The Other Place
There are a few places I visit repeatedly in my dreams and nightmares. They aren’t real places. Or at least, I don’t think they are. They seem like they could be real places, were it not for the slightly strange architectural choices; staircases leading to nothing, doors that aren’t aligned with the floor level, odd bowl-shaped floors and cambered corridors. I’ve been seeing those places since I was about 5 or 6. They’re like movie sets to me now, places where my internal psychodramas have played out. They’re places where I’ve run, sat, levitated, hidden, laughed, cried, fought, had sex and been killed… all so many times that when I’m there, it feels familiar.
However, there’s another place I only dream about when I’m sick. Not just sick, but when I’m very ill. I’ve only been there a few times that I can remember. It’s not like the other places. This is the other place. And yet, it’s barely even a place at all. There’s nothing there. It’s colourless and silent, but somehow I know it’s very vast. A yawning void that extends into eternity in every direction. It’s totally empty, but space itself seems thick and viscous making the void seem already full. It’s warm, almost humid there, but if you were to try and move, you’d feel a icy chill caress your body.
When I’m in the other place, the only thing I know in that moment is that I exist. I’m incorporeal, a soul drifting in nothingness, floating peacefully through limbo. Then it comes. It happens.
Without any warning, without seeing, hearing or feeling anything, I suddenly become aware of its overwhelming presence. It’s massive, like a terrifying explosion. It expands so rapidly that it saturates my entire perception. It overwhelms every one of my senses, senses that I don’t even have in this place. I can’t see it or hear it or even feel it, the only thing I can understand about it, is that it’s all-encompassing and I’m not. With no body, I’m unable to flinch as its inordinate and immense presence pervades everything. I try to brace myself, as though for an impact, but without a body, I’m left completely helpless, I can’t even flinch. It is happening and I’m powerless to do anything about it.
Then, just when I feel like I’m about to be engulfed by it, just before devastating enormity becomes so unbearable that I simply cease to exist…it shrinks away and vanishes. My mind is left paralysed by what I’ve just experienced… I’m left with something like psychic tinnitus, an inaudible but penetrating ringing in my consciousness as I try to process what just happened to me… try to reorganise what little of my perception exists in this place, try to determine whether what I just experienced was painful or pleasurable even.
But before I can, it happens again. And again. And again. And it keeps happening for what seems like an eternity.
In between times, I wonder what it is. Why it’s happening. Sometimes I wonder if I’m dreaming. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve died. Sometimes I wonder if I ever even existed at all. I deconstruct and rebuild myself over and over trying to remember if any of my memories are real, or just dreams I had of another person to stop myself from going completely mad. And if that’s true… that I imagined all those memories, that person… Can I imagine more people? Different existences? Other lives? Maybe this is just what I do… I float here for eternity and dream people. Maybe my last dream was just so vivid, it made me forget that this is what I do.
Before I can finish the thought, before I can start to dream the next person, it comes back. It comes back and it floods everything. I wonder if this is my chance to start dreaming a new person, and as I do, I imagine Meryl Links, lying in bed. He’s lying in bed, writhing in discomfort. He’s suffering. I think about whether I’m really him, or if he’s really me. I wonder whether I’m a dream or he is. As I’m thinking this, I feel myself slipping. This time, unless I do something, I’m going to shrink and vanish along with it. Like a dust mote being dragged down the sink by the water.
I think about Meryl and decide that his dream isn’t finished yet. And then I wake up.