Did you ever hear one of those little electric timers they use at Starbucks? I’m not sure what they’re for — some drinks require precise timing, I suppose. I was meeting some friends at a Starbucks earlier this evening and I had an experience that I’ve had a few times before — a very odd experinece.

I should note that I used to have an alarm clock that made the exact same chiming sound as one of these Starbucks timers. Not a similar sound — the exact same sound. When I hear that sound, something way down in my brain tells me that it’s time to change my state of consciousness. Specifically, it tells me that I need to wake up. It’s a classic pavlovian response. There must have been many times that I have heard that sound while dreaming and, upon receiving the signal, had the world around me dissolve away to be replaced with the real world.

So when I hear the timer go off at Starbucks, my brain gets the signal to wake up, and there is this moment of expectation that the dreamworld around me is going to disappear. It only lasts for an instant, but it is a profound and disorienting sensation. The world becomes a very unreal place for a moment, and I become frustrated that there is not a real world to wake up to.

Just for a moment, I get a glimpse of another level of reality — a more real level of reality — but of course, this is no “glimpse,” just a sense that that other level is there and that I’m missing out on it. All I know about this other level of reality is that it’s more real than the one I’m in…and that I can’t get there.

And it is a complete illusion, of course.

But maybe it’s more than that, too. I don’t believe that the real world is an illusion and that I need to awaken to some enlightened state of existence. (Well, I don’t entirely believe that.) But I do believe that trying to perceive and understand our world in a new way — to get to the “next level,” if only metaphorically –is a huge part of the journey we’re all on. And it’s good to be reminded of that, even by a cheap electronic timer.