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do not sleep.
I die.
No. I sleep, but fail to rest.
Every night I go to bed. There is a time of darkness, like the troubled twin of death. But the coming of the dawn does not revive me from the dead. I am not Ra, and linger still.
This is not a normal sleeplessness, the kind that vain and would-be insomniacs brag about amongst themselves. As if a guilty conscious or physical malady could constitute some sort of virtue. This is a sleeplessness that only sees itself in sleep.
The doctors said there was nothing physiologically wrong with me: the problem must be psychosomatic. The psychiatrists tell me that there’s nothing psychologically wrong with me that sleep deprivation cannot account for: the problem must be physiological.
At first I told myself that I would not be slowed down by this strange impediment. There were things that needed to be done. If I was not running at maximum capacity at least I was not forgetting things like most insomniacs, even if I had begun to have difficulty in distinguishing between the days. It became a constant embarrassment when people would talk to me about abstractions like yesterday and the day before, but I could only process them as vaguely contemporaneous aspects of today.
My colleagues begin to wonder if I’m all right. They ask questions: Have I been satisfied with work? How is my family life? Maybe it’s a good time to take those few weeks off. They are being polite, not practical, and I ignore them. Yet my days grow shorter. First it was eight hours, then nine, then ten. . . .
One morning when I awoke from that thing-which-was-not-sleep I decided to simply stay in bed, reasoning that perhaps I should let my internal clock tell the time for me.
It was then that I had a most singular visitation. A woman was sitting on the foot of my bed; her back against the wall, her legs outstretched the width of the mattress. She was indistinct. A gossamer veil, sparkling silver, hung about her and only hinted, here and there, at features. But her presence filled me with comfort. All my senses seemed softer, more welcoming. As if responding to my desires she appeared closer to me then, holding my head, her skin and silk so smooth against my tired face. I did not want to move, I did not want to break that feeling of peace, even if it was not sleep. And I held onto the stillness until she disappeared.
I decided that it must have been a dream, for in the end I woke up.
The interlude helped nothing though; worse, my strange and tenuous grip on memory began to fade. That, more than pain and fatigue, was the most unforgivable symptom. Time flattens with lack of sleep. The past, a day ago to those who have forgotten wisely, becomes buried in millennia, the now, a swift anarchy of separate sensations. What had once been a sort of stretching and extension of my recollection reached its maximum tension and became a blurring of events. Increasingly, I couldn’t properly place anything in my past. Things were either present or simply somewhere else. Sometimes, though, if I stepped back, I could make out large defining features, as if my history had become an impressionist painting whose dots and dabs wanted only some distance to show its beauty.
My colleagues were seriously beginning to wonder about me. My mother was insisting that I would never find a wife if I kept on being so difficult the way that I was. And if I never found a wife I could never have children, and without children, well, of course there would be no question about grandchildren. . . . Worse, work was considering letting me go for medical reasons. Letting go, like when someone takes an unwanted though once-loved pet into the woods to lose both animal and guilt in one well placed accident.
No. I needed to take the initiative.
It was becoming increasingly apparent that the medical system was something fundamentally outside of this experience. The drugs they gave only served to shorten my time awake, to make me a fraction more productive, but never did they helped me push through the steadily growing daze. I decided to try and formulate a more inward experiment: I would videotape my sleeping self, be as alert as possible both at the moment of falling asleep and waking. I still remembered what normal was, and from that measure I could consider anything else that was to follow.
Night came.
I made my preparations. The clock on my bed read nine to ten when I set my head against the pillow. I tried to clear my thoughts, to let the images and words that formed my daily monolog slip away into a controlled fall of unconsciousness.
It was growing so tiresome, the steady beat of the clock, the slight hum emitted by all modern rooms everywhere and at all times. I felt myself submerge slightly as if the top of my bed was covered in a thin layer of some viscous, yet inviting, fluid.
It seemed to me that my observations were being made more difficult by the fact that I could not say for certain if I was still in my bed, or was walking around the room. I chided myself and tried to focus on where I was, but the issue became further confounded by the disembodied arm which held my head firmly in place. Well, at least I now knew where I was. But why hadn’t I thought to check for that before I went to bed? Careless. If it held me down too long I might never be able to rise again.
