She was medically sedated and yet she was very conscious in her dreamless state. She was floating again, as she’d been in Washington Square Park. She was rootless, drifting, no point of orientation, only darkness. The image was in her mind, not in her eyes, but Caitlin knew that she was not dreaming. She was not hallucinating from whatever drug was pulsing through her veins because there was a solid realism to what she did see. It was a ring of light. It didn’t grow, it simply appeared, like a lightning bolt that erupted but did not fade. Yet the more she looked at it, she could see that it was not simply a ring: it was more like an ouroboros, a tail-devouring snake. Present in countless cultures, interpreted and reinterpreted in classic psychotherapy, a true human archetype. Why is it here, in my mind? She tried to ask it, but the serpentine form did not want to be accessed. The circle just floated in its own soupy white light, set against the blackness, unable to be addressed or touched . . .
