Walking the Sleep

by Mark McGhee

  Maybe I don’t want to know anymore. I thought I was staying to figure things out but now I am finding new questions with each DAY. I don’t need to say DAY anymore. I can say today now without wanting to scream because I am beginning to feel more of a sense of time now. Beginning to understand how time passes, and yet does not, pass here. I can say “TODAY” because I was walking the sleep and was not aware, and now I am aware, so that was not now, and now was not then. But conscious enough I am to say “TODAY.” If I do not walk the sleep for extended periods, I can see days pass. DAY. That is comforting somehow.

  Yet I fear of becoming a stayer sometimes. From what I have seen of stayers, most aren’t that agreeable. Some are pure fuckers. Some are people I wouldn’t waste two minutes on in life, but I spend what seems like hours and days talking with them. They aren’t all like Sam but at least there are others that can hear me now. It happens slowly like a fog melting off the bay in San Francisco. A rare warm day is promising and the sun begins to burn through, slowly, imperceptibly, the fog begins to lift, and then it starts to clear up. And people, who seem to try, can sometimes hear you, and you them, and then you might pass enough conversation to know that you either like them, or you don’t. Not dead. Not alive. ALIVE. DEAD. It just IS. There are some days so beautiful here I have to sit and cry. I never realized how beautiful things could be when I was on that side and that is the truth.

  Not as angry. As often. Not feeling sad. Well, not all the time. I get confused sometimes when the line between walking the sleep and being AWAKE gets blurry, but for the most part, I don’t mind walking the sleep as much as before. Now there is an altered state that is very hard to describe. I guess it is not always completely unpleasant. Have you ever been watching a movie on your television set and started drifting off? And the images and sounds of a dream, mixed with the real sounds of the television are slamming into your brain in rapid fashion? They begin to mix and swirl. You start to drift and then you come back, and then the dream takes you for a second and then you snap back? A slow dance of reality, and dream, of real sound, and brain sound, memory sound, and sights, and pictures, and words, and electricity. And what was that pounding?

  Is it someone at the fucking door? No bother. It’s kind of like that and not always unpleasant, just longer it seems. I dream a lot now. I’m walking the sleep but I have a sense of awareness in my dreams. I can recall places I’ve walked and people I’ve seen. So, it’s not always so upsetting as it was to me before. In the beginning. When this started. When that ended. Before, it seemed as if I were just gone… and then I was. GONE. And I had no idea why I had begun walking the sleep, where I had walked, and what had transpired. Now it seems more natural and I can very nearly feel it coming on. And in that, I also see things that I feel like I remember wanting to know.

  Now if these things are real and true, I cannot be sure of because they are in fact dreams and yet, they are the dreams of awareness too. I’m seeing things and hearing things that I may not be fully, consciously, aware of. The difference between your dreams and my dreams is very clearly in that respect, different. You are curled up in your bed and seeing things and hearing things, that for the most part, your brain is feeding part of your subconscious. I am actually walking as I sleep…I am walking the sleep. I actually hear things, and see things when I am asleep. Some of these things are happening as I am walking, some of these things happened in the past, but I am there as surely as you are here. Yet like dreams, drunken dreams, things start running together and they start getting confusing. When you wake up, you can blink, rub your eyes, look at the clock, and know. Know that crazy shit flying through your head, the feelings, the fear, the sadness, the good, the bad, the yearning….you know in seconds that you’re dealing with dreams. I don’t always know.

  I have actually seen some horrible things that really happened. In walking the sleep, I can see, and enter another’s memories sometimes. This can be terrifying. It isn’t a movie, a book, a repeated story – this is raw shit from their subconscious that happened, not a movie they remembered. Shit like that doesn’t come over here because it’s childish to real horror, anguish, fear, despair, and terror. Same with the good stuff I suppose, but I just don’t run into lots wanderers full of good thoughts and happy memories of life. People are here for a reason I guess, and like me, it isn’t to walk around and have happy thoughts to share. I figure most of those people, with happy memories and good thoughts are reuniting with people, for real, in a better place. Not here. Not hell. Not limbo. Not heaven. Not. HERE.

