#day008

I usually don’t fall asleep until it’s technically the next day, so this story is of my sleep from the early hours of today.

I’m not sure if I was in the process of falling asleep or if I was just awakening from having fallen asleep somewhat, but I found myself at the boundary of being conscious and unconscious (though I didn’t know it; I thought I was lucid since my eyes were open). Somehow, the poster made by the freshmen from the small group I led senior year looked eerily like the opening of a rectangular tunnel carved through my wall with the image of a haggard, bony lady crouched there, as if waiting to come out. Part of my mind knew that this picture I was seeing was 2D, yet I still used my leg to hold my body pillow up against it so that the ‘lady’ could not inch forward and come out.

Was that resistance I perceived?

The little fear that wondered whether it may be more than a 2D image caused me to start saying, “What is going on… what is going on…” Perhaps a piece of tape came undone, or a pin fell out, but whatever it was, the air currents from the ceiling fan seemed to draw the bottom of the poster toward itself, and all of a sudden, the ‘lady’ seemed to come alive and begin to crawl forward, and the trailing ellipses in my mumblings turned into the interrobangs of frantic screaming.

I don’t know how I broke out of that ‘nightmare’, but I suddenly understood what it was I was looking at, and the pulsing shadows became flat and harmless once again. It still took me a while after that to calm my breathing down and be okay with closing my eyes.