A membrane filling with air or blood. It grows where my brain should be bobbing in my head, but isn't, and the dream is the color of closed eyelids in bright light. I see it from the inside and feel the membrane stretch, the pressure on the inside of my skull. Then it breaks and I feel that too. Like a balloon bursting by my ear. From the inside. And I am startled awake.
***
I told Richard this dream when he offered to interpret one. We were standing around the bonfire. Wendy wanted to sing. I wanted ghost stories. Richard said give me a dream, I'll interpret it.
--Recurring I said, but it's just started recurring.
--Recurring? How long is the dream?
--It happens very fast.
--And what color is the balloon?
--Pink, I guess.
--It's your consciousness expanding.
--Really? It feels like aneurysm.
--No, consciousness is pink. Aneurysm is red.
--Good to know.
***
But neither red nor pink, now that I've gotten a closer look. A membrane much like an eyelid, veined and growing. It's dark in there but I view it from within, so there is also its slick mucous feel. The first time, I woke on the twin bed in the little room I shared with Glaydah in Vermont. The light was on because Glaydah was still out and the light was giving me trouble. I thought my head had burst and let the light in. My eyes were closed but the light came through.
***
Familiar in another way. We dove for rings and coins all summer and practiced skimming the bottom of the pool. Stay down as long as you can, okay? Trystan's challenge at the municipal pool, and later in the ocean. As long as you can. Okay. Light art, weightlessness, blue and cool, and all you have to do is hold your breath. You can't stay long, but stay as long as you can.
***
What world is that? The one I can't occupy. I can't see the inside of my own head as though standing in it and looking around. Will not move through water with gills and an air bladder. There is equipment that allows for some semblance of these experiences, but only artificially. What does the eyelid do? What the throat does, what the anus does. I don't know what you're thinking, how you glue things together in your skull, not really. You don't know either. Open, close, open close. The dream is not itself mysterious; it stands in for the irritable reaching after. Closure. Which is impossible, of course.
***
It might end with its own parallel. The dream, my waking, my holding my breath, and the relief, waking and taking a breath, the apneic throat failing to open, the membrane stretching, the lungs holding, the heart pumping dark blood through a sleeping brain growing sleepier with oxygen deprivation. It fights back with a dream let's say. To open things up again. Expanding consciousness: you forgot to breathe again. You cannot live here in this place where there is no breath. The membrane breaks, startles me awake, and I inhale, those collapsing moments. And another: I wake to find myself not breathing and cannot sleep for fear of forgetting.
***
Not, as I'd first thought, that forgetting leads to dying, that it is 'life threatening' according to information available about apnea. But that forgetting leads to delusion. Promise. Dream. That's my fear: "the world wants to be deceived," Kaufmann writes in his Prologue to Buber's I and Thou. And me too, I want to be deceived. "Mundus vult decipi; but there is a hierarchy of deceptions." At the bottom, oblivion. Forget everything. At the top, forget only what is unpleasant.
***
