In Twilight Regalia

What makes a person not sleep? I haven’t been such an insomniac lately, but on the whole, I’m the kind of person who wakes at any slightest click, pop, laughter, or music. Those are the things that aren’t supposed to be there, and something must be wrong! says my brain. That’s when I get up and write.

Now I have another person in my life and sleep is tricky; some nights I pass out and some nights it’s impossible while he zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzs away without a dream in his head. Ever. I mean, he never dreams, Ever. I puzzle that such a creature exists. I dream constantly, tiringly, of all the possible realities I missed.

I have dreams about chasing after something I can’t remember where I left it, maybe it’s my purse, maybe it’s my clothes, while encountering all my friends who’ve long deserted me in real life and being so happy to see them, and yet I really do have to go, do you have some SALT? See because I have a bunch of leeches all over me, and I really need some salt RIGHT AWAY…. and they have no salt.

And I wake up and think, well, take a pick, you could be younger and thinner and have all the people around you you used to want and like, with a few leeches…. or you could wake up and be older and fatter and friendless in this neighborhood where the trash blows around with a strange new experience on every front….

…..and here I am hard pressed to choose.

Which I guess is why i have problems sleeping in the first place…

But I have had some amazing dreams.
I have had dreams that I return to on a regular basis, like actual geographic locations, where I see the same people and pets, who don’t exist. I have dreams where I’m creating the BEST music, making the COOLest costumes, having the deepest conversations. I’ve had dreams where you discover the planet you are walking on is actually made of some seething, breathing, monstrous disgusting slimy creature that’s going to absorb you at any moment….

But waking up can be just as harrowing. The strangest waking up I ever had was after a night of carousing and inhaling and trying to avoid some guy at a party in an old Victorian at some friend of a friend’s party. I remember now that it was dark and I remember my frame of mind when I withdrew. I remember being ready to leave that world around me, the drugs, the guy who was after me, all of it. I don’t remember much after lying down upstairs.

But my eyes did open, and it was screaming stark white.

A white empty room with a wood floor and two windows. Two white sconces on either side of windows. It felt like I was placed into the last scenes of 2001 Space Oddyssey. A contrived space created by a misunderstanding, but benevolent master race?

It wasn’t really clear where the door was at first. There was no furniture, there was nothing but a white sunlit room and out the window were……

BALLOONS…. !

HUGE BALLOONS in the bluest clearest sky I have ever seen, it was a Peter Max poster of a sky with little figures in the gondolas of HUNDREDS of balloons of every color, pattern, all floating up perfectly diagonally from one lower corner of the windows to the upper right corner and awaaaaaaay into the blue…..and I,

I was ….. DEAD! Was I dead???

For a moment I truly wondered if I’d done it this time, and what the benefit of balloons would be in the afterlife. OKAY IF I’M DEAD, WHAT DO I DO WITH THIS? was my first thought.

My second thought was

OH SHIT I’m DEAD!!!
NOOOo how did I do that???

I hadn’t meant to do THAT.

The thing that was me felt all flung apart.

Was I me? Were I?

What was feeling? Was I feeling that?

Had I and then what? Ah… I? It’s me isn’t it?

It is.

Isn’t it?

Then I noticed branches at the bottom of the window. TREES!

I ran to the windowsill and looked out and there were in fact actual trees and houses, and just to comfort further, telephone lines.

I slumped backward with sheer collapse of relief. There was a mattress there. I had been sleeping on it.

Later they told me that I had seen the launching of the annual balloon race that that flat town held every year. Perfect place for it with all the fields around it. Balloonists from EVERYwhere come for it….

Sometimes I remember that moment and I think I would probably STILL choose here. I would still choose the blowing-around garbage and the flooding in the distance of thought and the snoring and radios and past dated food in the fridge. It would still beat leeches in the long run.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 10th, 2005 at 6:48 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.