dream therapies

This is a dream. 

You are falling into a pit of despair and you don’t know where and how you got here. There are tears, and they won’t stop falling. There is rage, and it won’t stop calling you, into the belly of some trembling beast. You always knew you would die. You just didn’t know it would be so soon… and so shaken. 

You are hidden, and you find yourself in some cold cell. A cold, kind of cell. It is damp. There are chains, everywhere. There is barbed wire around your skin, but it doesn’t hurt. You are so numb that you can’t even feel it. You are actually hovering above your body, watching. From the ceiling. You see the top of your head. There is a strange yellow puss coming from your left shoulder. You wonder about it. 

Swimming, you are. In a huge ocean. The water is purple, and it keeps sloshing inside your mouth as you extend your arms to carve through the thick wet. It burns when it touches your tongue, and so every breath is labor. You almost laugh at the absurdity because where are you swimming to? You can’t see anything but purple water. You begin to laugh hysterically. Your mouth hurts and is on fire, your breathing: laborious. 

She is screaming something inside of you. Something is screaming inside of you yet you have no voice with which to express it. You have lost your voice. Someone hid your voice, you think. Someone hid it away, far away, a long time ago. Where did they hide it? You don’t know, you can only remember your grandfather in a closet. Breathing and asleep. That is the only image that comes to mind. Did he steal my voice? You wonder. Who has my voice? 

Through the tears and the years you see a yellow light. A small yellow light, and as it approaches it is actually accompanied by a figure. This person is very small and thin and has wings. They are translucent. The way they bat their eyelashes makes you flutter. Have you come to save me? You think. Oh, please. You utter. Save me. Your throat burns, where your voice used to be, and now the strange yellow puss coming from your shoulder has started to also ooze from a place just below your belly button. You are scared and you want to go home. Have you come to save me, you squeak? 

The trembling beast inside of you has awoken. It spits out a name, but you don’t quite catch it. You are running your sharp nails across your own skin and so everything is kind of a blur. You quickly reach for your phone, though. You take a picture of yourself. You change your background image. It’s a bloody picture of you, five years ago. You can’t remember, and the beast doesn’t want you to. It eats you alive, especially when you close your eyes. You can’t remember who you are or who you were, all you can do is continue feeding the hunger that cries from inside. 

The being with the wings looks up innocently and then darts off. HEY! You shout. Where the fuck are you going? You start running but you quickly realize you have lost all feeling in your legs. You collapse, and there is dirt. There is suddenly dirt all around you. You lose yourself in it, smelling, smudging, and spreading the dirt everywhere on your body. You have become transfixed with the metal scent of it. It smells like metal and the earth. You learn to let go, here, for just a moment. In this stench of this. You feel you can let go. 

Thrashing purple water arms lead you up and onto some kind of island. The island is small, and it is overgrown. You sense no further beings on the island, you are alone. But how alone can you really be, you think? With water, air, sound, and sky surrounding you. You breathe deep for the first time in twenty six years. You have only been alive for twenty four, but somehow death is not what it seems. You remember being in the womb. You remember the sharp jabbing pains when your mother would vomit. Your mother vomited for nine months straight. They said something was wrong with her, but there she was, still being a vessel for you to be born. 

And now here you are. You cup your hands around your ribs, because it feels good. And you deserve to feel good. Or at least that is what they tell you. You don’t really know if this is true. You can’t stop thinking about it, but that is okay. At least the puss has gone away. The purple water washed it off. 

Suddenly something odd starts happening. It is like a flood is coming from inside. You lose all sense of your skin (did you have much sense of it beforehand?), and everything becomes a huge, overwhelming sob. You see the beast, but he quickly loses his grip beneath the waves. Your whole body shakes for days. You can’t stop it. You don’t know what it is happening. You are not even there enough anymore to try to control anything. Some people come and visit you, but they don’t look like how you think you remember human beings and friends look. They are silver, and their heads tend to spin in circles. You can’t think straight. You have become a solitary circle, a continuously-occurring tear. The tear tears holes in your soul. You don’t know which way is up or down. You simply feel the water thrumming, all around. It has no color now. You have no color now. You are gone, maybe never to return. 

________________________________________

Your eyes blink open after some time. Things are slow. And too bright, so you close your eyes again. Something aches deep down inside. The good kind of ache though, so you don’t worry. 

Again, the light. It is like the sun is rising, right next to you. You can feel its warmth. The warmth feels good. You lean into it. You hear a song. Emerging, it is the sound of a bird, and a human voice is harmonizing with it. The voice sounds familiar. You wait and see. Maybe… 

Maybe it is your voice. You can feel hands that also feel like yours reaching. Reaching out and wanting the voice to return. You realize you are terrified, but you keep reaching anyway. You can’t see, but you keep reaching anyway. 

Something soft touches your fingers and the sound stops. You feel an indescribable ooze. An ooze that slinks up your wrist, your arm, and into your heart. You feel a kind of click and then a sigh. A sigh escapes from you. A burst of light. And then nothing. 

me, Arapahoe & Ute & Cheyenne territories, cira 2015
photo beheld by Haley Wilson

Nothing of who you are, and nothing of who you have been, you open your mouth. A sound comes out. It sounds like the night. You cry, because you realize that somehow you found what you were looking for. 

All the swimming, the trembling, the burning, you don’t even care anymore about your grandfather and the purple and the puss and his breathing and sleeping and the mystery of it all, because somehow your voice has found its way back to you. 

You have remembered yourself healing, and this is no longer a dream, you are awake, you have a voice, and this is your life. You are ready to live it.