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I dream of adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Not often nor in any great detail, ATP (a high energy macromolecule essential to every living thing on the planet because it is our “energy currency”) winds its way through my dreams like a three-stranded woven cord, sometimes just itself on a dark background of a nearly empty dream and sometimes it comes across the stage of a dream in progress, taking the shape of something else. Last time it was a large black cat, a panther I suppose, from its size and disposition. When something like that happens, some intrusion of image or content, I stop staring at the dream unfolding and I look in surprise—this time at the molecule/cat unwinding itself across the field of my dream vision. I know in the dream it is ATP and at the same time it is a cat and the surprise of that wakes me in the dream to the fact that I am dreaming.

This last dream was a fairy story come into my head to play. I watched from the sidelines, I felt much like I do when watching an old medieval-style play being re-enacted outside at some summer festival or another. I feel a kind of wary delight, enjoying the colour and sound, the freedom of the sun and air and the simple fun of watching people act silly. The wariness, I think, comes from the knowledge of how easily human behaviour can shift from a group to a mob, and knowing that somewhere circulating among the people are those who would hurt another for a few dollars or a few moments of pleasure and perhaps it is that constant chary knowledge that causes the ATP in my dreams to transform into cats instead of, say, butterflies.

In this dream, the play I was watching from the edge of the field was at first a single character (as it turns out the only human character), a witch, costumed in traditional black, her head bare and her hair loose. I remember feeling amused about that in the dream, the conflicting messages of mourning and hiding that come with an enveloping cloak attached through the character’s dress with the sexual and mental freedom of unbound hair. The witch was in a state of ennui. She was being serenaded by the moon (another character, and it was the moon, not a human character dressed as the moon), who was concerned to bring the witch out of her funk. The teapot, the size of a Great Dane, was pouring itself, its brew to sustain the witch in her travail. The cow and the spoon were helping out, hovering at this moment in the play. Inside the dream I could almost feel the wringing hands despite the fact that only the witch had hands. And yet, despite all the solicitous attention, for some reason she was still sighing. It was funny really: witty self mockery, as if the world really stopped to care for human languor. Then, in the middle of this performance the cat shaped molecule of ATP stalked across the field. Even stranger, the cast of the play didn’t notice and the cat, its deliberate slide of muscle, took no notice of anyone. It just walked from lower left to upper right. “Oh!” I thought, “this is a dream.”

***

I learned about ATP in a biology class, I think, during the time I was still in school in England. It is possible that I heard of it before, or read of it. One of my favourite books as an eight-year-old was my parents’ copy of Van Nostrums Scientific Encyclopaedia. But if I did read it in there, I don’t remember it.

The thing that caught my attention at first, and probably the reason for its occasional appearance in my dreams, is that I understood from that long ago biology lecture, that ATP is the main energy carrier in every living thing on earth. The knowledge blossomed in my teenaged head as the knowledge of life’s essential unity. I had already read Darwin by that time, and I accepted the basic obvious physical transformative mechanism of adaptation because it seemed clear that a life form must adapt to its environment or die. The world, I knew even then, is so big and powerful that even though the world changes, its changes will always take precedence over the needs and desires of the life it throws up. Once I knew about ATP, knew that in the bacteria that makes me sick, in the salad I eat, in my mother’s dog, and in me the same process makes life possible, makes the energy come from the sun, through the plants, into me and the finally back into the earth, I knew this explained everything.

In Biology class it was if a hot light was burning behind my eyes. I felt it spread out into my legs and arms. I felt my mind shifting, little pieces of thought breaking free, turning and reattaching to new bits. I felt my mind move outward, as if it were a bowl whose edges were alive, turning air into a wider and wider brim, enlarging the hollow of the bowl, allowing me to hold more and more knowing. Despite this deep connection between spiritual experience and knowledge, the bowl of my mind, to keep that metaphor, wasn’t really filled with bits. I didn’t have the sense of a storehouse, and still don’t. Rather it is like a shimmering pattern that gets more and more complicated but not in small incremental steps. It leaps.

