The Blue Door Incident

I’ve seen the blue door just once.

It was a warm summer night. It had been roughly 36 hours since I last ate anything, but I had cigarettes. In those days, that was enough. I sat cross-legged on the worn mattress that served as a bed, my body a thin slice of electricity. The mattress, covered by the only quilt I owned, sank beneath my weight. The air in the apartment pressed down on me, a physical sensation at odds with the tingling sensations running throughout my body. I closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them, the blue door was in front of me, just inches above the mattress.

A warmth enveloped my head. I stood up slowly, afraid if I moved too fast the door would disappear. It was a pedestrian door, a standard closet model you might see in any living space. The only thing unusual, besides its location, was the striking color blue it was painted. Azure: a middle hue, not so dark as navy, not so light as sapphire. Not a crack in the paint job, not a streak or smear. Still, it was merely a door. Are we ever interested in the door? No, only what lay behind it. I realized there was one more unusual thing about this door: it had no doorknob or handle—not even a mark upon the door to indicate where one might once have been.

Standing now, I stepped off the mattress and looked on the other side. The door looked the same. Azure, no handle, no distinguishing marks. Ok. My body hummed, vibrant with electricity. My veins had become powerlines. Did it matter what side I opened the door from? I had no context with which to approach this question, any more than I did for any question involving the door, since it couldn’t actually be there. That it was there rendered all but the most basic musings moot. I returned to the mattress, reasoning that I should open it from the side that initially faced me. I didn’t know if I had conjured it, but I didn’t know that I had not conjured it either.

I gently placed my hand middle-left on the door and pushed. It swung open.

What I saw was water and sky. The water went in all directions, emerald green and oblique. The sky was clear, light blue, and met the ocean on the horizon. All seemed peaceful and empty. Though I could not prove it, my electrical bones told me there was no life in that sea, and my electrical bones seemed to know more about what was going on than my rational mind, which was at a loss for the whole incident. I stared at the sea for a while, waiting for something further to happen, but nothing did. I leaned through the opening, keeping my knees firmly planted on the bed. The air was a tad cooler through the door, but I had no difficult breathing. In fact, the warmth in my head was spreading down my body, de-buzzing my shell and allowing my breathing, which had been coming in short sharp bursts, to steady.

I thought to touch the water, but kept my hands at my side.

I pulled my head back in and closed my eyes. When I opened them, the door was gone. I’ve not seen it since, though I’ve thought about it on occasion through the ensuing twenty-five years. If you would ask, I would dismiss the whole incident as a hallucination, brought on by too little food and too much warmth (the preceding day had been quite hot, getting close to triple digits.) I accept this explanation, and I know it’s false. False because the nature of reality is far more subjective than we generally allow ourselves to believe, and false because the door was not a lie. Just because I did not and do not understand the door or where it opened to, does not mean it did not open to a truth. The rational explanation allows me to get out of bed in the morning and do things. The rational explanation lets me sleep most, but not all, nights.

Take apart the fear and clean out the arteries. How does an atheist define soul?

Can an atheist have a visionary experience, without ascribing it to a higher power? If the atheist attributes the experience to something unknown, does that something unknown become a higher power? Processes are happening across the universe at this very moment, witnessed by no one. We still do not know what dark matter or dark energy is, even though—at this moment—we are reasonably sure it exists.

It is true that in the preceding two years leading up to the blue door incident, I’d done a fair share of drugs. It is also true that in the year leading up to the blue door incident, I’d gone from an intense crush to having the crush returned to being in a relationship, the first truly serious one of my life. Love is a drug, as the saying goes. Love alters perception. Triggers chemical reactions.

When the blue door incident occurred, I was in the midst of a two-month window where I was largely drug free. I was stone broke, jobless, living alone and in a long-distance relationship (my girlfriend some 200 miles away, and I had no transport or money, visits were rare.) I wrote a lot: letters, poems, stories. I read a lot: fiction, music journalism, philosophy, religion. I walked a lot: miles every day, around the decaying, empty and sometimes sketchy parts of Spokane. I had no phone. I was the most invisible I would ever be, the most alone, and perhaps the most free. Everything was worthy of exploration.

At the time I could not call myself an atheist; I remember deciding firmly I was an agnostic after reading one particularly passionate passage in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot that set my heart racing, bursting with joy at the wonder of it all. An agnostic didn’t have to be noncommittal, I thought—simply open to ideas. Certainly to evidence, should one ever manage to prove the unknowable. I didn’t want to risk giving up the idea of ecstatic experience. I also was beginning to falter in my belief that I would not live long, and in those moments when the light managed to shine through the cracks, I wanted to perhaps hedge my bets a little.

But the blue door was not an ecstatic vision.