  So, often I see things in real time happening as I walk, and listen, and sometimes make sense of REALITY. And my memory of dreams is so much clearer than you can ever understand. Think of it like this. We are watching a movie and you are drifting in and out of sleep for those two hours. You finally fall asleep. When you wake, you have a recollection of some of the movie. I watch the movie and then, when it is over, I sleep.

  When I awake, I can clearly recall the movie in detail, while, for you, the plot, characters, and outcome are very sketchy. That is the way it is becoming for me.

  On your side dreams don’t always make sense. Here I walk the sleep and try to make sense of what is reality, not thought and subconscious busywork.

  There are other things that have been changing for me. I realize that it is easier to talk to people here than I had thought before. I think I really began to realize this when I finally spent some time talking to Sam at the liquor store in Santa Ana.

  Chapter 6

  Now, more than ever, I want to talk to that woman on the pier. I have seen her in my dreams several times now. So, I am not above spending some days at the San Clemente pier hoping to see her again. To see if she will smirk at me again. To see if she will notice, in my eyes, that I am more aware now. To try and find out how or when I knew her, because I have this feeling that I did. That I do. Here is more private than you might imagine. Like I told you before, maybe more than once, I forget, I slip in my memory of what I say, but I do have a distinct awareness of who is here. But I realize now, that seeing anyone and everyone that you might want to isn’t as easy as all that. I thought, because I could sense them, and knew absolutely that they were here, that I could easily see them anytime I wanted to. Not true. Was that smirk from the beautiful woman because she knew I couldn’t really communicate? Like when you’re new to something, and struggling so hard to learn it, and a seasoned person, a master of the skill is watching? They aren’t mocking you really… a slight smirk isn’t exactly mean either. Just a knowing.

  When I was young, I recall watching a man in his thirties trying to learn to surf. I must have been sixteen, my hair bleached light brown and blond from months of sun and sea water. My skin was tanned a dark brown, my shoulders muscled and rounded from countless hours of paddling into waves. The man was doing everything wrong. He looked like a wounded duck in the water. He thrashed at the water in uneven strokes, he kept his chest flat on the board and struggled to remain on the poorly waxed board. Every wave seemed to be the end of him as he was slammed into the surf, breaker after breaker.

  Set after set of waves knocked him into the cold Pacific and he was poorly equipped. Even in the middle of summer, when it’s warm out, cold currents can come into the southern California coast. A spring wet suit on those days keeps the chill off the bones. He was wearing board shorts only and I could see he was cold, beaten, and fatigued. But he didn’t quit. I remember laughing a bit inside, not mean, but amused. I smirked. I remember smirking. I didn’t have any meanness in my smirk. It was just a knowing that he was struggling with something that was done without thought, naturally, for me. I eventually had paddled over to him and gave him a few pointers for which he was very grateful. By the end of the day he rode a few waves.

  So it was with the beautiful woman on the pier. She was smirking with knowing, and that I did not know, but there was no malice. I wanted to see her again, so she could see that I had learned.

  Less of walking
the sleep now. Almost a knowing of certain periods of time passing. The dream of, well, the walking the sleep experience rather, of being in a hellish war, thrown lifeless onto a rickety wagon, dragged along a blood and corpse strewn road. It wasn’t mine. I remember that experience, that dream well, but I had been walking the sleep. I had come upon a tortured and wretched soul fighting his hellish memories in the walk, and he had shared them with me. His horror. I had been given the blood soaked filth of his horror. Part dream, part memory, all very real for him, then unfortunately, for me too.

  You know what’s worse than a horrible and terrifying dream? A tortured dead person’s dream of horror and anguish. A reliving of their memory and horror.

  Some of it mixed and twisted I imagine, in dream state, and some of it very close to what really happened at other times, I think.