What a comfortable catastrophe. . . .
I tried to get up but the presence of the hand prevented me from moving. It was this realization that finally kindled the light of panic in me. I got up and moved out to the hallway. But I was still in the bed! I tried to will my body to move and in the end I surrendered to a desperate thrashing of my limbs, a thrashing which did not coincide with motion. At least I had managed to make it to my bathroom. No, no, I was still in bed. Exerting every effort still left to me, I try to will my indolent body off of its strange prison.
Then something happened that I can only describe as a quake in the material of reality: my abortive motions were dramatically altering the objects in the room.
Thrash, the walls were of bamboo. Thrash, the bedside table became a small Corinthian column, the bookshelf, a scarlet curtain. Thrash, the room was a cave. Thrash again, it was a coffin. Thrash, the camera could be of no use now, for it was a gargoyle gripping onto the iron gate that had once been a curtain, and sometime before that a bookshelf.
At least I had managed to get to work on time. My employer pointed disapprovingly at his watch but then ushered me into the office without a word. I would just have to stay late again. Leave it to him to notice that I was late when there was a fleshless bull eating out of the waste-paper basket besides his secretary’s desk. What would it do to the carpet when it had finished eating? In the end I simply had to trust that my employer had thought about this in advance and would take the appropriate steps. But would he notice I was gone now that I was back in the bed?
Frustration overtakes panic and dispels even the fear of my paralysis. I thrash, and I thrash and I thrash, the room explodes into an epileptic rainbow of scenes and scenarios from an unending spectrum of times and places. I wake up. And submerge. And wake up. And submerge. And finally...
I wake up.
It was ten after ten.
But I do not trust this. Sitting up, I move my body and test the reality around me. Even when inflicting the traditional pinch my skepticism is not satisfied and I sit in the dark for a while longer. Convinced, by boredom if by nothing else, I prepare for the next day before falling back into a more familiar oblivion.
You never truly appreciate the regulating powers that the unconsciousness holds over the conscious mind until you’ve been forced to go without. Each day I grow more giddy, more manic. Friends who once knew me shun me in the streets. I say too much, for you see a lack of sleep sometimes compensates with an abundance of unasked for truth-telling. No one likes others idly daydreaming with their secrets.
One day in this state of ostracism I made the difficult decision to simply stay home. Work had no use for me, nor did my colleagues, and I thought I could use the time to recover.
That afternoon in my bedroom, I was attacked.
Barely remembering what had happened two hours before, I thought I might make myself fresh again with a nap. Napping had not occurred to me, and the bed looked like a very inviting place to inter my tired bones, if only for a time.
Somewhere between sleep and wakefulness the attacker crept into my room. Its first manifestation was to rob me of my sense of place. It became almost impossible to tell if I was moving about, having woken up, had flown out the window or was still trapped in the bed. At first this proved merely frustrating, but its alternative was worse: There was someone in the room and the hand was holding me down. I couldn’t move and was utterly mute.
There is a specific sensation associated with a presence, even one unseen. It manifests itself as surely as the other senses, and if it is somewhat more nebulous than sight or sound, its effects are equally as immediate, and are just as stubborn in asserting their supremacy.
A fat man was standing at the door. I could not see his face, but his shirt was stripped, either red or blue, sometimes both, and stained with grease. I tried to get up, but once again the disembodied hand held me down. Without moving the fat man was closer. His presence was at the door one moment, then half the distance the next. While in my prone position I still couldn’t see his face, yet I could see under my door, and I heard the voices of people outside. If only I could call to them, to make some noise out of my distress.
There is an electric kettle in my room, black and white and smooth, which suddenly began making the high-pitched whistle of a more traditional appliance. It never whistles, it is self-regulating, and turns off just at the boiling point. As if it were a sign, the fat man’s presence suddenly shifted again.
He was right beside my bed.
I wanted to scream and yell and jump outside of myself. Surely the people by my door should hear something, even if my writhing here only translated into the faintest whimper in the waking world, someone should hear. I tried to thrash, to cause a dream-quake and force myself away.
