To dream, perchance to sleep
Tales of the subconscious conclusion
I am ill. More ill than I’ve been in a very long time. And definitely too ill to be sitting here writing about it.
Aside from being ill, I feel like crap. I am restless, but when I get up I want to lie back down. I am hungry, but when I try to eat I am overcome by nausea. I’m wide awake when I want to be asleep, and when I want to be awake I am drowsy. Imagine you’re in a maze, and everywhere you turn there’s a fuckin’ rat. That’s exactly how I feel right now.
But the worst thing of all is the insomnia. It has been three days since I had some proper rest, and I’ll be the first to admit that I am starting to go mad. Yes, mad. Completely bloody mad.
I’ve spent my entire weekend lying on my bed in a cold sweat, caught in a strange delirium, thinking repetitive thoughts of startling irrelevance and stupidity. Even now I can feel the fatigue and disorientation leaking into my mind....
* * *
I must get these papers to the fifteenth floor. Where’s the fifteenth floor? Here are the stairs. Where am I? I must get these papers to the fifteenth floor. It’s been walled off. I must get these papers to the fifteenth floor.
Whoa! I must be dreaming again. Christ, I wish I weren’t hallucinating, so I could get these papers to the fifteenth floor!
Damn! It happened again! There are no papers! There is no fifteenth floor! It’s only a dream. Must... keep... track... of... reality! Now, where’s the fifteenth floor?
Fuck!
Shit!
Shut up!
* * *
Everyone I know has a unique, personal remedy for insomnia. One of my friends bludgeons himself into unconsciousness with red wine. Another bludgeons himself into unconsciousness with vitamin-C tablets. I usually give up trying to fall asleep by about 4 a.m., and write hallucinatory, offensive emails to my exes until I eventually pass out.
However, when it comes to sans-bullshit, take-no-prisoners cures for insomnia, my dad is the master. On his worst sleepless nights, Dad reaches for a small brown bottle he has kept in his medicine cabinet since the 1970s.
According to its label, the fluid in this bottle was originally a “fortified tonic containing vitamins and iron; alcohol 16% in a fine sherry wine base.” But that was then, and this is now. When you look at the label, it’s hard to miss the bold black stamp: “EXPIRY JAN ’78.”
In the more than two decades since it expired, the contents of this bottle have fermented into the most noxious substance known on the planet. My dad has no idea what it’s turned into, and he doesn’t care. All he cares about is that a lidful of the stuff knocks him flat on his back for about twelve hours.
Of course, he only uses this bottle as his last resort—for when this sure-fire sleep fluid is gone, it’ll be gone for good. At sixty-one years of age, my father will not live to expire a bottle of fortified tonic like this again.
* * *
I’m still awake. Damn.
Shut up.
Am I asleep now?
No. Shut up.
Shakespeare was such a fuck.
That’s it. Time for Dad’s fluid.
Dad still has condoms from the 60s, you know.
Of course I know, you idiot. I am you.
Shut up.
* * *
I rolled over and groaned loudly. On top of the cold sweat, I had that horrible stereo sensation of a painfully empty stomach and a painfully full bladder. Yet I could not rise from the bed to satisfy either bodily demand. Even the act of sitting up in the bed seemed too elaborate and planning-intensive to be feasible at that time. I lay there, waiting for some kind of resolution to occur.
Glen?
Yeah?
This is your subconscious mind speaking. I don’t usually make conscious appearances, but I’m fucked.
Get lost.
Come on Glen, get up, you must get up and finish the insomnia piece.
But I finished it a few hours ago.
No you didn’t. That was a dream.
You’re lying. Piss off.
I’m not lying. Go and check for yourself.
I can’t. I can’t move my brain.
You must, Glen. You must.
If it turns out that the insomnia piece isn’t finished, I’m going to file a formal complaint with the dream ombudsfigment. Where is he, anyway?
On the fifteenth floor.
The fifteenth floor. Yes. You know, when this is all over I think I’ll be paying a visit to those assholes on the fifteenth floor.
I am the fifteenth floor.
Oh, shut up. •
Originally published in The Peak, March 22 1999.
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