White 01 (Waking)

I wandered in the face of it, heavy with the anesthesia of morning, the stillborn sense of reason that accompanies almost waking up. I practically fell into it, the light ahead of me, blinding and melting the face from my skull, spilling brightly burning liquid yellow onto the paper fragile landscape of dreaming, disintegrating it and leaving just the mild yelps of sketchily drawn fragmentary people in the daisy syrup wake behind it. Eyes opened to painful sensation, then quickly closed to retreat behind fleshy thin walls that failed to keep out the intruder completely. It sizzled through, searing half caught blurred neon nonsense into the black, then letting it heal and drift away into a sea of cloudy gray-white fog. There is the tug, the pull of sleep, the revenant remains of night bliss wrapping cold, comforting skeletal hands around your brain, burying it in the cozy warmth of a beckoning pillow. The revulsion of early revolution. The snapped rejection of the coup of consciousness. I fought back, like I always do, trying to casually embrace another minute of slumber, but the constant shrill beak crack of the goddamned alarm pushed me further and further from it with every repeated shriek.

What had preceded was certainly amazing. I could feel that, the rush of excitement still burrowing tunnels in my stomach, still sending trolley car cable sparks of adrenaline up my spinal column. There had been an acquaintance long forgotten, a composite of childhood friends and favorite characters from television shows, the kind of dream companion that's mutable and shifting, but not in a distracting or disorienting sort of way. There had been a remote location that mixed the most mundane bits of real life with the most fantastic issues of pulp, so that battlement towers rose like boney fingers from the aisles of the grocery store, and a steep, thorny valley populated by albino crocodiles dropped swiftly from the parking lot, filled with stray shopping carts and some sort of psychedelically sparkled thought-toads. There was no unrest or confusion caused by the radically altered landscape accessible through the freezer doors, and though the point of view might vary frighteningly and include views from eyes of people stuffed dead in their coffins, the narrative remained, in its conjoined twin logic, understandable. More so, for those first terrible moments of shift change, than the harsh light story sucker punching me in the face.

And soon, the whole of it, at least the crisply ill-defined details that struggled against any sort of pin and label, burned off entirely, leaving a void resulting in hysterical and thankfully short-lived, but still absolute confusion. As the fake world of dreams was booted out, left to wither in the spotlight of analysis or drown in a sea of sensibility, the real world reasserted itself with a hastily sketched outline skeleton shot through swiftly with the incalculable tiny bits of data that align themselves quicker than lightning to encompass the whole of the known world, the stable one that lives outside of dreams and seems to remain the same from day to day, provided our memories are to be trusted.

There is that little bit of me that always worries about the veracity of what my mind, the devious stranger in my own attic, compiles as real in that first moment of waking, since during my sleep it can easily convince me of a million unreal stories that I dismiss because of their oddness. I assume I live the same life from day to day, with the same characters, the same chunk of rock spinning through space under my feet, the same specter of death looming over me. But I wonder sometimes how I can be sure of what I haven't made up, positive in its truth only because it happens during the time I'm awake. But what difference is there in the perceptions? And if I have a memory, whether it really happened or not, in the waking world, isn't the faked experience of dreaming just as valid as the honest experience of being awake? It confuses me, sometimes, to the point of crippling, but eventually, some unseen, unknowable governor inside my piloted brain sorts the two halves of my life out into their respective boxes and allows me to interact with the world I see as relatively stagnant and real while still holding onto the memories of a handful of faded dreams.

And while that disorientation is frustrating in itself, what's worse is the window it opens into the creeping mystery of my own brain... the various parts of my consciousness that operate without any input from me. There's the odd film maker that creates the nocturnal fictions that confound me and confuse me and rip contentment with the questions they lead into. And there's the traffic cop directing logic and nonsense and keeping the division between them as strong as it can be. There's the foreman keeping the machinery of the body operating without any real effort on my part. And there is the generator of stray thoughts... all of the unfocused bits that wander through my mind without my asking or my permission. And the crowd of passengers and drivers stuffed into the gray matter folds of brain sometimes throw anything of my autonomy into question. I'm not sure where all of that music, all of that noise, all of those commands are really coming from. I never get to be fully confident in who I am at all...