I could see her from my bed, in nebulous white slapclapping her mouth with what must have been a wad of gum.
". . . doner organs but you were lucky dear," How was she able to do that, I wondered; chewing gum and articulating at the same time? My slump back to sleep kept simultaneous beat to the clacking of her teeth and I was back in the school courtyard. Engulfed by great walls of stone overpowering the horizon, I instinctively marched forward with the rhythm of loud mastication, tracing the gigantic bricks with my fingertips until I came to the one that I knew would let me out. I looked more closely and as I peered, the stone transformed into a heavy metal door. How do I open it? A key appeared in the socket. I entered the other side into a constricted passageway that gave me the chills. It lead me straight back to the schoolyard. I tried the door a few times and then realized it was a loop. Whinging, I reached for the wall once more and looked up. The wall sank into the hospital whites of my sheets. Submerging itself between the folds of flimsy poly-cotton blend. A group of doctors circled around my bed tapping pens against clipboards murmuring, shaking heads. I could hear the S’s snaking from their mouths overlapping each other’s, entwining between themselves, weaving a shield of filmy protection against my ears. I struggled to sit up in my stupor.
I remember stocking the liquidation shelves in the back of a large room. Cheap! Read the hand written black markered poster board. Buy five now and get one free! That was my writing. I looked at the book I had clutched in my hand. How To Fix a Leaking Heart; it was a thin hardcover dressed up in shiny rose coloured paper with a picture of a drainpipe Y joint embellished like a heart, dripping its blood red nuggets of lost love juice into the dredges of the human waste cesspool. The book in my other hand: Ten Steps to Great Sex. It depicted a grey silhouette of a caucasian thirty something heterosexual couple linked together at the middle. Him on top and her on her elbows with her head arched back, mermaid hair cascading in waves behind her. I looked on the shelf at the book I had just placed. Heroes to Die For. Militiamen and rock and roll stars living it up on a cluster of pyrocumulus clouds undulating their silky felonious ways over burning trees. I was drowning in the degradation of words and smarmy stale pictures of skin veneer proof and testimonials espousing the right though not righteous paths of formula, not virtue.
Overcome and wild with rage I stormed from the room, the building, books flying, me throwing them, flinging them across the room, people gasping, hovering, protecting their faces with their arms as I accentuated my point with flying hardcover and paperback bestsellers "I'll give you Five Ways to Find Financial Success!" I screamed at a well-dressed man clenching his blackberry. "Find True Happiness Through My Pathway of Love!" I yelled at an older woman clutching her handbag. I thrust my crotch in gyration and saw my boss from the corner of my eye coming straight for me. I was mad. My head was pounding and I was out of there in seconds down, on my bike I did a wheelie and skid out onto the road.
I never made it home. I only made it here. Here where the doctors hover and stare.
Premonitions or prompts, is was pointless the debate whether some dreams predicted the future or merely gave me the ideas to translate into waking world actions. I debated that anyways, having plenty of free time. I always got into trouble when I was all riled up and maybe if I could have learned what I would eventually learn from my dreams I probably wouldn't have crashed. But then if I already had that inner-peaceful wisdom I wouldn't have needed to lean anything from remembered dreams anyways. Here where the doctors hover and peer. Where my dreams trounce my waking head with premonitions or prompts: Predetermined arcs of fate are just learning? Maybe predetermined to learn? I never claimed to have learned everything from the remembered dreams, not yet, still just a human but one who lives in two worlds. I live in two simultaneous worlds of colour and clarity topographically merging colours and form, textually into each other, leaving me perplexed, overwrought and on occasion, amused.
I was in my grandmother's garden. It was large and rolling with shrubs the colour of burnt wheat. Thistles wind rustled and whistled. She was not home. Though my task I knew, was to dig up potatoes. The first few I dug uneventfully but the third potato I dug like an excavation. It kept emerging in expansion until it was the size of a small house. My cousin appeared, though I had felt his presence all the while and began laughing. "You will never get out!" he snorted, his eyes swimming in a murky sea of mucous. I knew I would never be able to dig the giant potato in its entirety and I couldn't return to the safety of Grandma's house without three potatoes. That’s what she had told me, this is what I had promised her. The dreaming continued through an endless cycle of Sisyphean digging and undercurrent feelings of overexposure. I longed for the safety of my grandma's house.
Sinister. Funny, I should feel this way in the dream time not awake. Living in two worlds can be draining. I have but two choices; adapt or perish. Through force of will, through will of force, I was a living palindrome. Mirrored one side of the other the two worlds, unimportant which was the reflection and which was the reflection on the reflection, both became repetitious hell. Doctor dreams and dream doctors. How to break the mirrors of memory? I would have to take control of my dreams or maybe even my waking life. I would need to subjugate this immobilization into Control; self-mastery not in the vein of those trite-as-shit softcover mass market books whose existence nudged me in this fate’s direction originally. Hell, that past is just a reflection too. The cloying claws and pawing pedipalps reaching up at me to drag me back down the mountain in my dreams, they are mine, my hands wrapped up in primal packaging for maximum impact are mine. They are my hands holding under in this hell. Waking up does no good. This is me here, in unconsciousness and awareness I need to take hold. I need to adapt.
My dreams were a prison and my prisons were dreams. I began to understand why the brain forgets dreams. Unfortunately I could not forget mine. As one doctor was holding my wrist and looking at the stopwatch, I sensed that I was only to get worse and I no longer could care what is dream and what is waking reality... Two worlds, frayed threads holding together bulging seams, both worlds are overstuffed with cushy fluff, seemingly profound non-sequiturs begging agnostic treatments.
...something like a bee, dream pollen on its legs, flower to flower. Wake up. That doesn't help either. Or maybe a wasp? I am the pollinator and the stinger. I forgive myself for remembering my dreams, shit always flows down hill, let it all go. Insight salvaged from the sewage of my memory? So easy to say, so hard to do. My eyes open, turned on, tuned in, awake, aware, alive, but I still need to activate wakeful movement. The dreams are mine, I am struggling against myself then, I forgive myself for that. Forgiveness is an ox in cerebral narrative. I am an ox, for Christ sake. Eyes open so long but awakening to... This is what scabs are made of, ruderal growths a nightly coughing up of dream dust blood emesis. I am a field and there is growth. Growth is not a false stoicism or healing but an admission and embracing of decay, anything but denial. Healing a trite concept perhaps not admitting the cyclicality of it all. Onward, here I am: Awake.
