Awake and anxious in the early hours of the morning you suffer the unrelenting skittering of thoughts until after a long enough time the process begins to tire and a wave of sweet detachment washes over you, dissolving the skeleton dance of thought and letting you return to sleep. Many explanations could be given for this phenomenon, but in the way it is experienced there are certain constant features. The anxious thoughts have a rapid high-pitched a dry quality about them and seem to be confined to a small space at the front of your head. Their connections are rigid but not logical, they are existentially thick in that their reality or truth seems unchallengable and they form a highly enclosed system. The anxiety felt is strongly coloured with primal fears of death, decay, abandonment and powerlessness. The other thought which finally resolves them comes as it were from outside, from a much larger space behind the head, but it is imbued with a strong sense of self. While the anxious thoughts are of 'me' the comforting thought is of 'I'. It seems always to have been there, but unrecognised and unrecognisable before the point when it entered the field of awareness. It seems to literally dissolve the anxious thoughts, which break down into their constituents as if, no longer able to hold you trapped within them, they cannot hold together. The obvious image is of the child whose nocturnal fears are soothed away by a parent to whom it is at last able to entrust the wild sense of self that it was too weak to control. It is tempting to use a word like grace, but there is no Other involved here, the parent thought is what you are in a mode which overpowers and opens the constricted and frightened child form. These are shifts within consciousness, like a change of key, and behind them is a sense of latent powers and of the mysterious coexistence of different centres of consciousness.