I rarely remember my dreams. This is a blessing, for the ones I do remember all have been associated with something negative. I only remember…
- two years of the same nightmare, gremlins chasing me in an endless pursuit that would throw my five to seven year old body out of bed as they closed in and then it seemed I would escape, only for them to close in again
- dreams of two grandmothers, my grandmother’s housekeeper and my father – all in a context relative to the person, all with them speaking to me, their true selves being broadcast, but no sound reaching my ears. All who would die the next day
- my dream last night.
I’m a very lucid dreamer. Not in the sense that I can go all “Waking Life” and control my illusions, but in the sense that every damn thing I see is real. It’s what’s truly happening and I have no sense of the slumber that proceeded it.
I used to sleep walk in response to things I’d be dreaming. I’d have entire conversations, using dream speak and be frustrated when the person I was talking with wouldn’t understand or would question my alertness. I got ready and on a bus once, to go to high school, two hours early. I also used to have sleep apnea, so imagine how many times I must have thought I was drowning or being strangled.
Best of all are the times I’ve woken from one of those dreams, sweaty and still tremoring, with a moan in the back of my throat. Why don’t I ever get to remember those ones?
Since taking this medication to quit smoking, Chantix, the dreams have been off the wall. When the psych effects first kicked in, I was waking every 45 minutes it seemed, not remembering but still having the echo of a WTF on my breath. I remembered this morning at 3:30am when I woke up, still (already) crying, on the verge of hyperventilating.
This was the stuff that nightmares are made of:
Isobel is playing on our waist-high windowsill, dancing and laughing. The window’s open a couple of inches, but nothing that she can fit or fall through and I’m doing something that allows me to be right there watching her, and her freedom and happiness is making me smile.
In one of those cosmic fuck ups, she turns the windows crank just as she puts her foot against it and the weight and crank in unison allows it to open wide enough for her to take a step outside.
Into air.
I don’t even have the ability to try to stop her from falling because time speeds for just a second, just long enough to ensure that I don’t save her but do arrive at the now floor-length window, to see her free fall, in now slow-motion. Now we’re in a high rise, though shortly before, when happiness was going on, we were living in a 3-floor walk-up.
I watch her fall, tummy first, about 25 floors and land. I think of how scared she must have been. I think of how she might have enjoyed the air whooshing past her face. I think I should jump too, because there’s no reason for me to live, now.
Then I think that I can’t jump, because if I do, people will think I threw her.
And that’s when I wake up.
* Quote of M.C. Escher
