Infinite Galaxies in the Wine

In between sleep and awake. It's a special place where so many astounding experiences lie and yet seldom can one remember them.
Dreams, my dreams in particular, are wild, vivid, emotional, colorful, strange, intense, eye-opening, weird, scary and sexy in any random order on any given night.
And I generally remember them all.
I don't know if that's amazing or a curse.

Rarely do people want to hear about them - especially my husband.
"They're just dreams," he says. "They're not real."

Well they matter to me because I dreamed them!
This is MY subconscience we're talking about!

Last night was an extraordinary occurrence, however.
I lay on the couch, curled up in the corner, resting my head on the arm and a pillow; my husband sat upright on his side of the couch. Together we watched a recorded National Geographic special on the Hubble telescope, a subject that my husband is well-informed on and yet still interested in enough to read articles and record these shows about. I am fascinated with the images brought to us by Hubble too, just not as much as he is. So I watch the show and listen to my husband's comments and remember some of my Astronomy, re-learning and understanding better things like supernovae, the birth of stars and black holes.

Eventually my exhaustion and relaxation turn into dozing and then to sleeping and somehow within only minutes REM & dreaming. Every now and again something would arouse me, either a word or a prod from my spouse or from the television. Each time I fluttered awake, I realized what I was dreaming and what I was hearing. Information was still pouring into my ear and being processed and understood by my brain even though I was dreaming about events from the day. Morning coffee, evening wine, I can't remember it all now, but you get the point.

What is astounding is that I was learning, processing, and applying information in my dreams....and coming up with new ideas. At the time, these ideas were only profound when I woke up.

I dreamt of a close up of the dark burgundy red liquid, held so delicately in a sturdy glass, only within that liquid were galaxies upon galaxies. Infinite galaxies, swirling and moving, existing separately or colliding if too close to each other's gravitational pulls.....I imagined them glittering and burning for ages and all they entail, countless stars and minerals and elements and life forms. Floating in a sea of red, yet was contained in a glass that I could hold elegantly in my hand....

After a few more minutes of dozing, another epiphany: Concept Synesthesia.
If you don't know what synesthesia is, here is the definition.
It is a blending of sensory experiences, usually hearing and vision, sometimes other senses. Like tasting a color or seeing images or colors when hearing certain sounds.

What I experienced was somthing I named "concept synesthesia".
The concept was Singularity. A singularity has a few definitions (mainly mathematical) because it is a difficult concept to wrap your head around. Basically it is "a point in space where any of the properties of matter or space-time become singular - i.e. infinite or zero. Thus in the limit density, pressure and space-time curvature become infinite and volume becomes zero."
In the case of supernovae, those that are so huge and dense in matter, those that spin so fast and so hot and are so unstable, the energy it has blasting outward is burned up and they eventually explode in on themselves, yet the insane amount of gravity pushing in on itself still remains, therefore pushing all of that matter in on itself until it is so small and so dense that it becomes a singularity in which no matter and no light can escape. In other words, a black hole.

It was this concept of singularity that I was considering while dreaming and while I woke up at one point....and in that moment between sleep and awake (which we shall call In-Between), my brain also considered the specifics of In-Between, whatever you call it for real, and decided at once that it was at that moment of clarity that my concept of the In-Between and the concept of singularity at the same time was actually a singularity in itself. And that blew my mind.

Then my husband told me I should get up so I could go to bed.
Which I always thought was such a ridiculous thing to say to someone, even if I'm the one saying it. It's like something you'd hear someone say on a sitcom. "Wake up! So you can go to bed!" Duh.

There were so many other really out there ideas flowing in my mind at the time, but those are the two that I made a point to remember as I was lying in bed trying to go back to sleep again. I would have written them down but I was too comfortable to get up and find a pen and paper without my contacts in.

The image of galaxies floating in a glass of wine was so cool, I can't even explain it because it was more than just the imagery -it was the idea of what they all contained, the infinity of it all in the direction of smaller and not larger was really different. When I think of infinity, I usually think outward, or linear, far away from myself.....but this time, it was something smaller than me and getting EVEN SMALLER and it wasn't even from me, it was in a glass, totally separate from me, and I had nothing at all to do with this amazing relationship between a container and infinity...only an observer.