Ghost with Purple Glasses

Jimoteè Chamameé

does this count ?

When you get four vampires in a flat, obviously there’s going to be a lot of tension. There’s tension in any flatting situation.

But anyway, this does have a downside; vivid, elaborate dreams make for vivid, elaborate nightmares. I can usually tell when it’s one of those nights, since he grinds his teeth pretty badly.

I was never quite sure what to do when I knew he was having a bad time of it, though the grinding alone was enough to worry me and push me towards intervening. I used to just shake him gently, hope to rouse him just enough to reset the dream or something, but it wasn’t too effective and anyway waking him up all the time isn’t good for rest.

I’m rather proud of the strategy I eventually settled on: gently, so as not to wake him up, I’d lay one arm across his hands, wrapping his fingers around me so that he was holding on. Nightmares being nightmares, I can usually count on a pretty tight grip when this happens.

It may seem a little odd, but consider that holding on to something with both hands is typically a very agentic frame of mind. We hold on to things that give us power, in one way or another, and possessing objects often makes us feel powerful in some respects. That has consequences, even for a dreaming mind.

I knew it was working when he woke up rather mystified from one such dream, and told me that he’d been running through the caverns of some dungeon or cave system, pursued by monsters, but then all of a sudden he was holding a giant anime sword and fought them off instead. So I got to be a sword for him that night, I was delighted.

I don’t usually get to know exactly what happened, since even for a very vivid dreamer like Ritter, nine tenths of these things get forgotten. But I know I’ve been things like door handles, steering wheels, stuff like that. And even when I don’t know what I am to him, he doesn’t grind his teeth nearly as much- the sleep is deeper and more peaceful, so I get plenty of feedback that it’s working.

It’s such a perfect encapsulation of love in microcosm, isn’t it? No matter how much you mean to them, and how much they mean to you, the gap between two conscious lives is fundamentally separating you. But fundamental does not mean insurmountable. There’s this whole world in him, full of dreams and perspectives that I’ll never truly experience. But I will be a part of those worlds all the same, finding little ways here and there to make sure that the dreams of me make him a better, stronger, and happier person.

And Great Straight White Male Writer 1 said: Everyone in my ideal audience is dead.

And, just when I thought that Great Straight White Male Writer 1 might elaborate, and say something predictable like “my grandmother” or “that elementary school English teacher who taught me everything,” it got worse. Because then he added, “You know, Virgil, Homer, Shakespeare”—I’m serious, that’s what he said! Here he was onstage in a gorgeous turn-of-the-century theater with hundreds of people in the audience who had each paid $20 to see him, but no, none of us mattered, it was only about all those long-dead men of the canon.

It’s hard to imagine anything more damaging to literature than questions about audience. Then again, it’s hard to imagine anything more damaging to literature than literature.

When we write on our own terms, with all the specificity, nuance, complication, messiness, contradiction, emotion, confusion, weirdness, devastation, wildness and intimacy, when we write against the demand for closure or explication, we write against the canonical imperative, and instead write toward the people who might actually appreciate our work on its own terms. I mean we write toward our selves. We also write toward change. A canon is a cannon is a canon. Wait, don’t shoot me, I’m already dead.