Q&A Your first "encounter" with nothing?

On May 29, 2007, at 4:17 PM, adam watson wrote:

Quick question,
In an earlier blog, you spoke of a reoccurring dream that you had as a child in the which you found yourself in a brown mesh tube (I'm paraphrasing) and you reached out and found nothing. Was this your first encounter with nothing, or had you found nothing before either in consciousness or unconsciousness?

Thanks,
Amateur Psychiatrist
A.W.

To which I replied:

Very good question. In unconsciousness and non-existence I found nothing for all eternity prior to my conception (which I don't like to think about). My first encounter with nothing in conscious memory was (when I regained consciousness) following an extended period of staring in the direction of the wall and seeing only the purest brightest white. It wasn't white, but that is the only way to describe it as anything. It didn't take long to realize that the best way to describe "it" was not to describe "it" as anything at all, because there was really no vision, thought or reality in my comprehension until the moment had passed.

I still don't know how it happened, and I never tried to re-create the circumstances that brought my thoughts to nothing that day. As for infinity and nothing, they are opposite sides of neither a coin nor the space that coin may have once occupied. And being that I always thought of life in infinite terms until that day (being frustrated by my eternal non-existence prior to the chance meeting of two gametes which heralded my emergence as a viable entity on the world scene), this knowledge of nothing new made the comprehension of my eternal nothingness prior to my eternal existence (in some form) with an as-yet undefined term of intellect punctuating my two eternities somehow more tolerable.

--Xymyl (KON)