'If I'm Not Smiling, I'm Just Thinking'
What are these dreams they talk about?
The ones that inspire the songs and the waking-morning epiphanies? The ones that leave a longing for dreams to come true?
I want those.
But nightmares are my journey into the world behind the wall of sleep.
There are no words to my nightmares. The only words are the words that are gathering in groups and conspiring against me.
The nightmares that speak to me speak nothing. Of nothing. Of nothingness. They are waking nightmares, borne of dreamless sleep.
They startle me awake, freeze me.
They follow me, awake in the dark, where the rest of life all around is suspended in dreams.
They follow me as I squint toward the clock hoping that the little hand is past the 5 and not the 4.
Hoping for nightmare to give way to the morning light.
Where life stirs.
Life as it is. Neither dreams nor nightmares.
But if it could be dreams ...
And if I could dream ...
10 comments:
You've written about Uncle Gene before, recently even. I can't find it.
Thoughty piece.
Ending of this post was very good ... and as mamalujo wrote, very thoughty.
I read this initially as what I would expect a writer to nightmare about. Silence, metaphorical apathy, a writers block or a mute audience - either way, there is nothing to create, and nothing to appreciate. Scary business for a communicator, I would think.
My nightmares are all chaos and noise around a catatonic me, impotent to the horror around me. The inability to cope with entropy slips into my waking life at times. I wonder if I would welcome a nightmare of silence, but then, it's all relative, eh?
Then I remembered a post of yours from aways back, written after a blackout, I think. You wrote about fear of the dark and the unknown, but moreso the fear of being alone with yourself. The silence then, a waking nightmare. I, of course, internalized the whole piece to the intimidation of having to face the chaos in my head.
Interesting. I like the dichotomy, and the similarities.
Yet there was the post that brought me here and made me stay to read more. Living Dead in the Mayonnaise Jar. A disturbing nighmare of chaos, though you were only five when you had it. (I swear, I'm not stalking you, your posts just have a way of sticking with me enough so I can find them again.) Nightmares of sound to nightmares of silence. I guess growing up really does change us.
And then, mamalujo brings up Uncle Gene, and I thought of your post about Uncle Chris back in March, a post where comments weren't allowed but surely deserved. I don't know who that man is in this picture - you, Gene, Chris, or the Marlboro Man. But I sure wish you some dreams worth smiling about.
Meanwhile, life stirs indeed.
the post doesn't make much sense. my mind wasn't together when i wrote it.
i have nightmares every night. i take this medicine to help me sleep. i had taken my medicine and was trying to write about my fear of having nightmares.
by nightmares i mean what happens when i wake up. i don't dream. all i know is i startle awake not knowing what i was dreaming to make that happen. i have waking nightmares. i wake up to a dark, silent room having emerged from something i can't remember. i usually just want the night to be over.
the picture of my uncle gene, whose the brother to my mom and my uncle chris. i've never written about him before, but he was always the hope of our family. he seemed to be the one trying to keep it together the most. he played sports, went to college. tried to keep it cool. i've always kept this picture of him. i hung it in my dorm room and kept it in my wallet for awhile to remember what i thought my family could be.
it didn't quite work out that way for him. there used to be a time i hoped for that, but i've pretty much given up the fiction of that picture.
that stuff is no joke. it has you thinking in weird patterns like words consipiring against you and shit like that. i think i was actually dreaming awake.
oh, and the reason i disabled comments on the other one is because i didn't want people to feel like they had to say something.
but you're free to, if you want to.
i could keep a diary, but then only i'd read it. and those close to me know all about me. there's something about making this so that anybody can read it that makes it so that it's not all my own.
ridicule or support or sympathy or disgust. it doesn't matter, man. it becomes something more than just me thinking it in the middle of the night.
I started keeping a diary. I found that I was too lazy and wrote about stuff that was too mundane.
Wow man! I can't imaginge the terror of knowing that I was going to have nightmares every night.
i kept a diary by hand a few years back. it was the same way, but actually helpful because there was no pressure to make it sound good. just express the details. i left out words sometimes so i didn't have to take the time to write them.
corky, i think some of these things become self-fulfilling prophecies. the cycle usually breaks, though. somehow.
What a horrible endless loop. To fear having nightmares so badly that you can't sleep- take medication so you can sleep- only to have nightmares.
What are you on? Ambien used to really screw me up. I used to sleep walk, talk, and drink. I got drunk once WHILE sleeping. Woke up in the bathroom with a bottle of Bacardi. I decided I'd rather be sleepless.
lunesta.
i really don't know anything about it. except that it actually helps me sleep.
but i think i was doing a form of sleep walking when i wrote this.
You grimey sonovabitch. Bring back the last *hilarious* post :-D
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