Dreams Like These
Photo courtesy of Gary Meulemann and Unsplash
As a child, I was prone to sleepwalking. It was not uncommon for me to shamble down the stairs to my parents room to utter some nonsense phrase or another before shuffle-footing back upstairs to get back in my bed, journey unknown to my waking self.
As I got older, I began waking up in increasingly scary places. I woke up once hiding in my bathroom vanity cabinet, folded in upon myself, like a human accordion, with no rational reason for me to be there, and no memory of what I might be dreaming about that would urge my id to hide me away.
The next time I awoke to find myself in the middle of climbing out of my second-story bedroom window, in abject terror, although of what, I can’t begin to guess at.
As I grew closer to adulthood, I noticed that when I was in the in-between, that no man’s land that is the borderlands for vivid dreamers, I would hear garbled whispers, celestial voices that reminded me of listening to a radio that was picking up two or more stations at the same time, unintelligible monosyllabic mutterings that were almost decipherable but not.
In addition to that, I discovered that I was rendered immobilized during this stage of pre-sleep, and if I somehow fell off that partition into full sleep I did so with an unwelcome guest. I could feel their presence in my room, inching closer, kissing snake-like sibilants, dread taking on physical weight and mass with each creeping inch they came closer.
I would always manage to wake myself up right before the distance between us closed. I can remember, once, I actually felt hot fetid breath against my cheek and neck before I fought my way back into the waking world.
Shortly thereafter I had an incredibly vivid, organic dream that involved me being in a morgue or funeral parlor, my only company a dead man that I had never seen before. As if that wasn’t bad enough, I could smell the rotten aroma of cloying sweetness that is the scent of death and decay. The smell was so overpowering that I could still smell it after awakening.
All of my sleep problems came to a head at this point, and my parents decided that this was an issue that needed professional guidance, and that began the first of many in a myriad of psych consults and psychotropic meds.
It was the olfactory hallucinations that got them. Time and again I was told that was unheard of.
Pet and CT scans revealed a small benign mass in my temporal lobe. After an unsuccessful attempt at removing the growth, the problems only intensified.
It has been a while since I’ve walked in my sleep, although I traded walking occasionally in my sleep to now talking almost constantly during those hours, a near nonstop litany of nonsense coupled with strange predictions and ominous warnings, seemingly apropos of nothing but surprisingly fortuitous at times. I’ve had people awaken me out of a screaming reverie, in absolute panic. Recently a friend told me of how she had her house blessed, and burnt sage throughout after I had visited for a few days. She confided in me that her house had become restless after my stay, that I had unwittingly left something behind.
This is why sleep is something I can do without. At least awake my fears are substantial, with limited physical properties. In sleep, the rules are superfluous, the dreams themselves nonsense inspired, terror fueled menageries of incoherent meaningless messages, or portents, signaling strangeness and madness. Most of my life I've wished for normal sleep, for eight blissful uninterrupted hours until recently when someone suggested that the part of my mind that creates these horrible things might also be responsible for my creativity and talent as an artist. If a few bad nights is the price I am forced to pay in order to be able to express myself artistically, then that's a price I'm comfortable with paying.
