A Diary Entry/Short Story called "Out of Body Experience on the Train Home"

Out of Body Experience on Train Home

I had a weird train trip home today. It all seemed very slow and serene and, like, liquid. At one point, as I was reading a chapter of The Justice Game titled “Diana in the Dock: Does Privacy Matter?” and trying (indeed really struggling) to think about what Geoffrey Robertson was saying about freedom of speech and privacy and how they in a certain way compete and how freedom of speech seems to be something people in the modern era are constantly fighting for but privacy is kind of marginalised and how he personally thinks this is bad and that they both deserve equal respect, which I thought seemed I dunno kinda facile and vague, I must have fallen asleep. I can recall I had this really intense dream involving paper and hands (I think) and a really loud, aggressive sound. It was over quickly I think, maybe 30 seconds. When I woke up, for about a second I had no idea who I was or where I was or even what it would mean to have no idea who I was or where I was. I think I was just a body.

I only know this because immediately after I snapped into consciousness. I suddenly realised that the noise in the dream was the sound of the train bumpily going over the tracks and that the noise of the train travelling as I sat there wasn’t as loud as it was in the dream. I wondered whether the extra loudness was real coz we were going over an extra bumpy bit of track or something or whether my brain had just increased it for the dream. This all happened very quickly, of course. Simultaneously, I knew that a second had just gone by but I sort of hadn’t been in it: I felt that I had just experienced something profound. Non-existence? Simultaneously I tried to recall the dream, which I felt like I remembered, but as I did I realised I remembered only a vague impression. Simultaneously, I saw that I was on a train that was regularly, languidly rising and falling and that I was looking at the back of strangers’ heads nodding with the rhythm of the train and that that was weird. Simultaneously, I saw that there was sunlight streaming in from the right and that it was striking my school uniform-wearing body and that a black blazer was behind my head and that I was resting my black, scuffed shoes on my black bag which has a hole in the corner and

Suddenly, one part of my brain forced me to remember myself. I’m Tom Aitken, I’m 17, I’m in 6^th Form at Sydney Grammar School, I’m travelling home on the train earlier than normal because I had a period 7 free which was because it was an A day, and I have heaps of homework to do, so much fucking homework, and I must be really tired to fall asleep on the train and maybe I should try and get to bed early tonight except I probably won’t, maybe I should take a day off school tomorrow except that’s probably a bad idea and there is also the Term II concert, I’m doing it for guitar and sax, I feel like I should go to school for that, and I recently acquired a sty under my left eye and, wow, I almost forgot, I have heaps of social anxieties and things to worry about in life, and maybe I should write about this but no I shouldn’t.

Everything returned.