I had another “episode” last week after suffering three nights of exile from my sleepself. Thankfully, these new burns are not severe. Dr. Bellows did not exactly react with compassionate rectitude as I tried to explain the terror of clarity.
The terror begins when I see my life as one long nocturnal arc of sleeplessness. I become enraptured by visions of such persuasive and vital detail—when the veils that divide the mist of real and dream, past and future, fall—and all the timeless dimensions stretching between Dream and Reality become one. These dimensions, except during the “clarity,” are as unseeable as the eighty percent of the universe that is hidden, dark matter. The invisible tentacles of light eviscerate my soulsmell. I feel the light tentacles transforming into laser blades that slice into my synapses, which sets off an uncontrollable panic that I will be separated from my body. The psychic protons that hold me as a consciousness are jettisoned, and I am disseminated into the universe, into nontime, lost in the dark matter. I fear I will never again find myself whole.
This is not at all similar to the transcendent out-of-your-body creative experience that is familiar to every true artist. Or when I am communing with my DNA. The clarity is no spiritual reverie. No, I am ripped from my essence, my body and soul. I never know if I will come back to myself or if I will forever be torn, trapped in this unforgiving, odorless realm.
It happened again last week, the same way it first happened when I was teenager. After the baby died—and he did die to me!—I awoke during the night and ran shrieking into my parents’ room. They stayed awake with me all night as my body trembled. Hilda put warm compresses on my head. Dad rubbed my feet. It happened once with Horrwich, too, on the night of my ungraduation party. It happened when Alchemy was murdered.
When I hurt myself or hurt others, it is because this terror is seething and I can feel the waves beginning. My cuttings, my burnings are my declaration: I am real. You are real. I can hurt myself and hurt you and I can bleed. I will remain tethered to this reality, no matter how painful. The doctors think my behavior reflects self-loathing or a desire to escape. It conforms to none of those categories. It is unclassifiable.
Only in those etheresque episodes, sucked into the invisible dark matter, have I felt unvarnished fear. I have no fear of what has been done to me or what will be done, because nothing has power over me except for that one incurable terror. I never want to feel it again. Yet I always know that I will.
Now that Alchemy is gone, I have no one who understands. If only I could see my granddaughter, Persephone.
O Persephone, if you could only sing for me and I for you …