I’m on an alliteration theme right now, mentally, and I just can’t seem to escape it for some reason. But, that is likely not what concerns anyone. Hopefully the quality or even just plain quantity of prose herein is what draws people. Because it sure as hell ain’t the funny pictures. There haven’t been any of those for quite some time.
I’ll be honest with you, whoever my audience is (being honest is important), I am tired. I did not sleep well last night. Immediately on the other side of the paper thin wall three feet from my bed, butted up against it, was a 2 year old with a broken limb. They are not known for their silence at the best of times. When confronted with actual physical pain, or a sense of persistent wronging (such as trying to adjust sleeping position when one limb is encased in hefty plasted), they tend to keen incessantly. So, for the hours of the night I remained in my room, I heard a sort of gurgling, desperate and surprisingly quiet set of noises. They spoke purely of discontent, of pain. Not the usual attention-whore chattering from a child. That sounds dismissive, but until you hear the real stuff, you don’t realize how much crying on the parts of children is utter nonsense.
They want you to look, to interact, to tell them they’re special. All of these are good and noble tasks. They are important, and from what I understand necessary to a child’s development. But again, these weren’t the sounds the kept me from sleep. Those sounds sought only an end to suffering, and a release from the percieved prison of consciousness, and indeed life.
I’m not saying I believe he wanted me to come in and put a pillow over him. Christ, I’m not that bad, am I? And I’ll admit, there may have been a fair amount of projection. My own psyche and view of life transposed onto the relatively blank sheet of a blonde, blue eyed, ruddy cheeked mind. I don’t think my cheeks were ever ruddy. But then again, I don’t know, because it’s not a word that anyone knows the meaning of anymore.
Digressions and general stupidity aside, I waited it out until 1am. At that point, I had a decision to make. Do I get up, weather the storm, and pray he’ll be asleep in an hour or less, or do I get up, grab a blanket, and hit the couch? I opted for the couch, whose cool leather and angular arm rests look much better during the day, believe you me. It was no real surprise when I awoke with a loud snapping sound coming from my neck as the first light of dawn trickled through the blinds in the living room. It seemed quiet. I hightailed it to bed.
Once there I managed to get back to sleep until something happened to me that hadn’t happened for a while. I was awoken, quite rudely, by a nightmare. The sense of forboding was overwhelming. Have you ever lain in a position you thought comfortable, until you suddenly realized your neck, with all its pulsing, life-giving blood flowing through it, was exposed? I hadn’t, until this morning.
I dreamt of a strange, caste-based society. Essentially a conflict between the owners and the workers. It was pretty typical stuff, and might even have some bearing on realistic class-struggle in the modern age. But that kind of talk should be left outside of dreams. Dreams aren’t logical or even sensible, most of the time. Theories on their purpose range from random neural firings to a brain’s attempt to bring about order from a series of thoughts that make no sense. Theories about dreams are one of the many examples of the arrogance of people. Why can’t we have one thing that’s just a strange, silly mystery. They’ve already tried to explain away the northern lights, earthquakes, AND (through focus groups) why people keep going to Nicolas Cage movies. Leave dreams alone.
At any rate, in this caste-based society, a plan was afoot. A plan that, if effective, would free the lower classes of their bonds, allowing them to move from their homes in the basements of large estates, down a hill of rolling green, where a bucolic river flowed lazily through the landscape. My role appeared to be that of a journalist, or witness. I don’t think I was involved. I did, however, seem to have a close connection to the leader of this would-be revolution, whom I believe to have been my brother. He bore no resemblance to my actual brother, but instead looked a bit like a cross between myself and Teddy Roosevelt, which was somewhat awesome. All this took place, of course, before the whole thing went bad. And they do, often. Dreams, that is. They go bad. They turn to the darker, uglier side of things, and leave us momentarily children again, sweatily gasping in the dark.
I strolled down a dusty hill towards a sort of launch pad. The revolution seemed mechanically based. It wasn’t going to be a violent struggle; it had more to do with the acquiring of vehicles. These craft looked like large boulders with frames on them, which would balance gyroscopically and carry passengers. I got a sense that it was like the industrial revolution, but the people would be spared, instead of the cattle.
As one would expect, something went wrong. A blinding flash of light, and the woman in front of me began to lose her color. Sabotage, that was the word on the lips of the people. The rich didn’t want to see the poor move out of servitude, and now they had to pay the price. The woman in front fell to the floor, writhed and stood again. As she washed out to white, her eyes grew eerily red, and her skin took on the sheen of chitin, the substance insect shells and fingernails are made of. Soon she resembled a humanoid cluster of fibrous segments, dotted with eyes and teeth. They all began to change. I fell back and saw one leaning over me, mouth spread wide to display translucent, dripping fangs. Nothing but red and white, eyes and exoskeletons and teeth. The first woman to change said something to the effect of “How I’ve waited for this,” as her stomach opened to display more searching eyes. Her voice started as a whisper and ended as animal growl, accompanied by a total whiteout of my vision. And then, quite predictably, I awoke.
I lay gasping in a dark room, my head lolling as I attempting to not return to sleep. I heard a cry through the wall and knew I was back in the real world. I rose, showered, ate some toast and tried to shake the sense of impending doom out of my head. And did so, pretty much successfully.
See, a shrink would take that dream and analyze the living shit out of it, and likely come up with a conclusion based on the anxieties and fears I would have already told him. Me, I look at it a little differently. For one, it was some crazy imagery, that I would have revelled in had I seen it in a horror film. Second, I’d like to think it was a sympathy thing. As in, while it had no bearing on the young boy in the next room’s situation, I wasn’t allowing myself to have an easy night either. Third, and this is something of a default for me, I just never remember good dreams. I’m not quite sure they exist. If a dream is just your fantasy, aren’t you missing out on a good half of the contents of your head? It would sure be nice, every once in a while, to go to sleep and feel yourself doing what you’ve always wanted to do, but it would render the real world obsolete. You wouldn’t need consciousness, after you found your perfection behind the veil of slumber.
As long as we’re always afraid to go to sleep, even just a little tiny bit, we’ll have a good reason to get up, to move and live full lives. And that seems important enough to have the ever-loving shit scared out of us every once in a while.
That’s all I’ve got for now. Comment at your leisure.
RJC
Thinking back on it now, I’m not sure if
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