Early Bog #11 (The Dream)

One of my last blogs from two years ago before I switched to my own website here at Husband Amused. I have a feeling this may be correlated to the days my tumor began expanding again, but that is just a guess. This is kind of trippy:

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2009 9:25 AM, EDT

I woke at 4:30am, knew it was too early, then proceeded to have a very unusual morning unfold. I lay awake, trying to put more than one thought together at a time. This has been hard: multi-thinking. Since the surgery I can do one thing and then do another. But I can’t comprehend two things at once unless I write it on a list and do them sequentially: one, two, three, four, etc..

Why I like mornings, I guess. The clean slate. Every action is an unadorned etching you can take time with by itself until you do the next one. I used to enjoy this as a luxury, but right now it is a necessity. Noah pills. Noah outside. Noah inside. Paper.

This morning, trying to mull over several things at the same time, I fell into a deep dream. I was walking in a garden with flowering plants and trees. Vegetables grew too, everywhere. But the vegetables, when I approached them, were in fact words hanging off the plants. I picked them, pulled them apart, rearranged the letters, made sentences. I could hold them in front of me and they would stay in mid-air as I reached for another word to go with it.

In the distance, I heard the blip of musical notes, quick arpeggios. D minor, staccato, higher pitches. I went to hear where the notes came from and the sound emanated from another plant, a giant hot pepper plant larger than I had ever seen before. I jangled the peppers and they made the sound again, those beautiful arpeggios as they touched one another. I tried jangling others of a different size and they added new notes, new colors (G-sharp alternating with A) to the already twinkling sonorities of D minor.

Then I felt a bass note. A benevolent D-natural in the grass that vibrated the skin underneath my feet, one note held out forever, sustained by the vibrating blades of grass as the air passed gently between them.

Things turned dark. All color faded away. The sky dimmed and I looked up to the clouds. The sky turned into a movie screen and someone said, “This is a film reel with scenes of rockets exploding.” I watched the blurry gray images of the clouds, but I saw nothing in them. I was holding my oboe now, and my oboe, on its own, rose into the air. My arms were fully outstretched. My own grasp of it and bodily weight prevented the oboe from flying away. But by continuing to hang on, it pulled me into the sky. My oboe was the rocket, and I felt myself tear apart from my physical body with a violent SNAP! as I followed it upward.

I was in my bedroom now, having floated up to the ceiling, curled in the top far corner of the room, my arms clutching my oboe to keep me flying. It was an unusual sensation I have experienced a few times in my life, this out-of-body feeling that is so real. I was fully awake, looking down at my bed and I could see myself lying there. MJ was gently shaking me because I was shrieking with some kind of nightmare. It looked like frames of a movie were stuck for a second, then they jolted forward to the next second, then the next. Very angular and raw. Film jamming and tearing in the projector, spitting through violently. Something terrible was happening down there. MJ was horrified, screaming, and I wanted to get back. With an audible SNAP! I flew myself back inside my body.

I saw a flash of my surgery. Metal instruments. Knives. Metal probing deep inside my head. Male voices: “In?” “Yeah, good.” By God, it was real. A memory. I saw it. It was real.

I felt MJ’s hand rocking my shoulder, soothing me out of my nightmare. I stirred briefly but stayed asleep. I woke a few minutes later, still feeling MJ’s hand holding me. I breathed in and out.

I said, “Love you.”

I slept some more, dreaming of musical notes. Harmonies. Polyrhythms. I was composing.

When I woke, MJ was out of bed. I leaned up to see the time. In my glance at the digital clock I caught the exact moment it flicked from 7:59am to 8:00am.