I wrench my attention back into the blackness, to the grave of the dying fountain. An awesome force is condensing there. I don’t understand it entirely, but I know that what is forming there is the very substance of my life.
Then, propelled by an unfathomable energy, a tendril composed from the well water itself [your pipe idea] heaves upright through the darkness.
It’s presence is magisterial, and its vigor absolute. I don’t see it. It isn’t an image. It is an experiential meta-form: I feel my whole life tearing through its veins, it flexes my experiences in its muscles and its skin is composed of the moods and textures of my past.
It shifts shape and grows with fierce power and precision, redrawing vast swaths of both my recent and childhood memories every time it billows outward. The exactitude of its violence is sublime. The growth pangs of its ecstasy threaten to burst my skin.
....
From here I find myself pulsing through the veins of the tendril, hurled through various channels of my life’s experience with a speed exceeding some definite but unknown limit. But I never feel confined to just one channel. [your network of piped visions increasing in speed idea] It’s as though I am looking into a single facet of a prism, with my immediate experience playing out in the largest and most central frame of the kaleidoscopic scene but with innumerable other experiences of my life felt flitting like flames around its edges. Everything is so present, so clear. [your idea of extreme crystal clarity and realism]
Like before, when the memory of falling and gripping the root on the island during a summer kayaking trip was followed subsequently by falling from my skis and into snow, the channels of my memories remain networked through associationistic nodes.
A string of prayer flags snapping in the wind over a Nepalese mountain expanse becomes psychedelically spliced into the cable line of a tramcar leading down from Rio de Janeiro’s Sugar Loaf peak. A tunnel maze beneath the floor at Chuck E. Cheese’s I crawled through during a childhood friend’s birthday party opens out into a blizzard-battered night framed by the mouth of a snow tunnel dug out at age nine along my parent’s street.
I travel between waking life memories and memories of dreams [your idea of dreams flowing through the network] thought forgotten forever with equal facility. In this world constructed of life experiences and held together by associations, dreams bear loads as heavy as those from waking life.
And I’ve dreamt of this moment, this experience itself, too, vaguely even as a child. I’ve harbored a desire only brushed against at the far edge of those callow dreams, which I thought impossible to sate: to clothe myself in any texture of experience at will, to sink into its tangible moods, and to tumble through life’s wardrobe naked and laughing. A ridiculous dream, but here I am triumphant in spite of it, laughing.