  And I realized it while falling half into a walking the sleep, and then ripping myself screaming out of it. I was aware and clear at the time. Again, I had wandered up to the northern California coast. I was walking a frigid stretch of the beach in Elk, California. I was wondering if one of my relatives every came here because I knew there was a family connection, and I thought I felt someone hanging around there. Maybe it was just the memory related to me by my grandmother, my mother’s mom. They had spent months there when my mom was a little girl. In the forties, my grandfather had been moving the family from northern California to southern California. He was starting a small Pentecostal church in a dust strewn and nearly lifeless valley called Val Verde, California. Val Verde…Green Valley? I always wondered who named it that. A joke? Maybe a wandering priest stopped off there in spring after a particularly wet winter. For weeks it could turn green and beautiful. That was a trick though. It was dusty, hot, poor, and wretched. Dirt roads led to nowhere, and when to somewhere, poor people living mostly in weathered trailers sitting unbalanced and sun bleached. So, getting back to Elk, a beautiful, postcard beautiful place, my grandparents car broke down in Elk. They were poor. My grandfather was a good mechanic, but there would be no moving on until he could find some work locally, get some money together, and buy the parts needed to continue on. They camped and lived there at the beach. They collected and steamed mussels. They lived there on the fringes of a beautiful and quaint beach community for months until my grandfather could earn enough money to travel on.

  Money was offered and kindly refused. God would provide work, and labor would provide the money needed to repair the car, and they would move forward in God’s time, at His will, and according to His good pleasure. My grandfather was not too proud to accept help, but his belief system required him to work, not allow others to work, or provide. In the winter the community remembered the children there. Presents were brought at Christmas and gifts of food would show up quietly and anonymously. For this, for the children, my grandfather accepted the charity. Human kindness.

  So, it was very cold. DAY. I walked along fading slowly into the sleep without realizing.

  My mind was working on something important one second and the next I was seven and making snow cones with my Frosty the Snow Cone Machine…and the next second I was an adult. I found myself screaming and shouting to god. And I was surrounded by people screaming and shouting. Oxygen masks began dropping from compartments all over the cabin of the 727 jetliner. It was plummeting to the ground with screams, and fuel, and fire. The engines screamed, screeched, stopped, metal grinding. Stall. Stop. A small boom and it screamed again to life. Stalled again. And stopped. For good. A fireball burst past the window. The airliner seemed to try and pull up. A monstrous injured bird. A final painful scream and then a sound of tearing metal, screeching, screaming, tearing, and more fire. Smoke and plastic and the worst of smells, human flesh burning. People screaming and cussing. Crying. Praying. Shitting. The stench of bowels. I snapped conscious, from the sleep, and I was standing next to an obese man in a bright yellow Hawaiian shirt covered with hibiscus flower print. On a pure white sand beach.

  His eyes were blank and his mouth hung open in that stupid fucking blank expression only the severely brain damaged seem to possess. It was his last memory and I had fallen into his walking hell. Aloha motherfucker.

  Now I am more aware as it were. It was kind of a relief in a sense because it answered some questions: why was I having fucked up images of things that seemed so real, but for which I never experienced, saw, lived, or otherwise had stored in my own consciousness?

  Now I knew. So, to exercise caution and some level of “awareness” when I might be getting close to walking the sleep, try and know, if possible, find a place where I couldn’t be a receptacle of some rotten soul’s most horrible living hell. Fortunately, I have seen that these things don’t last long. In fact, most don’t even have them. It seems to come with people surprised by their quick and untimely deaths. Normally violent. Always quick. But never slow and knowing. For instance, I never felt the last memory of a person in a hospital bed surrounded by loved ones, but I certainly have felt the memory of a man ripped in half by a truck. Head on. Motorcycle. Very fast death but very confusing for him.

  These are things of which I am increasingly wary of, finding myself near an entry point of someone fresh to here, and they are not aware. So they walk the sleep continually it seems, and they are prey to the raven’s taunts, and if I am not careful, and fall into the walk of the sleep when they are near – it can be very bad. I don’t speak of ravens metaphorically. REAL. HERE.

