was being said? Would anyone talk to me? Was I safe?
What was remarkably absent was any sense of why. I never asked myself: why can't you move? Why can't you speak? Why can't you understand the people around you? Why are you wherever you are? It was just accepted. It was normal. It took me quite a long time of looking back over these experiences to realize that it was because each time I woke up, it was as though someone had scrubbed everything that had happened before that moment. Not just the previous coma dream, but all of my existence.
Who are we if we didn't have yesterday? When I awake in Montana, I could smell the dry dust road, the sagebrush, even the creek nearby and the overhanging cottonwoods. I could smell the rusted iron on the train tracks. I could smell my own stale sweat. I had absolute certainty about where I was. I was immersed in that moment. The last thing on my mind was what happened the day before. I wasn't from Hialeah, Florida... I was from THERE. Wherever that was... I was there, then.
All of which leads to a strange conundrum: morality. Our sense of right and wrong is highly driven by our context; who do we live around, who cares for us, what do "we" believe? When you remove those memories, and remove the context... suddenly you are faced with a child-like mind. The newness of a situation was dumbfounding. Presented with a dilemma, the solution that would have occurred to me in my day-to-day life was unreachable in the coma. There were no threads connecting that life to this life.
I have a friend who once said that they didn't understand where atheists gained their morality. It shocked me to hear this. I replied that I couldn't understand how someone could possibly get their sense of morality from just their religious faith. It was totally out of context. It seemed as absurd as basing one's morality on Harry Potter or on any other fiction. One's morality is shaped by family, experiences, teachings, and failures.
This is a lead-up to the beginnings of a story... well, all of the stories really. Let me say again, every time I woke up in a new place, it was Day Zero. There was no day before it. There was no question of who I was or had been. There was no mystery either. It just was as it had always been. Perhaps one could call it inertia.
To be continued...
