WHAT WAS THAT?! | By Doug Koempel

I’VE OFTEN THOUGHT of the human body as a kind of vehicle—an unfathomably complex machine that we pilot through life like novice, underqualified drivers. We go from point A to point B, mostly unaware of the miracle beneath the hood: billions of cells, miles of nerves and a brain so mysterious we still argue about what, exactly, it’s even doing.

And yet, every now and then, something in the system shudders. A sensation flickers through. A strange unease, a moment of detachment, a vague “I feel weird”—and suddenly we realize: we’re not entirely in the driver’s seat.

It’s tempting to rush to Google, a doctor or that one friend who took a semester of psychology and now thinks they’re Jung. “What does it mean?!” But more often than not, you won’t get a satisfying answer. There may be no diagnosis. No pinprick to draw blood. No definitive scan. Just a sense that, for a moment, your conscious mind caught a glitch in the matrix.

And this is where things get interesting.

See, we’re good at diagnosing what we can see or measure—bones, blood pressure, brainwaves. But we’re far less equipped to handle subjective experience. Especially the kind that doesn’t conveniently fit into language. “I feel weird.” “Weird how?” “I don’t know. Just… off.”

We forget that our body’s systems don’t just transmit data—they also filter, interpret and color it. Your nerves and brain don’t simply relay pain or light or sound—they decide what it feels like. That’s why a sound can make you cry or a color can give you contentment.

Which brings us to consciousness—the ultimate wildcard.

We still don’t really know what it is. We don’t know where it is. And we certainly don’t know why it sometimes decides to produce inexplicable states of being, dissociative flashes or what we might call little “perceptual hiccups.” Are these quirks of biology? Electrical misfires? Echoes from the subconscious? Or are they evidence of something even deeper?

Because—and here’s the real curveball—sometimes you don’t even need a functioning body to have a fully immersive experience.

Enter dreams.

In dreams, the body is effectively offline. Eyes closed. Hearing dulled. Tactile feedback at a minimum. And yet, within that sensory vacuum, we perceive in full color and full sound. We run, fall, fly, kiss, scream. We invent cities, suffer heartbreaks, have conversations that feel truer than the ones we stumble through in waking life.

Who’s driving the car then?

Dreams are a blunt reminder that perception isn’t confined to the body. The machinery may help us navigate waking life, but there’s something in us—consciousness—that continues generating reality even in the absence of incoming data.

Maybe those odd waking sensations—the momentary dislocations, the slippery weirdness—are just the tip of the iceberg. Tiny overlaps between waking logic and dream logic. Fleeting reminders that we’re not just flesh and circuits.

So perhaps we are not only passengers in a body. Perhaps we’re also passengers in a mind that’s bigger than we realize—one that keeps generating experience, meaning, even reality, long after the lights have gone out and the sensors have gone quiet.

To live with that mystery is not a failure of science. It’s a feature of being human.

So the next time your internal “check engine” light flickers on with no clear explanation, take a breath. The vehicle might not be broken or malfunctioning—just wonderfully mysterious.