There I was, in a living room. I knew
that I'd been there before. The sage-green wallpaper, the molding on
the windows, there was a certain familiarity. But I knew that I knew
this place from a long time ago, early childhood. That's it, a house
I used to visit often. I know this walnut table. I know the smell of
this room. We lit the candles, and one by one, our friends walked in
through the door, sat down at matching walnut chairs, their hands
folded.
And then I wake up.
My, that was pleasant.
But then why is there a knife in my
hand?
Did I sleepwalk and get it from the
kitchen? Or was it under my pillow this whole time? Did I put it
there so I could defend myself? If so, from whom? What am I not
remembering?
I lie there a second. It's heavy in my
right hand. I can't even lift it. I run my left index finger along
the blade, and it's dull to the touch.
What is that noise? Whose voices are
those? What are they so angry about? Oh god, that's my voice. I'm
yelling at someone. Who? Why am I saying these things? And now I've
stopped speaking English altogether.
A face looks in through the window,
with heavy eyebrows, mouth slightly hidden.
And it knows what I know.
That this knife is about to go directly
into my heart.
*
And then suddenly, I come
to.
I hadn't been sleeping
there, not exactly. Dreaming, but awake. The knife is simply my right
fist, clenched and heavy, and I'm just now able to move it again. The
face is the illumination of a streetlight through the palm fronds.
I'm normally loathe to talk
about my dreams. It seems so bloody pointless, so false, and so
impossible to convey the truly special qualities of a dream through
something so vulgar as simple description. But this was barely a
dream, and it was one that I had both the privilege and the
misfortune to experience while at least partially conscious.
*
While the physiologically
activity of the brain during this process is beginning to be
understood scientifically, and has to do with poor signaling in the
complex in and around the amygdala during sleep, the root causes for
this misinformation remain somewhat shrouded in mystery. Genetics,
clinical depression, narcolepsy, poor sleep hygiene, stress, sleeping
position, and countless other factors are suggested as causes.
Meanwhile, different
societies around the world have their own folk explanations. In
Medieval Europe, they were incubi and succubi, and in Scandinavia,
they were mara, giving us the
word nightmare. In the American South, it was the ghost known as the
haint riding you, and in Mexico, it was the devil sitting on your
chest. And in
remote parts of Southeast Asia, particularly in backwater regions of
Laos, Thailand, and the Philippines, it is blamed on the same spirits
that cause young men to never wake up, a condition with countless
names throughout the Pacific hinterlands, but only described to
science with the sinister and no less mythological name of “sudden
unexpected death syndrome” less than a generation ago.
*
Of
course, this is what I spent the following day reading. I wanted some
kind of explanation, something scientific preferably, or if not, at
least a comfortable structure, something to provide narrative and
meaning, regardless of how true it was.
There
was that house, the candles, the walnut table. Yes, I had been in
that house. And the smell of the living room, that was real too. And
it was the same as that of the perfume of a woman who had shared this
bed with me a couple of nights before, the scent of which still
lingered in the corners of my bedsheets.
Our
daily lives haunt our dream lives. This is nothing new. Freud said
the same thing over 100 years ago, but had the bullheadedness to
consider his free association to be science.
I'll
say it in far simpler terms, without any pretenses of positivism. In
our sleeping hours, we walk through far deeper, darker forests.
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