Dreams

Sleep has always been the thorn in my side. During the earliest years of school, my mom would wrangle socks on my cold feet as I was still lethargically groping for sleep, half-saturated in a dream world. Even until high school I'd be dragged awake, institutional shuffle down the endless hall (mocking me with voluptuous carpet), the hollow, lifeless attempt to turn on the shower. At times -- not many -- I'd fall asleep on my feet, wrapped in warm water. Paradise enough. Then the smash on the door, reproaching me awake.

The worst association, which haunts me still, isn't the screech of some imaginary monster, the vegetarian terror stare from an alien-looking cabbage, or politicians. It was born of the ear: the light electric sound surge, infinitesimal, the overhead fan made as it was killed by my mother every school morning, before the useless, repetitive, slow, tortuously slow against-the-grain voyage to consciousness. My heart half-died with the decelerating blades. Time to get up and learn nothing, psychological abuse, and all shades of adolescent bullshit embedded in school. The explicit click of any light switch is still at times enough to make me cringe. It all signified the end of another world, the insulating security afforded by warmth, and the dreams were always lovely.

It's not laziness. I honestly can't help it. Between nineteen and twenty-two I lived for twelve hour marathons, not because I was seeking an escape, or because there was nothing better to do, but because if I didn't, I couldn't function. Gym and jogging cured this, yes, but only partially. There are still days where the snooze button is ruthlessly crashed for a two or three hour duration. My hypothalamus headlocks my frontal lobes, and any reason to rise never penetrates the sensate. Blame the brain; I am the blameless.

It all allowed me an incomparable wonder: I've learned to dream, and even dream to the end of a sort of earthly salvation. Bad dreams, I've learned, are the best. They shock you into life value; many times I would find myself hypnotically spooning my coffee the next morning, dredged in appreciative thoughts, simply because the gentle terror of a dream had, yes, taught me how to live. At least until the death of worldly worries and routine had drowsed me back into the quietly hellish, lifeless style of humanity.

And all these years the poor bumbling philosophers can't prove -- one bit -- the existence of an external world, or that our senses are feeding on anything outside of a neurological matrix of lies. Life itself might be a brand of dreams. A dream of God. And we have the miserable stupidity to take all of this seriously -- to grope and grasp and close off breathing until we're walking corpses. Are there any who have awoken yet?