  I talk of the ones that shit on your car from atop Sycamore trees, and scream at one another while picking at the remains of a road kill cat, dog, opossum, but no matter the source as long as it’s flesh. Black ravens. An occasional white. Crows too. But ravens are in control. No doubt.

  Any bird of their kind are evil and cruel. But ravens, most especially, are the ones that most often go after the newly dead. The lost souls that cannot break the walking of the sleep. Ravens love to torture them. They take great delight in sadism. They follow me at a distance. I’ve become quite adept at spinning river rocks. Not metaphorically. I have learned to manipulate real world environment to some degree, not a lot, nor varied too much, but I can launch a smooth river rock with the accuracy and rifled spin of a .40 caliber pistol. I have become the bane of many ravens now.

  I have lost count of the number of ravens I have splattered or wounded, but it is not uncommon for me to hear a screeching bastard yelling threats while flying sideways with an awkward stroke from a poorly healed wing.

  Headache. I have no head. Headache. I feel like I need to sleep DAY. Sometimes when I was “alive” I slept days away. DAY. Why? DAY! DAY! DAY! I can’t use “Today” DAY!

  Back again to Sam’s place. Tired.

  “Good to see you.”

  “What?”

  “Good to see you again”

  “What does again mean, Sam?”

  “Now”

  “Day?”

  “Night”

  “Always night here Sam. What DAY?”

  “You’re trapped in that. Give it up.”

  “Why?”

  “Mental masturbation. There is no night. There is no day.”

  “DAY!”

  “Now you sound disturbed”

  “Why is it always night here?”

  “There is no day, there is no night. It is. Look closer. It isn’t always night here. That’s in your mind.”

  “Fuck you, Sam!”

  “Yes, that seems to be the prevailing sentiment”

  “Sorry”

  “Don’t be”

  “Anything interesting happening?”

  “One of the punks that killed you was in today.”

  “Huh. Did he say anything interesting?”

  “No. He’s a thug. Bad luck Charlie. Dangerous but not a killer by trade. Bad life and all that.”

  “Fuck that asshole! He killed me!”

  “He killed a nameless, faceless, person”

  “So the fuck what!? That was me!”

  “A
nameless, faceless, human. Business”

  “I had a name. I have a name. I had kids. I had people that loved me.”

  “Really? I never saw that.”

  “I did before I came here.”

  “So, really, you didn’t have anything they took outside of twenty bucks and a gun.”

  “Fuck you, Sam. I just told you I had a family.”

  “Yeah, you had a family. How many were at your funeral?”

  “What the fuck do you know?”

  He lights a Camel and tosses me the pack. I light one.

  “I know that you burned bridges enough to end up living around here before you died. Alone. Carrying a .45 and living off booze and snack cakes.”

  “Yeah, I know it went bad. I have glimpses of things.”

  “How was the funeral? Interesting? See anyone you hated? That’s the fucking kicker. People you fucking hated standing around crying.”

  “I don’t remember. I have a foggy recollection. I don’t think I stayed that long.”

  “Find the right day, time, frame of mind – you should get back there and check it out.”

  “Godamnit, Sam! Why the fuck do you like to screw with me. You’re the only one I really talk to.”

  “Now that’s pathetic. Sorry though.” He cracks the lid off a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and drinks it a quarter down. Recaps it. Tosses it to me. I do drain it to half.

  “I just don’t want to get too close to people here. I’m not like you. I plan to leave.”

  “Where to?”

  “You know.”

  “Anywhere but here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How do you know it’s any better?”

  “Don’t”

  “Yeah. Me neither. Check this sad motherfucker out.”

  Latino in his late fifties. Scratching a lotto ticket. His arms are covered in prison tattoos, cheap ink set in intricate designs featuring the Virgin Mary. Heroin scars and tracks follow blue veins, frontage roads and construction breaks.