To Sleep, Perchance to Dream
what dreams may come
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I am submerged. I am gasping for air, reaching, trying to propel myself up. This time it is water. Other times it is sand, dirt. I swim or claw my way out, wake up breathless, panicky.
I am driving over a bridge. It’s a familiar bridge, I know it by heart by now, every wild turn and deep rivet. I know it’s going to plunge me into the water and I drive slowly, hands shaking until I reach the point where the bridge dips into the ocean. I hold my breath even though the water doesn’t enter the car. I keep driving, blinded by the dark water, guided only by the feel of pavement beneath me. I emerge, breathless, panicky. I keep driving toward my destination.
There are dead people in my dreams, relatives long gone. They rarely interact with me, but they are there, watching, being eyewitness to my anxieties pouring themselves out of my subconscious into the realm of dreams. There’s my grandparents, my uncle and aunt, a long gone friend, a recently departed cousin. I try to talk to them, to engage them, but they are there in spirit only, and cannot help me navigate the dark hallways or watery graves that populate the dreams. They are just visiting.
There’s a hotel. It is expansive and opulent, there are more rooms than any hotel should have. I know where my room is, I just can’t get there. The elevator never comes. I go to another bank of elevators and get on the first one with open doors. It takes me to the wrong floor and I have to traverse miles before I can find the stairs that takes me to my floor.
I take the stairs but they are winding and steep. There are doorways on each floor and I try them all, but they are either locked or I open the door to someone else’s room and immediately back out. I am lost for what feels like hours on the stairwell, unable to find my way back to the lobby or to my room. I climb, I climb, I climb. My legs ache and I am out of breath and I finally wake up, exhausted, unrefreshed.
I dream. I dream vividly, in wild color, with excruciating detail, in plots and subplots. I have several dreams a night and they are all exhausting. I wake up tired, panicked, confused. It takes me several minutes to enter reality, to shake from my head the feeling that I am walking another world that exists between sleep and waking, one where the dreams still feel real, not quite dissipated, where my bed is not a refuge, but a prison.
I’m trying to reach you. At first I can’t find my phone. When I do find it, numbers are missing. I try to call you but can’t hit the right combination of numbers. I need to talk to you, desperately. It’s been days. You’re probably worried. I want to let you know I’m okay. I try to text but the message never goes through. I feel disconnected from you, I’m a balloon that’s been let go.
I don’t know where I’m supposed to be. Work? School? I’m in a parking lot. I know I’m late but I don’t know what I’m late for. The building is nondescript and I try door after door. I gently jiggle the handles. They’re all locked. I look at my watch, panic sets in. I walk the halls. I bump into people, I drop the notebooks I’m holding, I stumble in my heels. I wake up, sure I’m late for something. It’s midnight.
My dreams are all nightmares, I never dream of pleasantries, never am I sitting in a beautiful meadow picking flowers mindlessly, just passing the sleep time until my internal alarm goes off. There’s always strife, always plans going awry, always a sense of loss or horror. There is murder, panic, despair, death, a loss of control. I struggle to wake myself up and sometimes I can, and do, but more often I lose the struggle and the dream continues.
Sometimes I lucid dream, mostly when I’m visiting a recurring dream place, and I can direct my action in accordance with the last time I was there. Don’t take that elevator, don’t open that door, don’t run in that direction. I learn from my dream mistakes.
Sleep should be a respite, a chance to escape the day’s wrath, to refresh your body and mind. But it never is for me. Sleep is where I dream, and dreams are where I am constantly in a state of anxiety. I want so much to sleep without dreaming, without diving into worlds I want no part of.
I’m trying to run but my legs feel like weights. I just want to lie down, right there in the street, but something tells me to run, run, and I try but my feet drag on the ground and then I’m crawling across the road and there are cars coming. There’s someone waiting for me on the other side, beckoning, but I can’t. I lay down in the middle of the road, my body heavy, my energy depleted.
I remember all my dreams, I remember every detail, every word spoken and every character who comes and goes. I can recall dreams I had in grade school as if they were movies ingrained in my memory. They never leave me, they only linger in my head at all times and creep up on me at the most inopportune times, flashes of a nightmare suddenly there, causing me to stop what I’m doing and suck in my breath.
I am trying to wake up. I can’t open my eyes. Wake up, wake up, I whisper to myself. I’m half in, half out of a dream. I can hear things around me in my waking world; a car passes, a sprinkler goes off, the radiator hums. I can’t move. My arms, my legs are immobile. I am dead weight. There is something, someone on my chest. I feel the pressure, I feel the heaviness sinking into me, I could swear I feel someone’s breath. I want to push them off of me but I’m paralyzed and I panic, I try to force my eyes open, I try to shake my head to pull my out of this state of wakeful dreams. Finally, the pressure relents. I open my eyes. My breaths come deep and furious, I gasp, then scream.
I am awake. I am alive. It is 3am and I will not go back to sleep, to dream.
[photo by me]
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