Accelerated Adolescence

Night Terror

If I am nothing else, I am my mother's son. And, though I am many things, chiefly, I am my parents' child. Despite adolescent denials that we will be different, the simple biological similarities of time reveal that apples do not have legs; they tend to lie where they fall. I expect to be very watchful for cancer in my forties. I pray that I won't lose one of my siblings. I have come to regard cancer as congenital, that same newfound respect for fire when one discovers how much pain it can cause.

Like my mother, I sleep like the princess on several mattresses, convinced that there is a pea or a grain of sand, somewhere, disturbing my comfort. She has likened me, asleep, to an octopus with epilepsy. Like my father, I have trouble falling asleep. Lights and small noises will keep me awake for hours. I often find that when I do manage to get to sleep, I am awakened by the slam of a car door or the creaking of the apartment. Constantly struggling for comfort, constantly waking and resleeping again, like a rising and falling tide, I will spend many nights in a lucid dream state. Half-conscious night terrors that will wrench me from my sleep with my heart pleading with my ribs to be allowed to leave, pounding against the fragile cage that restrains it.

Half-conscious, lucid, night-terrors. The terror of reality. The metaphorical monsters of my childhood have taken shape in the more hideous forms of humanity and reality. An ugly monster, dispassionate about my destruction has become my fellow man, bent on torture, slowly, systematically reducing me to nothingness. When I confuse lucidity with reality, I will often not sleep for the rest of the night. Like a terrible video game, the computer player is content with your failure. The human player is content only with accompanying humiliation, firing additional rounds into a dead player, destroying every last trace of even the walls of your great empire, toying with you for psychological effect to cement that they are superior.

In a recent dream, my pregnant sister, Mara, died. I did not witness her death. It was not gory nor frightening. It was so real that I could touch her death. We were all at my parents' home, grieving. I had a dream where my grief was so profound and my experience so real that I could feel the hot tears burning my eyes. We were stunned, stunted, reduced, a family in grief. Our words had been stolen from us. We were half dead, too. Each of us wishing that we could join her in the quiet sleep and forget our sudden stricken isolation. A ruined, broken family, with the presence of an absence moving through the room as though Mara wasn't gone. It was so real. I felt the most intense fluctuations between the agony of grief and the ensuing numbness.

Weeping, unaware of my surroundings, Mara appeared at my side in the ethereal fashion of the dead. Hugging my arm, resting her head on my shoulder. I could feel her soft hair on my neck. We sat there, alone in a house full of people. Dead, together, in a house full of desperate angry pathetic mournful life. Her brief assurance, before her subsequent disappearance, was not sufficient to mitigate my grief. I awoke, unsure if Mara was still alive, only the contradictoriness of my situation was sufficient to convince me.

In the chill of the spring morning, I thought about the meaning of the dream. I considered that the sweetness of my studenthood is coming to an end, two parts of my life are coming to an end. I am leaving for a big city to become self-sufficient, leaving behind a childhood of self-learning for one of other-learning. I decided that these were metaphors of convenience to rationalize away the visceral experience of my grief for my sister. They were offensive comparisons to greater demons that haunt me, that others so non-chalantly stir into a frenzy when I see them.

If I am anything, I am my mother's child. She has spoken of her night terrors, the significance of her dreams. It does not frighten me that I have inherited my mother's dreams. It only makes me feel closer to her, more able to identify with her situation. There are dreams that I can tell you about, the death of Mara is safe to speak of. Yet, there are more senseless, chaotic, terrible dreams that plague me. Dreams that are seemingly incoherent and unrelated to me, all the more horrifying. And, in my pensive quietness of those early morning hours, when I am dwelling on the lucid trauma that my dreams have brought to me, the shattered lives, the broken experiences, I wonder what my mother's dreamed, all these years. How have they shaped her that has shaped me?

Posted by Mendon at March 25, 2007 11:25 AM