2008

By 2008, my nightmares had evolved. I no longer woke up gasping and crying out for my wife to please wake me up, piss squeezing out along with freeze-cold sweat and then back to sleep where the monsters live, the puddle of piss-sweat chattering my teeth. By then, my otherside reality had hijacked a goodly portion of my conscious life and there were times I was just gliding through both, back-and-forth like someone sprinting down a mountain, ignoring the switchbacks between real and unreal in a desperate sprint to get to the bottom because the bottom is what matters and not the difference between the switchbacks.

One recurring episode featured me in some river bottom place with dark, chilled dampness, the treeshade and sunlight dappling through, not unlike the vacant lot adjacent to the Anderson yard on 8^th Street right before the hill downward toward Doddridge or the space between my childhood garage and the neighbor’s raspberry patch where I’d spent plenty of time wakefully dreaming.

In this world there was a large elm tree coming out of the ground slanting diagonally upward, over a brushy area that made a sort of cave of branches and wild lilac bushes and poison ivy below the arching tree trunk. Inside the cave-ish area was some kind of darkness and evil that I couldn’t recognize but only knew. There was a floor there made of broken wooden pallets thrown over the mud like a makeshift deck or those wooden sidewalks they had in cowboy movies.

And beneath that was hell.

That’s where I spent my time. In this recurring nightmare I’d captured someone that I knew but cannot now remember, but she was a girl and she knew something about me that would get me in trouble and she had all the power, even though she was my captive. The dream was always the same. When I’d get to the point where I realized this person “knew me” I’d panic and, in the dream, threaten torture and death. To prove my seriousness at how willing I was to kill her, I’d raise up a large woodsaw and lay the teeth of it against my left arm, just above the crook in my elbow at the base of my bicep and begin sawing through the skin.

I’d feel the initial pinch which felt a lot like giving myself an insulin injection or poking my finger for blood and then I’d feel electricity as the blade buzzed up against the deeper bed of nerves below the subcutaneous level, the jagged saw teeth breaking through the myelin sheath surrounding the muscle, the silver stuff you tear off venison so it won’t taste like deer.

And, my right arm would keep see-sawing back and forth with the sawblade digging deeper into my bicep, the electricity amplifying in my head like a pinned 2-stroke engine max-throttled in the wrong gear, if you know what that sounds like. I remember feeling the jolt of pain and if anyone has ever experienced sudden and inexpressible ice-pick-death pain like lightening you’ll know what I mean when I say pain makes a sound and has a color and every night that dream was a tinnitus yellow hissing orgasm of violent self-hatred sawing through my bicep and emanating like a spray through my nervous system.

Next, there’d be blackness and dark which was beyond the concept of color or lack thereof, a place, not a feeling or a sensory element at all. This was reality—a place and way of being, agnostic of geography or history or emotion or living. This was simply It, The Place, and I’d find myself in the dream, cozying into it and I’d dream-doze inside the dream and I’d feel the pull of waking consciousness and fight it, knowing that recognition of what I’d been dreaming would dredge up horror and screaming and self-loathing, the main feedstock of this evil and I’d roll around in it like a black lab in a maggot-crawling raccoon carcass, pulling sweat-soaked sheets to my chin, knees clutched to my chest, hearing my teeth clattering against themselves like shaking a box of wooden matches.

Awareness is relative. Slowly, I’d feel the gray light that comes before dawn creep in and remind me that, as real is this was, there was another realty simmering to meet me and an alarm clock and a flowergold wife sleeping next to me urging me to Shut it the Fuck Off and a shower and a drive to an office and people there who were real and bosses who I’d fooled I was smart or cared and coffee and a paycheck and vacations and an ego and weather and MPR on the car radio and birds up there rooking in the trees and earthworms in their subterranean depths, chewing dirt and shitting it through themselves like dirt-shit monsters and as I’d swing my cold-sweat legs over the bed toward the floor it would strike me that later that night, I’d be back in the dark and there’d be a dead girl under my floorboards and a carpenter’s saw, so Shhhh…