It is hard to describe the panic that followed. Being unable to move, or even respond, when an enemy force is so close as to touch you. The fat man could reach out his hands, if he wanted. . . .
What he did was worse.
He lodged himself into the back of my skull.
I could feel him there. All of my awareness became concentrated to confront him. It was then that I began to hear noises in a language that no one else has ever heard, sharp, demonic, gibbering, but definitely intelligible to something inhuman within me. It was as if that space in the back of my head were a yawning cave mouth, leading straight into the heart of hell, and I was acting as an eco chamber for all its myriad denizens to cry out from. I still could not move, and feared that I would never move again.
I am not a religious man; the talk of hell is foreign to me. Yet this presence demands a spiritual grammar sufficient to itself; it doesn’t matter what you believe, it makes you believe just enough in the concept of an immortal soul for you to fear for your own. Just at the threshold, when madness and sanity were losing their contrariety, the voices fell away, to be replaced by a BBC radio broadcaster.
She was introducing a classical piece from inside my head. I tried to hold onto this music, for I was sure that no one in the world had heard it before, and it came as a deliverance. When it ended, it ended, and could not follow me to the waking world. Now it would never be remembered.
When the music stopped I succeeded in getting out of bed. Again, I was cautious at first, moving slowly around the room, expecting any second to be mysteriously pulled back by some unknown force. But no, after several long minutes I decided that this was truly what it appeared to be. A look outside confirmed this. There had been no one conversing outside my door. Even my hope had been unreal.
Strand by strand I try to untangle the days from the dreams, but it only grows worse after this. The norm while asleep becomes a sickness in its absence: Awake, I hallucinate, and see corner creatures at the edges of my vision. Little things at first, but more often than not it’s faceless men facing me, standing too close, then vanishing. Out of a morbid sense of amusement I memorized the monsters.
Once there was a great cowled mass. I call it a mass, for it was neither of human shape nor dimension, but more closely resembled a veiled beetle. Fold after fold of black rolled down its back. It stood by my bedside, staring out the window as if unconcerned with me.
I was an insect to it.
Last week I saw a strange man of stretched flesh spread about him like wings. He was hovering, noiseless, motionless, turning effortlessly to scrutinize me. His translucent flesh made him shine pink through the shafts of light in the stairway. Naked and sexless, I chose to call him a man. He only visits me in stairways, or other places with sharp inclines touched by light.
Even the usual is unsafe. My ironing board won’t stop warping into a writhing and wrapped mummy, with elongated limbs and only a lump where its head should be. I’ve locked it in the closet. At least there was something I could do about that one. No, if it were to come alive that would do nothing, but for my peace of mind I found myself performing a growing number of empty rituals like this one. Their variety is very often based on human beings, sometimes animals, but nothing is ever truly safe from their transformations.
And each day it takes them a little longer to fade and be replaced by what they are supposed to be.
I have to wonder if in a dreamless night we practice being dead. For the more I’ve been sleeping my days away, the less and less time I can recall, and what I can recall is only filled with nightmares. Indeed, the cycle of nightmare and wakefulness now flows each into the other in an ever-quickening spiral, until in the end they are exposed, indistinguishable.
I try to find some rock of reality upon which I can anchor the rest of my life. Yet I begin to question if all logic isn’t circular, having to be a closed system to be a system at all. The only other option is to be driven back into the sensible madness of our dreams, and those too have been lost to me now. Reality cannot be used to prove reality, nor is it simply the security of opposites. The unreal proves reality insofar as it resembles it.
As if to demonstrate this, one day, or one night, I have a proper nightmare:
There is nothing here but stone, stone bridge and mist-covered canyon. The world ceases to be outside of these simple props. I am not here. There is a child here, a little girl, standing on the stone bridge that was not hewn, but grown from some seeds of my subconscious. Impossibly, a boat approaches. It’s coming down the hazy way and stops at the bridge. There is a woman in it. She wears a dress. She is beautiful, but obviously dead. There is no voice, but there are words:
“Don’t worry. Don’t worry. I’ll protect you.”
The woman lies down in the boat.
She begins to rot, her dress becoming thinner and thinner as it withers away, until it was no more than a cobweb covering a paper-thin, promise-thin corpse.
