You become addicted to lucid dreaming, and start having trouble telling reality from dreams.
It should be easy. Flying, floating: a dream. Sitting, bored, in a classroom: reality. Clear lines.
It isn’t easy.
I forget I’m dreaming. I am in a classroom, I am in a coffee shop, I am in normal surroundings, but one by one they fall away. I am not the sort to dream of flying over wild lands. My dreams are my life, or a version of it.
But in my dreams, the rooms are quiet. And the people are not real. In my dreams when I speak, no one speaks over me. In my dreams, people listen. And when I do not want to speak, the conversation ends.
In my dreams, when I am tired, everything falls away, and I move on to the next scene.
I am in the library. You are speaking to me. I don’t want to hear the next words. This is the page where I slam the cover shut, put the story down, wait until I am calmed and prepared to continue.
You are speaking. The scenery falls away. We are in a restaurant. That was a dream, just then? I thought that was really you, telling me things I don’t want to hear. Was that not you?
We are in a restaurant. You are repeating yourself. These words don’t make me apprehensive, but I do not comprehend them. What are the words? Are you mumbling? Or is that my ears? Wait, you’re tugging at my sleeve. I know what happens next. This is a dream, so I know what happens, because I choose it.
Why did I choose this? You are crying. You don’t do that often. You are looking into my eyes, and you are sad, and afraid. Did I make you afraid?
It’s after the restaurant. I couldn’t understand your words before, but now they are in my ears, going back and forth like the tongue of a bell. Come back. Come back.
Back where? I am here, where are you?
Why did I start dreaming to begin with? You were in love with life, and with me. Was I in love with you? Did that scare me?
I was always waiting to sink to the bottom. I was waiting for a cue.
It’s after the restaurant. I am dreaming. I’m walking on a bridge. There is a small lake. But no, it is a river, because I have decided. And it is not small, not at all, and it is in fact very far down, I have decided this too. Or was it always a river? Was I dreaming to begin with?
But the sun is on me as I leap off the bridge. Halfway to the bottom I decide to sprout wings, and I wait, patiently, to see what happens next.
Gaud are you okay?
i’m a melodrama bitch
How is your writing always so beautiful and vibrant but unsettling at a level so deep my lizard brain wants to hide
hey heads up if you get a youtube ad that’s chris pratt telling you not to skip, take his advice. it’s an ad for the Lego Movie 2 that literally plays the entire first movie
I periodically feel so fucking sad for women in history. I feel like birth control in countries where it is widely used has made women forget an aspect of male cruelty and sociopathy that is now less apparent (giving the illusion that men have improved when only women’s defences against men have)—the fact that for most of history men could live with a woman for decades and not care that they were slowly killing her with endless back-to-back pregnancies which not only resulted in early death more often than not, but also in a total smothering of the woman’s spirit and talents. I saw a quote by Anne Boyer the other day that called straight relationships for women “not only deadly, but deadening”—as I was reading Jill Lepore’s Book of Ages, a biography of Benjamin Franklin’s sister Jane, who was bright and loved reading and wrote some poetry, but had little time to make anything of her life in between her 12 pregnancies. Benjamin Franklin’s mother had 10 sons and 7 daughters. What could they possibly accomplish when their husbands kept impregnating them year after year after year throughout their entire adult life?
Charlotte Brontë eschewed marriage longer than most (writing to Ellen Nussey that she wished they could just set up a little cottage and live together) but she finally married at 38, became pregnant, and died before her 39th birthday. If she had married younger would Jane Eyre exist? I was reading that biography of Charity & Sylvia last month and comparing their life together in their little cottage to the life of their married female relatives, which was honestly hell on earth. One of Charity’s sisters had 18 children. Charity’s mother had 10 living ones, and probably some additional stillbirths. She gave birth to her first child age 19, in 1758, then to a pair of twins in 1760, then another child in 1761, another in 1763, another in 1765, another in 1767, another in 1769, another in 1771, another in 1774, another in 1777. Charity was the last child and her mother had been sick with tuberculosis for months when she became pregnant with her, and she died soon after giving birth.
I wish people would call this murder—this woman was murdered by her husband, like countless other women who do not ‘count’ as victims of male violence because straight sex is natural, pregnancy is natural, childbirth is natural. But when after 20 years of nonstop pregnancies this woman had tuberculosis and suffered from severe respiratory distress, severe weight loss, fever and exhaustion, and her husband impregnated her again, her death was expected. He must have known; he just didn’t care. This woman’s sister—Charity’s aunt—remained a spinster and outlived all of her married sisters by several decades, living well into her eighties. (Ironically, male doctors in her century asserted that sex with men was necessary for women’s health. The biographer quoted from a popular home health guide which said that old maids incurred grievous physical harm from a lack of sex with men.) And this aunt had the time and liberty to develop her skill for embroidery to such an extent that two museums still preserve her embroidered bed drapes. She accomplished something, she nurtured her talent and self. Her name was also Charity, and I find it interesting that Charity’s mother named her last daughter, whose pregnancy & birth killed her, after her childless, unmarried sister.
When I see women reblog my post about Sophia Tolstoy’s misery with her 13 children, adding comments like “thank god marriage is no longer synonymous with this”, I wonder if they realise that men have not magically become any kinder or more concerned about their female partner’s health and fulfillment, it’s just that women now have access to better ways of protecting themselves from their male partner’s indifference to their health and fulfillment.
Anxiety-prone-human 