On Night Terrors, The Malleable Play-Dough Engram, and Being Bent the Wrong Way

I have been sick for the past few days, and when I get sick, I dream terrible, Raskolnikov dreams. The past two nights the same night terror has recurred, and it has kept me up for what has seemed to be hours in strange, feverish worry.

This dream is particularly eerie because it plays in a loop, over and over, and because it does not present itself in fluorescent colors or MTV editing. Instead, it is a mundane replay of just a few minutes on Sunday night. It seems utterly real in that it simply reads the script of the life I lived just a day or two previous.

I had been at a friend's house with a small group of intimates. We were sitting around her kitchen table, enjoying Play-Dough. In turns, we would present a category-- favorite food, dream job, etc.-- and each person would try to represent their answer in the clay. For the question "if you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?"-- I chose to represent Northern California, or, just to make it simple, San Francisco. After attempting a model of the Golden Gate Bridge, I retrenched my efforts and instead chose to create a flat State of California with a little red "X" at San Francisco. My comrades guessed pretty quickly-- after trying to think of some islands shaped like that, one said, "but it looks like California," and there you have it.

The dream is pretty much just that, looking out of my own eyes. Yet in the dream, the white clay does not look like California. It is bent the wrong way. The Southern half veers out to the west as it goes south, rather than to the east. I watch myself make California wrong again and again, and again, and again, an infernal loop. Over and over. And each time I don't know that I'm making California bend the wrong way, and my friends gaze at it and humor me. And then I startle awake, after repetition upon repetition, but the dream does not leave me. I keep playing it, for now I am convinced that it is real-- why did I make California bend the wrong way? And why did my friends humor me? And what do they think of me now?

I pray for sleep to return, but I fidget, I squirm, I fret. Should I bring it up when I see them next, and make excuses? Sorry, I've been sick, things have not been right, I'm going mad, you saw evidence: Reverse-California. Bring me chicken soup. ~ I know it was wrong, it was to throw you off, haha, aren't I tricky? ~ I was making a mirror image so that when I flipped it, the surface would be smooth and pretty, but I forgot to flip it. Oops. But I always return to the same idea: just avoid those friends. Forever. Cut the losses. They will never respect my intelligence again. It is the only way to overcome.

In the morning, I realize that it was just a dream. How could I have bent California wrong? It is impossible. All the dream is is a sad statement of my egoism; that my terror should be some trivial moment where I fail to realize a stupid mistake. The hours I spend in half-waking worry are symptom of my needing to be loved for my ability to be right. In the daytime, I vow to cleanse myself of these vain, arrogant insecurities and build a normal soul, whose night terrors may be psychedelic clowns and sudden volcanoes.

But the dream wears the clothes of memory. I see my hands working the clay through my own eye sockets. The dialogue is dull, and it never changes. I see the little shards of hardened red Play-Dough. There is no lurking detail, no strange furniture, no out-of-context faces to label it a dream. I feel my own ignorance-- or, that is, I fail to see truth-- as I form the lopsided figure: the terror comes when I awake to replay it not as dream but as memory, and in my feverish, sleepy stupor, interpret it and feel. I cannot anymore picture my white clay California except for it being utterly backward. The night terror has re-written my memory.







Or maybe I bent California wrong.