The child, unafraid, jumps into the boat, through the boat, into the haze.
And falls to her death.
Waking up, I try to pull the nightmare closer until I can feel the sheets of darkness signifying sleep seeping back into my mind, and return to that minimal landscape of mist and of death.
I jump into the boat, expecting to die, knowing I wouldn’t. I knew the child had fallen to her death, I knew it with a dreaming certainty, and yet just as certainly I was alive, but somewhere else beyond my reckoning.
I had submerged again, that much was certain. Where I emerged was another world. It was obviously domed, and yet I could not see the dome itself. So large was it that it housed its own weather and storm clouds churned inside. Brief arcs of thunder lit up the landscape, now blinding, now falling silent. What passed for ground was a darkened stone, sometimes covered with sand. It could have been a mountain pass in some demon’s pastoral fantasy, save that the landscape was dominated by an all regulating clock tower.
The tower was enormous. I had not seen it at first. Rather, it did not see fit to exist until I had fully taken in the rest of the dreamscape around me. There were people toiling at the tower’s base, moving stones and drawing plans on yellowed parchment. No sooner had I realized this then I was also given insight into the character of these labourers: They were, all of them, people whom I knew.
Mother, father, friends and family, colleagues and half-remembered strangers, all of them toiling on this tower whose clock was counting out, not time, but something else more elusive than even that.
This clock would collapse at midnight.
Were the strange overseers of this place making me labour while I slept? Using the memories and impressions of the people in my life to help speed the construction of their demon device? But I looked around, and in all that grand machinery not a single guard or overlord could not be found.
They worked there by themselves.
I moved closer. The memories did not remember me, and went about their work. At the base of the tower I found them, the strange visitors I had felt before, but never saw with any senses yet sensible to man. They were looking up at the tower and turned as I approached. Again, with a dreaming certainty, I learned something of their natures.
Inhabiting a sphere of pure subconscious, they co-evolved along with the most primeval and inaccessible reaches of the human psyche. Now, self-aware, they demand the same from us. IngDie, the feminine. IngDas, the neuter. IngDer, the masculine. Each expressing a different, but fundamental, facet of some otherworldly existence.
Each in turn approached me, calming, confusing, threatening, and yet despite their differences of method they spoke with one voice: My tyrant self had made this monolith.
Were they coercing me? Had I somehow called them? The creatures seemed as if they were trying to say more, but our understandings were so different. I saw a symbol, mandarin, which I did not understand and would soon forget. A pearl necklace, then a single pearl. I didn’t understand. How could I combat both minds, conscious and unconscious? What was left of me if these were absent? How does one destroy the self when it has grown repugnant, but life has not? Overcome, unable to bear the strangeness of their thought and drowning in a flood of associative symbols, I closed my eyes and dashed blindly towards the tower.
There were no stairs leading upwards, so rather than stop and face the deluge I chose to move down, running around and around its spiral depths. In my indiscretion I tripped down the last flight of stairs into the basement.
My hands came down on something cold and wet. Then the room flashed in an epilepsy of awareness. The floor, the entire floor, everything underneath, all this was a brain, a living, moist, and thinking brain. Where have the stairs gone? I scramble to try and find some way out, but there is none. Trapped, I scream again and try to jump outside of myself.
I did not wake up so much as I came to the realization that the brain in the basement of the clock tower was in fact my bed. The cold dampness was merely my drying sweat which had drenched the sheets.
I never saw the triune beings again.
And now I am in a hospital bed and waiting to die.
I am awake, and yet this knowledge comes to me with the familiar dreaming certainty. I have been married to a woman who I do not remember, and am surrounded by the absence of children who I know exist but whose existence is the only certainty I have. I will leave them an estate that will please them all, my obituary will be long, full of deeds I do not remember. I could hold in my hands the few precious weeks I’ve spent awake. This paralysis is final, unlike the ones visited upon me sporadically throughout my life by those alien entities. I only now come to realize that they have been my companions all along. If they were drowning me in my subconscious, it was only because I had to learn to swim.
I close my eyes, and know that this time I will not wake up. |
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