Down to Earth

The hallway is dim, lit from an unknown source by an unnatural light, sufficient to see but only just. I cast no shadows on the walls or floor, yet the light seems focused on me, the hallway disappearing into darkness ahead. The walls are pristine, painted a deep crimson with a texture resembling filigree layered beneath. Hardwood floors the color of ash guide the way into the abyss. I take a deep breath, realizing it's the first breath since I found myself here. With that, I know exactly where I am; I've been here before, countless times, and each times its different.

The unnatural light follows me as I move further down the hall. Doors begin to appear to my left and right, spaced evenly six or seven steps apart, extraordinarily nondescript, flat wood resembling the soot and ash of the floors. Searching as I pass each one for some defining characteristic, some distinctive flare to spark interest in what lay beyond. As I passed more and more doors, each identicle to the last, I realized some drew my focus, instilled a longing within me for the briefest moment. Others would ignite a flash of rage or jealousy, some terrified me beyond measure untill I was passed. Still more interesting were the doors that seemed to evade my gaze, my eyes gliding past them as if they were insubstantial, a figment. Disinterest, apathy, detachment, lassitude, passivity, one after another they came and their influence weighed on me.

I could just stop walking but even awash in this torrent of emotions, one stronger still, rooted deep within drove me on. It just so happened to be the very next door. Curiosity loomed in front of me, a perfect replica of each door before, yet nothing the same. The patterns of the grain, the subtle changes in the dark gray to light, nothing had ever seemed so interesting. Unable to resist I gripped the captivatingly ordinary doorknob and let myself in.

To describe the room beyond the door with any semblance of specificity would be impossible as it is for me alone. That and the fact that the room lacked anything resembling distinction. As I stepped inside the door I found myself not in a room, but in wonder. At first there were walls, a floor, and a ceiling because my expectaions demanded such, a door leads to a room, obviously. But to compare this to a room would be equal to comaparing the Sistine Chapel to a sketch on a napkin. The ceiling that wasn't a ceiling sometimes, but was other times, was made of both the day and nightime sky, coelescing before my eyes to become Van Gogh's Starry night, shifting into the canvas of a zeppelin floating through an unfamiliar sky with a rippling sensation of looking down at the bottom of a crystal clear lake.

The walls that were sometimes there and sometimes not changed between a myriad of images of landscape both familiar, and not. A clipper ship on an ocean wave, capsizing, the ship rolls, enveloped by the crushing water, shifts into a rolling meadow of grass covered hills billowing as would a sail in the wind, shifting into a tempestuous hurricane in the atmosphere of some cyan tinted alien planet.

The floor shifted from white sand, to clear water, to stepping stones suspended over bulbous clouds, to a nauseating birds eye view of the naked earth miles below me. The entire room constantly shifting, changing, living, with no apparent meaning or relevance in the least, a constant torrent of overwhelming sensory stimulus. The only constant was a slender stone pedestal in the center of the "room" topped by a frameless mirror seemingly suspended above the pedestal but somehow held in place. As I approached the mirror I was nervous, would my perception of myself change as often and seemingly at random as my surroundings? But when I approached I saw only myself, staring intently at the only other unchanging thing in the "room." In the reflection I saw things behind me, people, places, buildings, I turned to look behind me only to find the ash colored door frameless against an everchanging wall. When I looked back to the mirror the images in the background were still there but changing themselves. I saw entire cities, marvels of technology, art, shelves upon shelves of books, mechanical innovations, government capitals; I saw all the facets of our society in the mirror and then everything was gone.

I had awakened from my reverie, finally found after once again being lost in the labrynth of my thoughts. It happens often of late, but never with such power. Considering what I had seen, what it could have meant, it came to me. Everything we are, all that we have achieved, everything we consider solid, real, tangible, and secure are all built on a foundation of imagination. Where imagination meets ambition innovation springs, nothing we have would be possible without someones head, at some point, being in the clouds. And we consider someone being "down to earth" a good thing... Imagine that.