Thursday, September 20, 2012

Dreams

Last night my subconscious brutalized me.  I woke up shaking with rage, and texted my boyfriend, telling him that it was a good thing he had been called to work and wasn't lying next to me when I struggled out of unconsciousness.  I would have hurt him.  I'm fairly sure the pillow was begging for mercy.

The dream itself has dissolved, and is nothing more now than a series of unconnected, totally randomized images, and it is no longer possible to even reconstruct the dream.  It is (mercifully?) lost, has faded back into my subconscious, and at this moment, almost 24 hours later, the raw, burning emotions engendered by the dream are . . . well, shit, they're still there.

Caustic.  My dream flesh feels flayed, peeled in long, apple-skin strips by the application of corrosive remembrance.  The anger, the humiliation, the confusion, but most of all - most of all - the helplessness.  The inability to change what was happening.  Watching it happen, like some gleefully-demented cameraman, zooming in on the tears on my dream cheeks, while simultaneously feeling the tears as they dripped off my chin.  (Yes, the pillow was wet.)

I knew I was dreaming, knew that while every agonizing emotion the dream laid out for me was forcing me into a paradigm of fear and distress, it wasn't a real experience, wasn't really happening, was just a bunch of neurons firing in specific patterns.  But I couldn't stop it.  Couldn't wake up.

So I watched myself suffer.  And rage.  And storm.  And weep.  And the cameraman took a delighted interest in capturing all those frailties of the self that one attempts to keep unexposed.  Unflattering camera angles of one's soul.  Exposing every ounce of insecurity, every broken effort to maintain composure, every stumble and faltering step towards sanity.

How could I do that to myself?  It's bad enough, participating in the dreadful antics one's subconscious is capable of forming, but how could I direct those antics, knowing full well that while telling the cameraman to make sure to catch the frizzed, tangled hair and raccooned eyes, the sloppy t-shirt and hastily-clutched blanket, I would be shrinking with mortification, wishing I knew where my pants were so I could put them on and gain a semblance of control over the situation.

I used to think the worst dreams were dreams of remembrance.  Dreams where a particular humiliation or anguish were re-lived, re-played, re-experienced.  Dreams where every stupid, pathetic, sorry act I had committed had to be endured, knowing perfectly well how the situation would end, but unable to change a single thing.

Those were terrible dreams.  But then I learned how to manipulate my dreams, and started fixing things.  I'd stop the scene halfway through, and say, "Wait a minute.  This is wrong.  I don't like this.  Let's reshoot it.  Take it from the top, but instead of making that decision, let's do this instead."  Then those dreams became good dreams, because I could change those memories.  Yes, I wouldn't be able to change the past, but at least it wouldn't haunt me, and would really become a different country.  One that I never had to visit.  Couldn't even get permission to enter.

But a victory for me is always - has always been - a loss as well.  Yes, I gained freedom from the past.  But now that I can construct my dreams, now that I can engineer special torments, I have unleashed on myself a truly malevolent creature.  It's funny to think how much I must hate myself to do to me what I do in my dreams.  There must be something terribly wrong when I welcome dream-death.  I've died so many times in my dreams that it's a relief, it's calming, it's knowledge that the death is just a segue from a series of well-constructed horrors into wakefulness.

Last night, watching myself direct the torments - so beautifully and perfectly designed to torment just me, to hit every nerve, and exploit every weakness - I couldn't help wondering why I couldn't stop myself.  Why was I so eager to destroy my dream-self, to leave me a pitiful, huddled, wretched creature, fighting for an ounce of self-respect, a soupçon of dignity?  Why am I my own worst enemy?

I know I can't be the only one who does this.  I refuse to engage in any real metaphysical speculation (yes, you adulators of Lacan and Freud, I know you're there), because to do would only legitimize my neurosis.  And that I absolutely refuse to do.  But I know I can't be the only one who torments myself while sleeping.

Of course, it's little comfort knowing that when it's time to sleep again.  Because that's the thing about being in your head.

You're completely alone.

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