Sctfree1: carousing in the nightmare. woke up. sleep deprivation demon now lurking.
MThead23: Lurking here too. What’s worse the nightmares or the insomnia?
Sctfree1: i’m easy or uneasy with either.
Sctfree1: one is fear of sleep. the other is fear of life …
Sctfree1: in one you have no control. the other, you have the illusion of control.
MThead23: Both presume a fear of death. I’m afraid of the fear of the fear of death.
Sctfree1: the only thing we got to fear is fear itself? i fear anyone who buys or sells that can of bullshit.
MThead23: Yeah, with food lines stretched from the Hudson to the Mississippi, that was one good sales pitch. That fear was real and so is my fear of death.
Sctfree1: after what you been thru, damn right. my fear — the void is de void and then the big id panic hits and i get undid by my id.
MThead23: You got any ideas how to handle it?
Sctfree1: feed the id … fuck drink play music. do good works. try to avoid acting like a self-righteous nihilistic hypocrite.
Sctfree1: you?
MThead23: I fantasize about doing some of those things.
Sctfree1: i see this shrink, ben butterworth.
Sctfree1: does random associative nocturnal therapy. basic idea in RANT is that insomnia is a form of exile from your subconscious. that dreams and nightmares can help explain and repair the exile.
Sctfree1: he has legit phds from stanford and the psychological institute.
MThead23: Is it helping?
Sctfree1: well, “the void is still the void/and I’m still awake …”
Moses laughed and sang to himself the next lines of the Insatiables’ “Sleep of Faith,” which he knew welclass="underline" and with rocks in my roll / holes in my soul / and gods to forsake / I’m searching for the sleep of faith before reading farther.
Sctfree1: yeah, some. i figured out a few things. ben helped me accept and embrace both my nightmares and insomnia. other shrinks willied me out as voyeurs with degrees who wanted to mess with or understand my “creativity.” ben respects that and wants to leave it alone unless i want to delve into it.
Sctfree1: and i don’t.
Sctfree1: he calls you at indiscriminate nighttime hours and if you’re awake you have a phone session. if you’ve been asleep he wants to know what you were dreaming/thinking the second you woke up. his theory is that in scheduled sessions the brain and body prepare beforehand and your defenses rise too high. in trad therapy most people pretend and blab about themselves.
Sctfree1: if you’re interested …
Moses did not immediately contact Ben Butterworth. He stuck with his “trad” therapist, and aside from the occasional Xanax, continued to resist the pharmacological antidote. He had started teaching a limited schedule. He still spent much of his time at home, where he often hibernated in his room, feeling stranded, a Robinson Crusoe who feared more than desired finding Friday’s footprint. He stared blankly at books he could not concentrate on enough to read, or the computer screen pouring out endless bytes of forgettable minutiae. More than once, twice, ten times, he found himself reaching for the phone to call his mother who, of course, could no longer answer. How goddamned idiotic, he berated himself.
One afternoon, a messenger delivered an envelope from Alchemy. Moses read Alchemy’s enclosed note: “Three tickets to Rio. Open-ended dates. You alone. You and me. You and Jay. You, me, and Jay. Your call.” Jay watched as Moses dropped the envelope on the wood floor and crumpled up the note and threw it against the wall. Jay strode in from the kitchen and uncrumpled the note. She read it while Moses stood motionless.
“Moses, what is wrong? He helped save your life. He wants nothing and is—”
Moses stepped in front of her, picked up the envelope, took out the tickets, and marched down the hallway to his room. His eyes indicted Jay with a clear warning: Do not pursue this line of questioning.
On a top bookshelf of his room stood the menorah that once belonged to Hannah’s mother. Around it he’d hung Hannah’s favorite faux pearl necklace, which she’d also gotten from her mom. He lifted the menorah and placed the tickets underneath its stand. He knew damn well at that moment he was not honoring his mother’s wishes: “Moses, do me proud and act like a mensch in a world of putzes.” He collapsed on the Turkish rug. And simply lay there.
Jay eased into the room and knelt beside him. Her eyes welling up, she cradled him. “Moses. Cry. Cry. Please.”
After many moments, she spoke in a calm yet determined voice. “You can be mad at me, at your illness, at Salome, at your mom, your dickhead father, whatever else you want … You have lots of reasons to be angry and sad, so be angry and sad! Let it out! And then, be generous. Be thankful for all you do have.”
“Jay, I could not have survived without you.” Moses searched for the adequate words, but he could only muster, “I’m sorry. So sorry.”
Neither one could articulate exactly why or for what he was apologizing.
Over the next month, Moses skirted his glance toward the tickets. He could neither rip them up nor act upon the offer. Finally, thinking, Why not? he decided to get Ben Butterworth’s number.
Butterworth, a stocky man in his late sixties, with stillblack, neck-length knotted hair and a withered face, looked like a mixture of Gertrude Stein and Geronimo. His brown-eyed stare was as brawny as his heft. A former college wrestler, Butterworth carried himself like someone thrilled by psychically pinning his patients to the mat. “My aim is to excavate and translate the essential messages from the dross embroiled in that lava mass that we label the unconscious,” he began. “This instant, tell me three fears. Don’t think.”
“I have these daymares. I had one in the hospital that haunts me. I don’t want you to confuse these with fantasies, sexual or otherwise. They’re nothing like that.”
“Don’t explain. Don’t digress. Talk.”
“I’m afraid of losing my mind. That my wife really wants my brother, who she slept with before we met, and that I was her second or third or twentieth choice and she settled for me after she’d had her fun because I’m a schlemiel. And meeting either of my biological parents.” He surprised himself that he had not mentioned death.
“Tell me your ‘daymare.’ ”
Moses pressed his back against the worn gray couch with equally worn and gray pillows. It was either spill or get the hell out. Butterworth remained inscrutable during Moses’s halting equivocations of the “Visitation” daymare. When he finished, Butterworth volunteered his reactions.
“There are many dimensions of ‘reality’ we don’t understand. Odd things occur that can’t be explained. That does not make you a candidate for a mental breakdown. I believe in what can be proved and I’m agnostic on what cannot be disproved. I do not subscribe to past life memories, extraterrestrials, time travel, ESP, or any other speculative sci-fi concoctions. This doesn’t rule them out for eternity. It rules them out for now. There’s more in here”—he pointed to his head and then to the heavens—“than there is out there. We work with your daymares. Your dreams. Your all-too-human insecurity and jealousy probably have more to do with you and your self-image and your parents’ desertion than they do with your wife or brother. Still, those are universal emotions that have implications we can examine, and they will become less detrimental if we resolve the issues with your parents. Your daymares intrigue me. They seem to be a form of night terrors, pavor nocturnus, accompanied by hallucinatory sleep paralysis. Most so-called professionals are ill equipped to properly diagnose and treat these disorders. I am equipped. I can work with you.” He stopped. His eyes projected compassion without sentiment. “Go home. Think about it. No questions asked if you choose not to proceed.”