A Waking Dream on First Ave

Much of my life tends to pass by as if it were a dream. Consciousness becomes acute only in stages and in certain moments; then it can feel as if I had woken up from the dream and now regard my life with an astonished clarity; like in that Talking Heads song “and you may ask yourself: how did I get here?” For instance, the other day at dusk in Manhattan, turning from 14th Street to First Avenue, walking in the rain without an umbrella, as the vista of First opened up before me and the mood changed from east 14th Street’s barren canyon to the compact and glowing matrixed mysteries of the east village, I became dumbstruck and I stood there in the spiky rain as if I were becoming conscious for the first time since I had moved to the city five years before. Time collapsed. It felt as if those five years had passed in a rapid dream and I, an automatom, had lived through it automatically and unthinking, and now some god had woken me to total vivid consciousness. I became weirdly aware of my position in space and time, my head wet in the rain, my undivided attention blooming outwards so that it felt for a very brief moment as if I were the city itself. The moment passed and I returned to my dream of automata.