I think about my current pattern, the web that holds my thoughts and beliefs, all fundamentally structured around a core piece of perception, an absolute proposition, an experience or a bit of understanding that has come down to me from my culture. I imagine it, sometimes, like a web, like Ariadne’s thread after a thousand-million Ariadne’s have woven themselves through the labyrinth and out into the world of their futures. But it is a living web and not really one of dimensional string. In my mental picture of it, based on the sense of my mind moving, it is like a web of light or heat. When a new fact or experience comes into the system mostly the web just absorbs it, shunts the new idea or knowledge into its already established place. The pattern itself doesn’t reorient. But when some things happen, sometimes as simple as learning about the ubiquitous nature of ATP, or the appearance of a purple glow around a stand of chicory, or the sound of a flock of starlings in early winter eating the cat food I leave on my front porch, the pattern can alter, breaking open old connections and establishing new ones. When this happens it feels much the same as the experience Reader describes as a “near death” mystical experience except, I feel no pain, only the wave of heat, a sense of temporary disorientation, and the sense that I have grown out, extending myself along the strands of the wyrd.

I like to think of the wyrd as the overall pattern that establishes all form and all energy. I try to hold the wyrd in my mind as an empty category and am helped in this difficult endeavour by my experiences of mind-shifts like the one induced by the knowledge of ATP. I think of pattern (the wyrd) as an algorithm and not as a number or arithmetic sign. In the equation 2 + 2 = 4, the numbers and signs are content. The numbers 2 and 4 are something. The arithmetic signs “+” and “=” are something; they are also content. The pattern, though, the wyrd which underlies the equation, the contentless presence/rule that enables the content to act is the relationship between the various content. Sometimes, I think of the wyrd like the iterated algorithm, as a kind of repetitive rule by which energy and matter form and reform. The pattern repeated and repeated creates the universe.

This is just like ATP and the manipulation and movement of energy from one form to another form. The basic processes are the same in all life. What happens is that an electrical-chemical gradient is created (in the mitochondria in animals and in thylakoid disks in the chloroplasts of plants. This gradient accumulates energy (sort of like a battery). This energy is used to manufacture ATP, which is the molecule that provides the energy for, amongst other things, the assembly of proteins, the synthesis of fats, nerve impulses, muscle contractions, the movement of sperm and bioluminescence.

The gradient has a positive pole (P-proton electrochemical potential) and a negative pole (N-electron potential). Movement along the gradient makes it possible for ATP to construct and deconstruct. ATP gives up energy (which is then used by the life-form for biological housekeeping) and becomes ADP: ATP (triphosphate) loses a tail and becomes ADP (diphosphate). ADP gets another tail (the ultimate source of that energy being the sun—via sun for plants and food in animals) and then it is ATP again, and is ready to sacrifice itself and discharge its energy to the bioform. It is the bonds that join those three tails to the adenosine that hold all the energy necessary for living. Although there are differences having to do with our various evolutions (plants for example have two different cycles for the production of ATP, one occurring in the chloroplast which works in concert with one occurring in the mitochondria, while humans do not have chloroplasts), we all have the same basic set up. The electrochemical gradient is an example of this. In chloroplasts the N side is in the stroma (the interior fluid filled matrix of the chloroplast) and the P side is in the thykaloid space (inside the thykaloid). In mitochondria N also occurs in the matrix (the space inside the mitochondria) and the P side is in the intermembrane space. But if you take their construction into consideration—taking the N side as the point of origin—in chloroplasts the gradient moves from the outside in and in mitochondria the gradient moves from the inside out. Animals, in other words, evolved from plants but got things backwards: animals are suyapi plants.

The beautiful thing is that this one rule, this working solution to the problems of distribution of energy, repeated and repeated, makes all life forms from a hyacinth to the world leaders possible. To me, understanding the radical unity of life, says that we are more alike at some levels than our gross differences would lead us to believe. It is this point of similarity, down in the chemistry and physics of our natures that makes me think that sometimes, under the right circumstances, what is often interpreted as a mystical experience may actually be something more simple and more radical. It may be an act of radical empathy.