You know the feeling, that push-pull of consciousness as you slide between dreams and daylight
You know the feeling. That push-pull of consciousness, your face pressed to the pillow as you slide between dreams and daylight. That liminal space we inhabit when we’re half-awake is a half-world; we’re just as alive there, just as vital, but reality is flexible, more formless. The high-density fuzz of this in-between space can obscure something as significant as a loved one leaving us; it can also thin the walls of reality, allowing us to be connected, ghost-like, with places and people far away.
When I read these stories from people all over the world, all existing in their own half-awake spaces, it reminds me how ordered we are when we’re fully awake, how we experience time and space in straight lines, and what a contrast that is to the hazy, blooming edges of our half-awake minds, opening us up to something new. — From the Editor, Evyn Williams
I.
There are spider-silk threads of dreams sticking to the corners of my mind. I keep my eyes closed, pushing out the creaking floorboards as the cats pad to their breakfast.
Breathe, focus.
I know that I repeated three things over and over like an incantation as I was falling asleep (a moose-skull necklace, Peter Pan, the Königssee), but dreams are fickle and defiant, and I can almost recall something… a semicircle? A ring with a cross?
These don’t trip my adrenaline with recognition, and as fast as I grab for it, the thread snaps. It’s gone.
I give up. Se lever.
It’s further gone now, as the hours pass, as I walk the dog on garbage day and look at the crooked evergreens and think, I’ve grown more palatable with time.
Maybe I don’t need to hold so tight.
II.
My mother wore a blue dress the night she left us. I was half-awake, watching her retreating figure shimmer in and out of my vision, sometimes as solid as a sapphire, other times translucent as fog.
I must have stirred because she stopped and turned. I remember she smiled. I don’t remember her walking back; I must have slipped into sleep again. Moments later when I resurfaced she was there, leaning over me. The heaviness and torpor of sleep battled fiercely with a nagging fear that something was wrong.
She spoke — words I’d heard her say many times before. Yet, on this particular morning, my four-year-old brain sensed a new weight to them.
“Be a good girl. Take care of your sister.”
Fading again, I said her name. Mommy.
When I fully woke, she was long gone, but the word lingered like a ghost throughout the room.
III.
Raindrops whisper on damp windowsills.
Cavernous lungs fill nearby like a tide withdrawing from shore.
Discomfort. Elbows and puppy paws poke exposed flesh.
Blankets, a taffy made of fleece. Contort around bent limbs.
Muscles, caught sleeping, stand at attention. Overcompensating.
Mouth. Inside-out cactus. Deep down dry yet hot and humid on the surface.
Dream into memory into a sliver of blue morning light through half-squinted eyes.
Reaching out, subconscious counting. Her. Pup. Cat.
Phone. Six. Two. Seven. One more hour.
Blue morning light fades into memory into dream.
IV.
I once had a surprisingly realistic dream about having breakfast in bed. It wasn’t until I woke up that it dawned on me that it wasn’t a dream.
I rolled over onto my side and made a horrifying discovery. A sandwich had attached itself to my back like a splattered leech.
I had fallen asleep while eating breakfast. How is that even possible?
Some people probably get off on having butter and jam smeared all over their bodies, but that morning I came to the conclusion that I am not one of them.
V.
I used to smoke a lot of pot. Back in the shared-house-live-on-white-bread-never-vacuum-use-the-phone-book-as-toilet-paper-microwave-everything-drink-only-beer days, it was a frequent activity. I shared a house with three other guys and we were feral. Invariably, the first one home would roll up, and by dinner time we were baked — and by dinner, I mean a cup of tea and a dry Weet-bix or three, sometimes with Vegemite spread on it.
The house was not healthy. I also took a lot of Temazepam at the time for insomnia. I’d smoke pot until 10 P.M. and then bomb two or three or four and black out.
One morning, I woke in a fog. Literally. My room was thick with white cloud and I was blinking and feeling this cold morning dew sensation on my legs. I shivered and saw my breath, and then, at the end of my bed, I saw someone sitting.
“Hey,” I said, dry-throated, but the figure didn’t move.
I shivered and pulled the covers up; I found them wet with dew. I sat up blinking and the figure at the end of my bed seemed to start crying. It seemed to be a girl; she seemed to be younger than me and wearing just a bed sheet. I was freezing by now.
“Hey, are you OK?”
She turned towards me, revealing the face of my friend. A good friend, you know that friend — the one you call when life goes wrong-shaped and you need an ear. The friend who’ll give you their last chocolate biscuit without blinking.
She turned and she was sobbing, looking beyond me. I turned to look behind me and saw a vague outline of a car park instead of my bedroom wall. There was a dog chewing on a stick and I heard a car engine.
“Hey, Kez, what’s up?”
She blinked and now focused on me.
“Where are you?”
“Durham Park,” she said, and I pulled myself out of bed.
“OK,” I said, but now my room was my room.
I pinched one of my housemate’s cars and drove twenty odd miles in the early dawn. I got to the park and saw her sat on a bench wrapped in a bedsheet.
“Hey,” I called, and she wandered over. She got into the car and asked what the hell I was doing there. I turned the heating right up.
“I was just driving,” I said. I drove her home. She gradually told me about a fight the night before with the guy she’d been seeing. He’d hit her. She’d fled. She’d been crying in the park. She was dressed under the sheet, but only in a t-shirt and underwear.
“What are you doing here?” she asked me, again and again. “I was just driving,” I said. “You know me, I don’t sleep.”
She sunk in her seat and sighed. “I was thinking about you,” she said.
A few days later, she bought me lunch and asked me again about that morning. I told her about seeing her at the end of my bed, about the morning fog in the room.
She frowned and nodded. She told me she thought she’d heard me asking where she was when she was sitting on that bench.
We both looked at each other. Well, that was fucking freaky.
VI.
A telemarketer called me on my first and only day off work during the week.
I was so exhausted when I picked up the phone that I let the telemarketer talk and talk without interruption.
Finally, she asked, “Do you think these terms apply to you?”
I, without hearing a single word she uttered, and forgetting to whom I was speaking, replied, “Sure. Can I call you back later? I’m tired. Love you. Bye!”
She said, “Love ya, too!”
VII.
The world has lost its shape. There is nothing left but the curvature of the waves and the straight-lined horizon.
I think I can feel my body deteriorating. I think there are barnacles growing on my shoulder blades.
You are my every thought here; I am scared I will forget you when I wake up, that you are only kept alive by this place. Do you still cover your mouth with your hand when you laugh? Is there still that Big Dipper formation of freckles on your right arm?
I imagine the words come back and I think I remember your mouth, but your voice is too soft now. I think I’m finally too far away.
Between sleep and wake, there is a vast emptiness. And there is you.
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