7:13 A.M.
One vision, this: a forest of my childhood. It is deep, long and lush. The deciduous leaves fall as the wind picks up and cools the sweat from my brow. The canopy above turns red and backlights my journey into the approaching sunset.
I walk a long flight of cracked, concrete stairs up to a field, passing rusted-over pick-up trucks and high grass littered with fat ticks and white flowers that resemble ancient bonnets.
At the top of these stairs, thick plastic barbs on thick plastic wire surround the exiting grass where I can see asphalt that winds off into dark farmland into the haziest depths of id and joy. Then, a crack.
I see my room, my bed, my ceiling. I feel the morning air crisp and cool. I smell breakfast cooking: fried eggs and burnt toast. Yet, I cannot move. Bone, muscle, skin. They all feel but do not react to plea or demand. I am still in the dimensions of that forest, the visions that lock the muscles, paralyze me with fear. They whip my nerves like an overseer of my personal hell. And still, now, in the waking world, I am not yet free.
Now this: on my chest a demon is perched. His eyes, bulbous, gleam silver. The skin of his feet cerise and hot, weigh heavily on my innards; I stop breathing, for I cannot with this weight.
On the killing fields of conscious brain, the corpse of my spirit bakes in the heat of angular sunlight. Here, little control of the pulses and impulses and rattles of truth is had–just a cracked, yellow smile from the scaled gargoyle, the rattle of his teeth as he demonstrates his desire to tear the flesh from my body.
Here, until I truly wake, the seconds expand, giving credence to the sudden flashes of brainwave from node to node–jumps that are taken for granted at work and play. Until I wake, a new worth is accrued for the words “creation,” “Creator,” and “alive.”
In this place, the demon chirps like the night cricket. In these frustrations of the waking mind, I squeeze out myself until a severing pop is heard. In the echo, the demon vanishes.
That is to say, I no longer see him. But this is not true of his voice, nor his breath.
From the walls he whispers again; the jibberish is soft, yet glottal; it makes little sense but it is a language that I will come to know–a fever of pitch and melody that I will love, wholly, in this waking world.