In the Arms of Sleep

It’s late at night; I have just finished writing a major paper that I have due the next day in American Literature. Beside me lies my girlfriend Oriana, asleep hours before and disappointed that I was not there to cuddle as she drifted off to dream land. I sigh and take a deep breath. I know what is probably in store for me tonight. I’ve spent too much time awake and my subconscious will pay me back.
Tonight’s dream stars me as the main character. Only instead of having brown thin hair, I have a mop of blond swaying from my skull. I lay in bed with my girlfriend, about to fall asleep when my phone rings; it’s a familiar tone, called “Cat Dance”. Being the ever cute couple I had one day given my girlfriend the nickname kitty because she was small, cute, and loved it when I would pet her hair as she lay on my chest. I assigned “Cat Dance” to be the sound of my girlfriend calling me as a joke, but with its catchy jingle we would often have her call my phone just so we could do stupid dances to the sound of a cat meowing. “Shit, did I assign that to another number?” I think as I reach over, groggy from my brains prepared set up prior to sleep, and hold the receiver to my ear.
“Hello…?” I say in an irritated tone.
I hear crying and heavy breathing. As the mystery voice on the other end tries to gather themselves I hear the vibration of breath being sucked in rapidly combined with a nose sniffle. I sit up in bed, ignoring that I will wake up my girlfriend who is sleeping to my left.
“Hello? Who is this? Are you ok?” The pile of blankets next to me shifts and I feel a hand brush the side of my leg.
“You have to help me, he’s after me. I don’t know what to do he’s just… just… lost it. Please, help me I’m hiding in the…”
Then there are just screams; thin, high pitched screams resonating to a crescendo, screeching through the electronic circuit board, so loud the sound nearly cuts off. I think I hear a man’s voice in the background a split second before I hear a thick, hollow thump and the screams turn to choked bubbling gurgles, another thump and the line goes dead. The phone drops from my hand and bounces a single time on the bed before landing face down on the floor, its indicator light of a dropped call flashing.
I turn to the sleeping woman next to me and harshly nudge her shoulder. “What kind of joke are you playing here?”
Oriana opens her eyes and shoots up to her elbows. “What? What the hell was that for?” She’s angry, not used to having herself woken up in the middle of the night.
I pick the phone up from the ground and throw it onto the blanket bunched up in front of her.
“That’s whats wrong. Which one of your friends did you get to play a cruel trick like that on me?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“The voice, on the other end of the phone, the girl crying, that was you. What did you do, record yourself and change my ringtone? Which one of your drunken ass friends would do this?”
She struggles to understand the situation that’s taking place before her. She remarks with a defense that she would never do anything so cruel. As she does this the phone rings again. Both she and I stare at it as the cat’s happy meow continues with a catchy jingle. I look over to Oriana, checking to see if she was playing a joke on me again by calling me. She lifts up her purse and retrieves her phone showing that it is in fact dead, drained of batteries from one of the hour long conversations with her mother living in Venezuela. I pick up the phone and see the name “Oriana” displayed on the LCD screen. Apprehensively I lift the phone open and place it on speaker.
Woman crying, sobbing. “You have to help me, he’s after me. I don’t know what to do he’s just… just… lost it. Please, help me I’m hiding in the…” and again I hear a scream, thump, gurgle, thump as the connection is lost.
I’m beginning to wake up at this point and my struggling subconscious shoots my brain with the rest of the story. Electrons pulse between synapses; my eyes jut left and right rapidly beneath my closed eyes. My cerebral cortex writes down the information, allowing me to obtain it at any point in time that I want.
And I wake.
Covered in a cold sweat I lay in bed for a few minutes, my eyes staring up at the ceiling fan. I shiver as it brushes freezing air across my chilled flesh. I stand up, pulling the covers back to let my bed air out while I change my shirt. I wander downstairs to grab a cup of water and when I return I see I have woken Oriana up. Unlike the dream girl, she has an easy time waking up in the middle of the night. Her diabetes has trained her with the ability to wake up from dead sleep as an act of self preservation. If my mind has the same reasons, I question as to what they could possibly be saving me from.
“Why are you up?”
I pick up a pad of paper that I keep by my bed and quickly jot down some notes. I explain that she wouldn’t like the reason that I was up. She is ever insistent one, wanting to know more about me, pawing my arm in-between the pencil scratches and I finally relent. I relay the story back to her and continue with what my brain told me should happen afterwards.
“What happens,” I say “is that I continue to get phone calls from this mystery person. No matter if I have thrown my phone away, change my number, or am on a land line, the ‘in dream me’ cannot escape from the harassment. Finally I snap and figure the only way to stop the phone calls is by killing my girlfriend. As I chase you around the house, I lose you, only to hear you making a phone call from inside a closet. The message is the same exact one that always plays when I answer my phone. I kill you, with an axe. Two chops and you’re gone.”
Oriana furrows her brow, not quite happy with how the story is going.
“Afterwards my cell phone rings again. I answer it and it sounds exactly like my own voice. The message says ‘It will never stop, nothing I do can stop it.’ And then I hear the cocking of a gun before the phone goes dead. I pick up the gun I had in my belt and slowly dial my own number, leaving the same exact message. Then I kill myself!”
I scrawl this onto the notebook as I’m explaining it to Oriana, lost in my own thoughts.
“Well? Doesn’t that sounds like a good idea for a book, or a movie? Maybe a TV show or something, it seems kind of short.”
