In the beginning was light and sound.

The light came in waves of intensity; brighter, less bright, brighter, less bright.  It was not like two settings on a switch, bright and not bright.  Rather, the intensity occurred on a continuum, a spectrum; brighter, less bright, brighter, less bright.  I realize now that its source might have been  incandescent lights.

Did the intensity of the light vary or did my perception of the light vary?  I assume that I saw it from behind closed eyes.  Or were they open, but I had no idea what I was seeing except that it was light?

Then, there was the sound. The sound also came in waves; louder, less loud, louder, less loud.  It was not so loud that it hurt my ears, but it was loud enough to be, with the light, all that there was in the world.

Were they synchronized in some way, louder with brighter or the other way?  Maybe.  I don’t remember. What I do remember is, that was my entire world, waves of light and waves of sound.

Was it a good world?  No.  The good world seemed to be missing, creating a hole, a gap, a void, yearning and then a despair that shaped my life in some way, with great intensity in my youth, and less as I have aged.

In some ways, it is still with me today, not like an old friend, but like something in a class of somethings that I don’t want to happen to others.

Which of my negative characteristics might I attribute to the hole?  Should I blame the hole for what I have not accomplished, or should I credit the hole for what I did accomplish, including driving me to tell this story?

My experience of waves of light and sound began as early as I can remember in nightly dreams and continued until I was 18 years old.  When I was 15 or 16 years old, I realized that I was, in a strange way, attuned to the sounds of electric motors.  When I heard one, I would notice the pitch, the rhythm, varying intensity of the sound, and harmonics around the pitch.

The dreams were not full on nightmares, but they were unpleasant. Dreams, especially those experienced as nightmares, can recreate unresolved traumatic events.  Troubled by them, I decided to see a psychotherapist at college.  In conversation with him, I remembered that I had been told that I was in an incubator for my first days of life.

Although common wisdom had it that we don’t remember our earliest days, weeks, and months of life, I thought that I had finally figured out what my dreams were about.  After that realization, the dreams stopped.

I imagined that I was alone in the incubator, not held, not caressed, not adored, not swaddled, alone and lonely, not like a grown person who knows how to sooth and comfort himself, but a just-born human, with no self, no skills, no experience of being loved.  To paraphrase Coleridge, I was alone, alone, all all alone, alone in the wide wide world.

Saying that I had an existential crisis is an insufficient description.  I didn’t yet have a self to have a crisis.  I was a crisis, and a crisis was all that I was.  Researchers say that abandoned babies and children complain loudly for a while, and then fall silent as they give up.  What might I have given up on?  What has my discomfort driven me to accomplish?