There are nights when I awake from a terrible nightmare, my simplest and most frightening dream. I am lying in a deep sleep in the bed I lay down in that evening. The setting and time are the same as the actual setting and time. If the nightmare begins at midnight, for instance, it places me in precisely the degree of darkness and silence reigning at that hour. I can see and feel my position; I know the bed and room I am sleeping in. My dream stretches like a fine skin over my body and over the state of my sleep at the moment. One might even say I am awake. I am awake though asleep and dreaming my wakefulness at the same moment I am dreaming my sleep.
Suddenly I feel the sleep growing heavier, trying to drag me down. I would like to wake up, but it weighs heavy on my eyelids and hands. I dream that I am tossing, flailing, but it is stronger than I am and after battling it for a while, I feel it, tenacious, taking hold. I begin to scream; I want to resist, want someone to awaken me; I slap myself as hard as I can: I am afraid sleep is going to drag me too far down, to a place from which there is no return; I beg for help, for someone to shake me awake. .
My last scream, the most powerful, finally rouses me. I am suddenly in my actual room, which is identical to the room in my dream, and in the position I dreamed I was in while struggling with the nightmare. What I now see around me differs little from what I saw a second ago, but there is a feeling of authenticity in the air— about objects, about myself. It is like a sudden winter frost that magnifies the sound of things. .
What does the feeling of my reality consist of? That the life I shall live until my next dream has returned. Current memories and sorrows weigh heavily on me, and I wish to resist them, to avoid falling into their sleep, a sleep from which I might never return.
Now I am struggling with reality. I scream, I beg to be awoken, to awaken into another life, my true life. True, it is broad daylight and I know where I am, I know I am alive, but there is something missing, as there was in my nightmare.
I struggle. I scream. I flail. Who will awaken me?
That precise reality around me is dragging me down, trying to sink me. Who will awaken me?
It has always been like this. Always. Always.