That my perception, my simple vision, is unusual (by standards I would have used ten years ago) I know. But I also know that it arises from the prolongation, the endless receiving of and attention to, innumerable micro-perceptions, which I have noted and registered. I have gradually shifted my perceptual editing in order to accept these micro-perceptions as normal. The enormous ridiculous rolling vapour of a cloud against the impossibly blue sky, both near and far together. The pale underside of a leaf in the wind. The smell of the night. Ordinary perceptions, but occasionally they seem extraordinary, nitid, numinous. When this occurs, the predominant reaction is to relegate them to the extraordinary, to keep them spiritually separate. But I include them in the everyday, thereby fusing their numinosity with that everyday. Thus, ordinary perception becomes suffused with a meaning usually reserved for dreams, visions or hallucinations.
However, I have also noticed during this process that my dreams are becoming more like everyday experience. I think I have levelled the two areas—dreaming in the everyday, and recognising the commonplace in dreams. The waking world has thereby become richer and the dreaming world more accessible. The distinction becomes progressively less clear, and I wonder when it will find a level. Yet all I have done is remove the false distinction between various kinds of perception: to take the extraordinary out of the realm of the uncommon, to make it normal; not to suffer from amazement and surprise when everyday things become resonant. Simply to enjoy it and pass on. The resonance is always present, the variable is my awareness of it.
(earlier than 18aug2006, original date uncertain)