Others' Dreams

I find myself anxious concerning the dreams of others. Once, a woman sleeping next to me for the night dreamed of a bookcase falling on me and I woke her from her distress. She was fretting for my safety from an ethereal bookshelf, its weight and contents trapping me to the bed next to her. And now, my mother has fallen to sleep as I watch over her, while I engage in my own researches. I fear--strangely, even intensely--that her dreams will go beyond her control, that they may dwell on some pain or suffering or entrapment. When I wake her, what then happens to me in her dream? Do I remain contorted and broken, the life seeping out of me in dribbling increments?

Such neuroses are not new. Rather, they are well exercised muscles of my imaginary. Dreams have the power to create worlds and even, or so I am told, reveal something unseen in our own. I am hesitant to purchase such claims, but appreciate the notion they introduce. Indeed, it is this possibility that has seeded such subsurface terror in me, roiling as it is with notions of others' dreams. These are places where I--or my avatar--are guests, hosted by the peculiarities of women I have loved and scorned, women I have cared for and cared for me, women who know both my strengths and my weaknesses. And it is in their dreams that their concerns and--to be civil, allow me to say--dissatisfactions can find facile claim. 

I have been dreaming abundantly of late: a bungalow I share with my father becomes overrun with cockroaches the length of my hand, my family strands me at an icey and abandoned North Sea coastline, my legs become entangled by serpents (snake-like, but tentacular and ichorous) that bolt me to the chair while impotent colleagues look on. These are the moderate nightmares of one who dreams too easily, too perspicacious of the creatures and stories he encounters. After all, these are the dreams of the dreamer and when I wake I know that I am gone from them, that my consciousness has abandoned that place it has created to indulge in private torments and subconscious fears.

What, though, of those men that are myself--or somehow represented by me--in the dreams of others? I cannot say that I have left them behind because I have never felt my consciousness there to begin with. Without waking the turning woman next to me, woud I have not continued to moan in her mind as my bones and skin lay torn and broken next to her? And the greater anxiety remains: What part has remained behind in that dream? How many of me have already been dreamed into suffering and death within the minds of others? What part remains when my own parent cries out at my torment?

These, I might be told, are the tremors of an exhausted mind. And such soothing would be accurate and even appreciated. When the earth shakes, certain objects once concealed are uncovered. I believe it is the same for the human mind. 

My nerves quake not at the idea of crawling insects, hypothermic chill, or repulsive vermin; these are all the creatures of one's own making and one's own imagination. My quaking comes from the unimaginable things, the amorphous and putrescent forms that stir in our depths, and make contact in our fragile dream-state. What can a serpent's venom do but sicken, paralyze, and kill? It is that which dwells in the crepuscular region between our minds and the places beyond that terrifies me. In others' dreams, where I am only the passerby on the street, what waits for me as I fall from the brilliant cognizance of a friend or lover or family member? What maddening, indefinable malignance lies waiting to envelope and tear at the flesh of my semblance, to digest in slow aeons not my muscle and tendons but the psychic residue of my dreamtime passing?

Given the completeness, the seeming assurance of the reality of my own dreams, how can I deny that I am not just lounging in my ailing mother's mind? After all, it is not the visit to the store, the posting of a parcel, the telephone call of a friend, the cancelled trip to the cinema that I am here and now experiencing; those are but passing memories, stories I tell myself to explain why I am here presently. My mother's dream of me need not be that complete. I am but a young man sitting across from his mother who dreams fitfully, recovering bodily and psychically as medicines both treat and frustrate her. A pot of tea steams between us, it's bergamot aroma fills the air. Modest lamps keep out the winter's dark. Ha! She does not even require the stars to be lit for this particular scene.

It is all I can do to lift myself from this chair for I am bound by fear stronger than any demonic serpents. My heart races as I pour tea into my cup. I sip, my hand shaking and the tea cup clatters against the saucer, splattering outward. Several infinitesimal crystals of sugar dissolve at its touch and I sicken to think again of that encroaching night, that dissolution of the real--or at least the reality--into that formless entropic mass. My breath shudders and moans against the--once forgotten--asthmatic constriction in my lungs. I shake myself but the tension remains, suspended between ease and pain, nestled in this nerve racking middle ground.

I shake the nerves loose, letting my fingers waggle and relax. How absurd, all these nighttime anxieties, and only in my weakened state--stress from Mother's operation and recovery--would I allow anything like this entertain me. I sip again from my tea and it refreshes me, it slides with warm thick certainty down my throat and I think, for just a flashing moment, that it will go through me and root me to the floor of the lounge. I peek around the curtain and see the flickering stars of the night. Without thinking I am at the door and outside.

The air is sharp and I pull the door behind me to keep Mother from waking. The night is dark, its sky clearer than usual, and I feel armored against the brisk gust that encircles my nightrobes. Something accrid curdles the air, a smell like sulphur but so thick I can taste it on my lips. I peer into the darkness, step forward from the porch.

In the midst of the stride, I realize there is no step to catch me. Something does. Its hooked appendages latch onto me and for a moment I am cradled at the hungering edge of the world. 

---

Just a story drawing from recent events and dreams. My mom is doing well and I have yet to be consumed by that which "gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time and space," despite fictionally descriptions to the contrary. This is also an attempt to use my new gewgaw for typing. For the most part it works delightfully well!