Dreamcoming

by Duncan Spencer

'I am right … beside you.'

A soft, sibilant and menacing whisper, so close to my ear that I can hear the animal rasping of breath. The first time I heard these words I woke up in a cold sweat, heart hammering in the dawn light.

Back then, on June 6 th 2006, that was the whole dream. No pictures, nothing before and nothing after, just five short words. A pentagram of words.

‘I am right … beside you.'

The next night the dream had a beginning. A deep, dark blackness every way I looked and then dead ahead a growing tinge of green. I peered, strained into the depths of it. Was I moving? Was it moving towards me? Or was it just growing larger? And then sixty seconds later …

‘I am right … beside you.'

Each night the dream got longer, repeating the night before, but adding more to it and ending with the words. Each night an additional sixty seconds of dread. Every night a minute longer, like a horror story told night after night that gets more terrifying with each telling.

I like the word ‘dread', it tells of long, drawn out horror. Ivan the Terrible is more accurately translated into English as John the Dread. I dread the night and then as I sleep my body prepares for greater and greater dread until the shuddering climax.

‘I am right … beside you.'

The green swallows me like some great poisonous snake, wrapping its sinuous curves around the edges of my vision, until I am more blinded by this blank horror than ever I had been by the blackness.

I try to move but my body is no longer under my control. The doctor says it is not uncommon this night paralysis. Not uncommon. Nothing to worry about. The body asleep but the mind awake. The mind alive but the body dead. I call out but of course I can't call out. My mind is full of questions.

‘Who are you? Why do you come here? Help me! Help me! Help me?'

‘I am right … beside you.'

I have begun to crave the stark horror of those few growled words, that audible pentagram, because it means the end of the night. The dread can return to its hiding place and start to grow anew.

After two months, the first hour of the dream. A low moaning began, and the green begat substance, a murky, slow-twisting thickness, ever changing and yet the same every night.

I see Edvard Munch protecting himself from the scream of Nature. Then the face drips apart and becomes some long-horned goat of a creature. I try to scream back some nights but of course I can't move, not any part of me. There are moans, shrieks, screams. Funny how my eyes and ears work when nothing else does.

The parts I've dreamed many times before never change, yet there is always more to see in them. Even in that first nightmare dawn of green I can now see the ghosts of images to come. In those first few flickers I see Ruth's face before it becomes Munch, then the goat, and the slithering, unseeable things that slide past the edges of my vision. And there are whispers and words in the moans and screams, or perhaps my mind invents them - some sort of hideous sensory inkblot test.

It has been fourteen months now. The dream is over seven hours long. Why then don't I stay awake? Refuse to enter this dream state? Not for ever of course, that would be impossible, but at least fight it.

I have, of course, tried. And yet always, like the man in Groundhog Day, I wake up at six o'clock.

‘I am right … beside you.'

Each night I fall asleep earlier and earlier. If I'm not abed before eleven now I fall asleep where I sit. This at least is something to take to a doctor, like the night paralysis. He sent me to a psychotherapist. She sent me to a hypnotist. He sent me to a dream therapist. I told them all about the dream and yet in the warmth of their concern it seems a million miles away. And nothing changes.

‘Why green?'

More and more this is the question I try to force from my reluctant throat. There can be no blood, no fires of damnation in green. But green has a deeper older meaning than red. Before Stop there is Go, before flesh on bone, moss on stone. Hades is terrifying, but this pagan mystery has dread. Green, even this deep, sick green is the colour of unstoppable growth, of Nature in its tragic entropy. Not red in tooth and claw but seeping, crawling moss and creeper, green.

There is a sleep disorder centre that they have sent me to now. They check your vital signs while you sleep. They try different drugs. At first I was hopeful. I talked to those who share the half-life of Morpheus: the Narcoleptics, those with sleep Apnoea, with Bruxism and Fibromyalgia and Hypersomnia. The stories I heard of miracle cures, of doctors that understand. But now they all look at me with, well, with distaste . As if I am to blame, and perhaps I am. It is my brain, is it not, that creates this thing?

Some nights I listen to take my mind off the terrors that curl around me, and some nights I watch to take my mind off the whispering demons. It's all the same because I know this scene so well by now. But there is infinite variety in what I once thought was plain.

Last night I picked upon the smallest variation of colour, a tiny dark speck in the roiling flowing river of green that gave birth, like the nascent universe, to form and shape that grew and drew others to it and became a hissing, snarling face of hatred. Not, a face showing hatred, you understand, but the very embodiment of that vile emotion itself.

The doctors say that I am not resting while I sleep, that despite the night paralysis my body strains in its sleep. They worry about my heart.

‘You can't go on like this. We'll give you a muscle relaxant tonight.'

And so they did.

‘I am right … beside you.'

My first heart attack. Apparently the rush of adrenalin was too much for my drugged body. No more drugs. They shake their heads and they are shaking them at me. It's my fault. They can't help if I won't help myself. Discharged.

I wonder about my sins, what perhaps I have done to be sent this torment. It is a state that makes one believe in Fate, this ever repeated unstoppable cataclysm, this nightly catechism, this ‘I am right … beside you.'

Have I sinned so badly? Was all this set in motion all those years ago when I lost Ruth? And was that not as inevitable as the dream itself. I used to dream another nightmare, but now I would long for that dream like meeting a long lost friend. To fall asleep and see her sweet face before me, even to see her falling, dropping backwards into the brackish water. To see the green algae close around her face and the shocked, silent scream filling with water.

But this has no part in my dreams now. Each night I watch and listen as my hell unfolds around me, waiting to see what the new night will bring. The creativity of madness.

Like Room 101 each person's horror is different I suppose. Some might dream of Hammer House eyeballs and slowly cut throats. Green doesn't support such constructs. Green is a slowly growing dread. Infinity was always the scariest thing of all to me. Time without end, pain without limit, fear with no boundary. Ruth's eyes staring up at me, always out of reach.

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