She finishes putting on her last piece of clothing and says:
“I think I’m going home.”
I’ve tried all the popular ways to come up with something to write about. I’ve tried smoking cigarettes, cigars, and hookahs in the manner of Oscar Wilde, Tolkien, and Twain. Instead I was left with a bad taste in my mouth. While crying out for Listerine I was unable to concentrate long enough while smoking to finish one paragraph. Alcohol, so popularized with writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack London and Poe simply led me to smash my hands against the keyboard. I ended up with paragraphs made of decasyllabic words containing only one or two vowels. Living a life filled with debauchery was also a no go. Crippling childhood shyness had wicked away all possible orgies and sexual filled vices that ideas would stem from.
In my wantonness to become a writer my subconscious decided that it would take control. I’m sure that I have happy dreams, ones of ponies and winning the lottery, but I am not allowed to remember any of them. So I use these nightmares, they are the parts which I build my stories with.
I’m too worried what teachers would say to take a dream interpretation class.
As I sit in class listening to the long drone of decasyllabic words spew forth from the mouth of a teacher whose self worth can be measured by the number of sweater vests he owns, my head begins to droop. Struggling to keep my eyes open I shift in my chair, but the battle has been lost. I start to drift further and further down to a dark abyss, I must pay attention in class and
I wake.
That was close, I think to myself still in a haze, and stretch my arms out. At once I can feel thick leather cuffs binding my arms down. My brain reacts violently to being confined and arms my body with a rush of adrenaline. Struggling at my bonds I can feel another set tying my feet down. I’m on my back, in a white room, wearing a white hospital gown. “Calm down, sir.” I hear from some corner, but my head has been restrained and I can only look to my left and right. Who’s there? What’s happening to me? Why am I tied up? I ask the disembodied voice. I hear a chair squeal on hard tile floor and light clicks as footsteps approach me. A tall man leans over the top of me. His hair is slicked to the side, a dying effort to hide his balding head. He wears a dark black suit, dark tie and white undershirt; overall he is the definition of a professional. He clears his throat and I hear the phlegm being swallowed as he starts a new sentence. “I understand you have a few questions as to what you are doing here, and everything will be answered in good time. But right now we have a few questions of our own that we would like you to answer.” He stops, disappears from my view for a second. I hear wheels make light crunching noises as they pass over the floor and he pulls a cart up next to me. There are several objects on the cart, but they are difficult to see from my vantage point. “For instance,” he starts “we’ll start with a simple one. What is your name?”
Andrew Thayer I tell him, puzzled still, but too shocked to do anything.
“Good, now a harder question. Why did you kill everybody in the house, including the children?”
I closed my eyes; this has to be a dream. Opening them again I see the same face staring over me, waiting for an answer. I have no idea what you are talking about I say to him. His features don’t change, almost as if he were expecting me to be clueless about the situation. “We’ve ran tests, you’re not schizophrenic, you have no clues as to having depression or sociopathic behavior anywhere in your brain. When we found you, you were sitting at their table, covered in blood staring off into space Mr. Thayer. In your hands we found this.” From the cart the man lifts up a plastic bag containing a large knife smattered in red. Dangling it in front of my eyes for a second, he places it back down onto the cart and lifts up a second bag, this one containing a small tape recorder, also covered in gore. “We’ve played the tape Mr. Thayer, it’s your voice, but we can’t understand what language you’re speaking. Our best translators are working on it, but we still haven’t a clue as to what you’re saying. Perhaps you could explain.” He pushes the button down, his fingers slipping from the slickness inside the bag, and my world turned black.
I wake up again, free from my bonds. Like a grotesque Rorschach test the walls has been sprayed with thick gouts of blood, hair, and pieces of skin. In the corner lay what was left of the tall balding man. I breathe through my nose to stop myself from the involuntary retching my stomach commands. Clutched in my hands are the knife and tape recorder, still humming as the tape twists inside of it. From the speaker I heard the sound of my own voice, barely a whisper repeating over and over “Come to Daddy, Come to Daddy.”
I wake with a start in class, luckily no one noticed me sleeping, as most of the people around me had been dozing too. Instead of taking the explanations written on the whiteboard, I write down my dream next to my notes on Geology. I hope no one asks to borrow my notebook.
I tell my friends, family, love interests about my stories and always get the same reaction. I must have been abused in some way, or I must have watched too many horror movies. I don’t even like horror movies.
I don’t tell anyone of my dreams anymore. A false front is easier to deal with than a list of questions I can’t answer. When I hear someone say they weren’t able to get any sleep at night I just smile and brag about the load of sleep I got the night before. I don’t mention that I woke up in the middle of the night, unable to get back to sleep because I don’t want to picture my family having nails being driven into their eyes. Most people don’t want to know everything about someone they love anyway. Mothers of murderers are convinced that their son has always been set up. The world is out to get them and an unjust system is working against them.
So what’s my excuse?
I’m no murderer, but my mind is. What unjust system can I blame my thoughts on?
When I write my book I’m going to have to do it under a pen name. The last thing I want is to have people I know questioning whether or not I am stable enough to take care of their children for one night.
The hour is growing late writing this paper and I yawn every few minutes. In a couple more sentences I will save the document, stand up and stretch, then head over to my bed in the other room. As I curl up alone on my bed I wonder who will die tonight.
My breathing relaxes, becoming even and deep. Muscles twitch involuntarily. My eyes shift underneath my lids.
And I dream.