Hypnogogia

My eyes wake up caught between worlds, pupils bobbing on the surface of the dream like black buoys jacketed in carrion and crow feathers. The sweat in them seethes quietly.

It's happening again, in the same place I never remember even when I'm there. Some frozen spot where I can watch the full eternity of an itch. Where I am mid-walk my entire life, or locking the same door, body folding down into an envelope crushed beneath the weight of a book. It's here where things happen that have nothing to do with who I am. OCD dreams, blanket stranglings, waking paralysis pass me like strangers. Samples of hell I'll never remember.

Eyes wide, I'm afraid of birds pooping into them, but I'm trapped on my back like some unlucky beetle. Strapped to an immobile spine, drifting through unresponsive constellations of muscle. And I can still hear the speaking from my dream, the syllables reporting like hammer falls from across the street. My eardrums feel underwater with blood. Wells flooded red. And I'm down there panicking for someone's hand to pull me up. I can just almost break some invisible case around me, and the terror is the annoyance. Hot and sticky and still.

I get tired of the pointless surges of will, and relax to strange beliefs flying in every direction, embedding themselves in the walls. People are in my room. My dad near my closet, a lady with fingernails groping out of her eye sockets. Crowds? Heartbeats and clicking tongues. Milling wet smacks in a movie theater, other people's breaths. They're watching, possibly without anything to say. And I squirm invisibly inside a limp and defenseless body, bones stapled to the bedsheets. Lungs breathing themselves, pores sphinctering out trickles of cold sweat.

I start believing I can leave it. I tell myself my blood feels warmer, over and over like mantra. Each time is a forced thrust, an impatient spasm. But each ramming knocks things loose. I start to feel agency in my fingertips, and it spreads like the breath of life over my legs and back, dethawing in puddles like frosted meat. The watching people have left unnoticed, and some sinkhole swallows the rest of the dream gibberish in a bathtub tornado.

Eyes find their bearing, and I blink deliberately, not a wormy drop of bird shit to be found.