Worth Writing

Last night I had a dream that I was waking.  I was waking reluctantly in my bed here in Hamilton with a journal in my hands.  On the cover were the words “On This Special Occasion…”  It was meant to be saved and filled with the narrative of a special time, a special event, some significant time not to be forgotten. 

Lying there on my back bundled in the covers, the journal in my hands, I thought to myself, “Oh alright already.”  I’d been saving it, letting it sit useless and empty for too many years already.  “I’m awake and I’m alive and I’m a writer and that’s occasion enough.  Today’s the day.”  I pushed the covers away from me with my feet and walked past the dog who expected me to go downstairs to put on the kettle as usual but went into the next room to sit at the computer/writing table instead. 

Laying the journal down and opening it flat I took up a pen and pulled aside the single curtain from the tall window on my right.  The cars in traffic edged by in the street one story below me on their way to work and all seemed quite normal for a brief moment.  Then the cars seemed closer than they should be, almost eye level, but that couldn’t be because I was on the second floor of my house.  But it was true.  I was eye level with the driver as he past on what was suddenly a dirt road, and then the road was a river and the cars floated, and then there were no cars, only river.

I had already adjusted.  I already understood that it was the writing, you see.  What was happening outside my window was not really happening.  It was only there for me to describe in the journal and I need not worry about what did or didn’t make sense.  I simply nodded and put my pen to the page saying, “Okay, okay, I know…I get it…” but just then something floated past my window in the brown river of my semi-awareness and I turned a little to late to see it.  I waited and there came another something like it; a skeleton. 

At first I turned away, but just for the briefest second before I turned back again, knowing they were my skeletons, there for me to see, to record.  I needed to see them.  There they flowed down the river, bobbing gently on the current, one after the other.  I was becoming increasingly upset and began to cry a little.  There were too many stories to tell.  I couldn’t write as fast as the river flowed so I knew I had to abandon words and draw a picture of at least one of the skeletons instead.  It was the only way to bear witness. 

I don’t know how I went from the chair in front of the desk to the small boat on the river, but there I was, journal on my lap, pen in hand, vision of a tall skeleton looming vertically before my eyes.  A trick of vision, I knew, a helper-vision somehow, and all I had to do was ‘trace’ what I saw.  I began to do that and did my best, but then I began to panic and the skeleton – the memory that did not want to be forgotten, to be re-buried, reached its bony hands down and pinned my arms to the sides of the wooden boat.  In pain and fear I closed my eyes and cried out: “No!  I’m not trying to run away!  I’m trying to stay with the truth!”

When I opened my eyes again I was in a room I didn’t recognize, dressed in street clothes but without my shoes, feeling very tired, and a man was entering whom I understood to be my ‘keeper’.  It was not enough to agree to ‘forget’; I had to ‘forget’ that I was told by anyone that there was anything to forget in the first place.  And this man, my ‘keeper’, knew I would balk at that, that I would be angry, that I would say that was going to far, asking too much.  Was it not enough to dismantle the mountain of Memory?  I was supposed to lobotomize myself of any knowledge of those who pushed me to dismantle the mountain?

I paced the room while the ‘keeper’ sat still and we chatted loosely.  He sat tensely, feigning relaxation; I wandered in circles feinging what I hoped was forgetfulness.  His cell phone rang and as he answered it I found some shoes and started putting them on and muttering something about it being time for me to go while looking for an exit.  And then I woke up. 

It has always been equally a blessing and a curse to have a disordered REM sleep that allows such vivid detail to be occasionally recalled in such richness of meaning.  As a child you can imagine how it merely tortured me as it came sans understanding.  I never read scary stories still today, for all my demons are alive and dancing furious jigs without the verbal or visual stimulation of Hallowe’eny (to some)delights.

steph