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Death Before Sleeping

I wear my body down and exhaust my mind before crumbling into bed in an attempt to keep my thoughts at bay. But regardless of how tired I am when I collapse under the covers and bury my head between the pillows with one arm holding a pillow over my ear to drown out white noise, I think too much. I think and think and think and think about regrets or projects or the consequences of something stupid I said to someone or old girlfriends or a movie I just watched or writing ideas or things I need to do tomorrow or I didn’t do today… but eventually, usually within about twenty minutes, I go limp and fall into a twilight state where I am no longer strong enough to control my thoughts and they proceed into my conscious mind unfettered but incomprehensible until, suddenly, just before I slip off into the darkness, there is light, and a clear, logical, and lucid dream begins and it always ends in death. My death. My son’s death. My wife’s death. A thousand deaths. I throw myself into the jaws of an attacking lion to save my son; dive into the Niagara River so my little boy doesn’t have to be swept over the falls alone; take a knifing for my wife in a dark parking lot; escape my burning house just in time to hear the screams of my family as the house super-heats when it hits the flash point; discover I am tied down to the ground with rope and tent stakes and covered with asphalt roofing shingles at high noon in the middle of the desert in July; come home to find blood smeared on the walls of my house and my wife and boy murdered; fall off a cliff on K2 and plummet 4,000 feet in 100 mile-an-hour winds; am bit by a poisonous spider right in the eye; feel my guts filling my lungs and throat as the plane plunges from 30,000 feet into a downward spiral; become falsely confused with someone on a mafia hit list; find a pillow over my face and held down by an incredibly strong home invader; see in the rear view mirror a lifted truck rear-end my Ford Escort and crush me and my son; and so on and so on…

These scenes do not happen just once either. Often, there are several takes and each time I try to stop the tragedy from occurring using a different method of escape or defense, but always, in the end, I fail.

And as the lion eats me, or the knife punctures my diaphragm and my last breath deflates from my lungs, or I plunge over Niagara Falls with my son in my arms, I suddenly wake in my mind just long enough to acknowledge that the death has occurred, the final scene has ended, and that I am about to fall sound asleep. And then I do.

END
© 2005 Christian Cloud Abraham

Posted on December 28, 2005 in
Emotion: Fear, Type: Dream