It was just a door, azure blue, that appeared slightly above my mattress and opened to an empty world. Did it exist in “this” world? I was the only one in my apartment; there would never be any independent verification. I didn’t want to accept it on faith, yet I seemingly had no choice. Accept or deny. It happened, or it did not. I came to realize over the following years that this is a dangerously limiting perspective.

It should perhaps be mentioned that I was only a few months removed from a drug-triggered nervous breakdown and so my definition of reality was a bit shaky. Not in terms of seeing things that weren’t there, or talking to ghosts, or anything so melodramatic. What gripped me was the fear that such a state as I’d been in during my breakdown could randomly happen again. What if my heart is beating too fast and I can’t control it? What if I can’t talk, my mouth gluepaste and sewn shut with wire? What if I die? What if I think I’m dead but I’m not? Etc. In this alone, empty time, I was doing my best to confront the fear. To acknowledge it, even respect it, but not let it have control. Intuitively I grasped that if I did not do so, I would never build a life for myself or believe myself to be worthy of love.

During the blue door incident, I surprisingly never felt fear. The tingling, electric feeling was not one of anxiety—my body was simply extremely awake. I felt curious and perhaps a bit detached. When I opened the door and saw the water and sky, I felt I knew the place, and this allowed me to remain calm. I didn’t know the place, of course, not in this world anyway (dreams are a whole different matter, I can’t claim I haven’t glimpsed it while traveling those strange pathways) but I felt open, open to the very emptiness of the place. An emptiness that was somehow…warm. Like my soul had been wrapped in a blanket. My mind, for once, was quiet. Not running in a million directions, not full of endless buzz. It’s similar to the state I enter when the writing and creativity is flowing and I cease to exist for a bit. This was different, though. I was not channeling anything, I was not creating anything. I was observing, but I could not be sure if it was with my conscious mind.

I’ve never been a practitioner of meditation, though I am attracted to the idea in abstract. It could be argued that I was in some sense meditating that evening when the blue door appeared, just like it could be argued I was already in an altered state, depending how liberal one’s definition of those terms are. I certainly associate that strange empty warmth with such a state. If that is what death feels like, then death is not something to be feared (and fear loses its value; don’t all our fears boil down to death, either ours or someone important to us?) Of course, death is the process of vacating the body; physical sensations like warmth presumably cease immediately. Could it be some part of my soul (for lack of a better term) perceiving something my conscious mind has no framework for, and as such my conscious mind reached for the images and sensations that best translated this perception? A bit of mind/soul teamwork?

Ah, but now we are into metaphysics and treading dangerously close to New Age pablum. I’ve never owned a crystal, I’ve never chanted, I’ve never done woo stuff because I’m simply not drawn to it. An atheist can excuse it if they want (we are just talking in metaphors, love, good ol’ metaphors—we don’t literally believe it) but that’s not something I’ve been comfortable with on a personal level. The blue door was real, even if it wasn’t. It was a rehearsal for death, it was outside the scope of death. If I could untangle that paradigm…well, I worry that my conscious mind would break. And that is a fear I’ve never quite shaken, no matter how much I think I’ve made my peace with my breakdown.

I kiss the sun in fear. I never learned to swim.

I have an irrational fear of drowning (though I quibble with the term “irrational”; I mean, if I fall into the ocean I’m fucked.) I’ve had many dreams of drowning, it has frequently figured prominently in my creative output, and I can’t peer over the railing’s edge on the ferry. I can’t even get close to it. At the same time, I am fascinated by shipwrecks, by stories of drowning, and by deep bodies of water (strangely, I’m not obsessed with fast moving bodies of waters like narrow rivers or waterfalls.) Behind the blue door lay endless water: my fear and my obsession. I perceived a world I could not possibly exist in. It would be romantic to say I conquered my fear, but nothing changed. The water was a metaphor, then? Well, I can’t discount that theory, but I don’t fully buy it either. It was there. It was a definition of reality.

Take apart the fear and clean out the arteries. Changing the diet doesn’t guarantee clean machinery going forward. We will all die. We all hope to meet death with a measure of grace. This is not enough, to wait for death. We have a lifetime to practice grace and kindness.

And that is the one conscious change this incident triggered in me. Ever since, I do my best to greet each day with a measure of grace and say goodbye to each day with thanks. I do not always meet this challenge, and in fact my percentage is much lower than it should be. But I strive for it, every day. Atheists don’t pray, but we do talk to the cosmos. Some of us do so quite frequently.

I will never untangle the blue door incident. I don’t think it is meant to be untangled, at least not on a conscious level. None of us—not a single one of us—has an iron grip on the definition of reality. We all create our definition, we all create our worlds, and we could all stand to be kinder to our fellow travelers. A little warmth goes a long way.