Last night, I dreamed that I died. I knelt down on an icy
patch of granite, tied my own legs together with a wrist-thick piece of rope,
and committed seppuku with a bronze-tipped walrus tusk. It really hurt for a
moment, and I felt my sleeping body rack with a coughing fit as my dream form
seized and keeled over. The dream then continued on as if nothing had happened,
leaving my corpse in the snow as my mind soared over the vast chasm between
Kilimanjaro and the Transantarctic mountain range. I was somewhere, I was
everywhere, and I was stone dead.
I wondered why I had done what I had. I became aware that I
was dead in a dream, and for a moment that felt like fourteen years, I was
frightened – frightened for my family, for my now-extinct bloodline, for my
mortal soul. A rush of latent Christianity flooded my unconscious; the Marianas
trench, countless miles below my high-flying mind, suddenly warped into a
hellish scene of fire and sulfur and deep undersea screaming. I flew higher to
escape the noise.
Up here it was a little quieter. The steady whistle of air in
my ears had become a source of comfort until I began to wonder whether or not I
even had ears anymore. I felt an urge
to reach down and check if my body was still there. Then the fear returned. “Moving”
“my” “body” – these words were now such a stream of nonsense, an infinite
abstraction – it felt like all the gravity in the known universe had been
sucked out, like the worm in the tequila. I wasn’t flying anymore. This was
something new, something different, and something old.
They say if you die in a dream, you die in real life. As far
as I know, this has not yet happened, and I must therefore still be alive in
some form or another. I scan the horizon for clues and find only the usual
suspects – monolithic white clouds, incomprehensibly large gas giants, the
endlessness of space, and inverse universes. There’s more, I know there is. I
flex whatever body I still possess and set my internal controls for
top-dead-center. I felt the adrenaline that only light speed can deliver. My
heart rate slowed to a crawl, and I felt my sleeping self shuffling our head
over to the cold side of the pillow.
Suddenly I stopped, although it might be more appropriate to
say something stopped me. I was standing under a great orange sky, and for a
moment I thought for certain that I must have broken through to Mars. The soil
was rust-colored and strange trees covered in thick hair were silhouetted
against the setting sun. All gravity had returned. I felt out of breath and
extremely thirsty; my sleeping self smacked our lips and groaned slightly.
Unsure what to do, I began walking towards the sunset. “West,” I heard from
somewhere. “Go west.”
I walked for ten days, until my feet bled and my calves
burned acidic. My retinas were permanently scarred from staring into the sun,
and my forehead blistered with third-degree sunburns, but I kept walking
because I was sure I would die if I didn’t. I longed to feel the fur of those
faraway trees, to be swallowed into the liquid heat of the universe, but what I
got was a death march through the chaparral. I felt like I was being watched. “Go
west,” I heard again.
I lost track of time. My body was shriveling like a banana
left outside, and turning similar shades of gray. My muscles were betraying my
grand ambitions and my hair was falling out in patches. I labored on as the
gravity increased further – I felt as though I was being pulled into the earth
by the root-fingers of some great uncaring beast, just another guy doing his
job.
I couldn’t even say how long it took me, but one day I tasted
salt and knew I had made it: over space, under time, and west across the
desert, to the sea. I collapsed to my knees and grabbed fistfuls of sand. These
old stones all fought the same battle, up from the depths and into the Santa
Barbara air. I was somewhere again. I had left everywhere behind, gone from
macro back to micro, from supermassive, volatile gas giants to little polished
grains of inert sand. A sea bird landed in front of me and cawed, but its call
sounded strange. Perhaps I had changed in ways I would never understand. It
cawed again, a sharp,shrill, buzzing sound –
-and then I woke up. My alarm was jolting, mechanical,
finite; I never felt more exhausted. This would be a two-pots-of-coffee sort of
day. I got out of bed, rubbed my eyes, shook the sand out of my shoes, and
faced the day like a soldier back from war. First thing this soldier wants is
breakfast.
-MJ 2/9/2013
