All life is a dream, and dreams are only dreams.

(Pedro Calderón de la Barca)

When I was a child, growing up in Puerto Rico, my mother would say to me, and so would the teachers at school, "boy, you are always in Babia." Sometimes they would shake me by the arm to get me out of that unknown condition. But I used to relapse very easily into that condition during that early stage of my life. And now entering my eighth decade I have to admit that I am having a regression towards that condition. Being “en Babia”, in Spanish means to daydream, to be distracted and enthralled.

Every day that passes now, I am more and more in Babia. I am mesmerized more often, by sunrises, the flight of the birds, an old tune, and my daily morning awakening (after so many mornings), as well as the memory of so many dear people that now are gone.

That's why I decided to do two things. First, to define exactly what that this condition is, and second, to find out what those moments in Babia were about, and determine exactly why they attracted me, and why my mind would spontaneously get lost in them without rhyme or reason, and what it experienced.

The first thing was easy. Through a Google search I immediately found, in the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy, the definition of being “en Babia” as "being distracted and oblivious to what it is around." I also found that the expression "being in Babia" is synonymous with being absent and owes its origin to a region in the province of León, Spain, called Babia, where royalty came to spend their vacation periods to distract themselves from the problems of the kingdom. In my case, being in Babia, began to happen in a neighborhood of San Juan, Puerto Rico.

My first moments of being in Babia seem to have been frequent. Actually, I don't know if all the children at that age are in Babia. But I remember as a five-year-old I lived in a permanent awe of things around me. When seeing other children with other families, I asked my mother, "Why am I here with you and I am not that other child with them?"

When I was 11 or 12 years old, I would walk maybe a mile or two to school. And for some reason I did it many times being in Babia. Then I would imagine that my body was some sort of giant robot, and that I was a little man who looked behind its eyes at everything, through a periscope in its head, to observe things as I walked.

Being in Babia is not imagining or thinking, it feels more like an entrance to consciousness, a trance where one becomes alienated from the immediate, even to one's own thoughts, and only perceives being conscious, beyond thinking or emotion, just aware that you are, and that everything is magic and beyond understanding.

The state is remembered later, as a fullness, and one tries to describe it, and think about and remember what happened. And one can give it colors and flavors, but in reality it was just an awareness of awareness. And one cannot control the entering or exiting that state. You enter without realizing it and leave when someone or something suddenly shakes you out of it.

Now, that most of my life has passed, and I am on my way to the next station, I am thinking more and more about these situations because, although they were very brief moments of my journey through life, they offered revelations of being, that go beyond cultural definitions, karmic currents, philosophies, conclusions, ideologies, and beliefs. Beyond my ego identity card.

I realized that being in Babia is glimpsing, at what really looks out from you. I don't know how to describe it or write about it, outside of incomplete metaphors and analogies. When coming back from those undefined Babia states, I tried to understand what happened. Not so much when they happened in my childhood, because then there was a more natural continuity between the Babia and the so-called reality perceived, and I did not stop to try to describe what happened, I was just ecstatic when it happened unintentionally, as an invitation to another dimension, which came to me from nowhere and for no reason.

But as a young adult, I remember an occasion by the sea, when on that state I felt an evolutionary unfolding of images in a superimposed and slow-motion sequence, like a film of a cocoon blooming into a butterfly, and I felt my human form unfold from a compact state through more complex forms and going from a prostrate locomotion to an upright walk. I felt that everything around me was a unified field, that the sea and my tears were part of the same water. It was like an awakening to a state of being that was just being, from a state with multiple definitions of who I am and always wondering who I really am.

Moments of being in Babia occurred under varied circumstances, from being alone in remote places, perhaps conducive to that moment, to occasionally being in the middle of official functions, in conferences, where sometimes a colleague would pull me out, by calling my attention without imagining the Babia state where I was.

In Babia, there are no horizons, no time, no particular points of view, only a conscious existence of existing, where the joy that is perceived has no mediation or conditionality of any kind, where there is no duality. It is just being, without time or dimension. An awareness conscious of itself.

Sometimes I try fruitlessly, from my present, to intertwine and identify the coordinates of those moments, to see if there is a pattern that defines them, a directionality that locates them, a reason for being that explains them, and a way to determine how not to get out of them. But I conclude that it is impossible. It is as if a character, one of those who appear in my dreams, wants to continue being or to understand who is the one who is or was dreaming, after the dream has ended.

In the same way, I suspect that this character, who is now writing these notes and trying to understand, what is that state of being in Babia, is born of that being that exists in Babia, and in that state is where one truly is awake, and that this “me character” and all the others, who appear in the context of life, are all dream characters, a dream of that pure consciousness that sometimes is revealed, when one falls into that state of being in Babia. And dreams, dreams are only dreams.