I woke to the soft pull of sheets and nothing else—not even my name. For a moment, there was only touch: fabric against skin, the quiet weight of my own limbs, the dim geometry of a body arranged in a bed. Many people know a milder version of this—those brief seconds of fog when you surface from deep sleep and your mind hasn’t quite “booted up” yet, a phenomenon often called sleep inertia.

But this wasn’t the usual haze. This was a clean erasure. I would estimate it took a full minute to answer the simplest questions—Who am I? Where am I?—a seemingly eternal span in which to explore the space of being nothing and nowhere. My wife wasn’t in bed; her departure likely roused me, yet I didn’t miss her at first because her had no meaning. The initial grogginess fell away, and what remained was not clarity, exactly, but a stark, quiet awareness with no story attached. I knew I was in a bed. I could feel the sheets. And beyond that: blank.

I couldn’t place the room. I couldn’t locate myself on any map, in any life. I had no awareness of my name, no context, no thread of identity to follow—no profession, no history, no family, no internal dossier to consult. Just awareness, hovering.

Image by ChatGPT, OpenAI

Once it became clear the answers weren’t forthcoming, a curious thing happened: I didn’t panic, as you might expect. Just a calm, blank neutrality. Nor did I push the issue, forcing my mind to produce an explanation. I simply resigned myself to the fact that I knew nothing beyond the bare spatial awareness of being a body in a bed. I don’t recall hearing anything, and we keep our bedroom exceedingly dark, so there was nothing to see. With nothing to taste or smell, that left only touch—and even that was mostly proprioception, the faint sense of where my body was in relation to itself.

Even within that sensory deprivation, my awareness was unmistakably online. I was thinking, and those thoughts were couched in language. In retrospect, I’m not sure whether I was fully awake. It’s possible I was lucid dreaming—conscious within a dream state, able to think clearly while inhabiting an alternate reality. Whatever the mechanics, the experience is the point: a state of amnesia suffused my being, and I wasn’t terribly attached to remembering. I knew, even then, that the questions had definite answers, and yet I felt no urgency to retrieve them.

I stayed there—unmoored, a blank canvas—for what felt like a very long time, until curiosity got the better of me. My thoughts shifted to wondering who I had been just moments before forgetting. I leaned into the puzzle, willing myself to remember something, anything. Yet my identity eluded me. I could reach inward and find no handhold, no proper noun, no familiar face, no memory with enough weight to pull me back into myself.

So I tried a different doorway: Where am I? My rational mind became obliquely aware of something called the United States, and that I likely lived in one of its states. I began running through a list that I had a vague association to, checking them off one by one—New Jersey, Oregon—each word a dull bell that didn’t ring. And then: Wisconsin.

The moment I thought the word, something inside me clicked. It was as if a long-locked cabinet swung open and the contents spilled out all at once—light flooding a space that had been sealed for years.

Then, in reverse, my mind traveled from the thought-form United States to Wisconsin, then narrowed to East Troy, and finally arrived at bedroom—our bedroom. With that anchor in place, the rest returned: my name, my work, my family, and the fact that I was alone in bed. I shifted slightly, and the remaining pieces of bodily awareness snapped into place. Once again, I knew who I was and where I was…but were those things truly, quintessentially me?

The truth is, I was completely at ease without answers—perfectly content to be nothing and nowhere. If I don’t require ego identification to be consciously aware, then who is the “I” behind the labels, conditioning, memories, and sensations? Who—or what—is the entity doing the experiencing?

I don’t have a mature answer. But when I juxtapose this with similar states of being experienced during deep mediative states, I can say this much: there is an awareness beyond all those things, and that awareness seems remarkably free of hangups—without judgment, without anxiety, and, humorously enough, without an existential crisis. It doesn’t need to defend a story because no story exists. It simply witnesses—and that, somehow, is enough.