Tag: sleep

Hunter

It’s close to midnight

But all that’s lurking in the dark

Is your beautiful face

Waiting for the howl

Enchanting my thoughts

And as I submerge

Into the darkness on the other side

The thought of you follows me

Like a beast

Stalking it’s prey.

*

Morpheus

The building doesn’t look like a fast-food restaurant, it looks like a house. Indeed, it looks like a house I have passed by a multitude of times, a mile or so from where I work.

It’s a rather nice house. You would never mistake it for a restaurant at all, apart from the big light-up logo on the front lawn. I peer through one of the large windows and see a serving counter inside.

“Huh. I didn’t know there was a Burger King here,” I remark.

“There isn’t,” The Dream King replies.

I frown, half-remembering where I am.

“That’s a shame. It would have made popping out for lunch a lot easier.”

We continue walking together, the familiar landscape of the Eastern Shore shifting to a more urban environment. It is not any city I know, but at the same time, I feel like I have been here before; my feet carrying me through the crowd as if I have done this a hundred times.

We duck into a covered passageway, take a short-cut through a fancy restaurant and find ourselves walking by a covered market. There are people everywhere, shopping, eating, existing. This is an older part of the city; the architecture is stone and cast-iron, stucco brick and ceramic tile. The streets are cloistered, arcades extend in every direction, but I can still see the sky, a dark cornflower blue of a late summer afternoon.

“I never knew this part of the city was here,” I announce. I pull out my phone and check the maps app, but it tells me what I already know; I’m in the historic district of the city near the old docks. In the satellite photo there is what appears to be a rollercoaster to the west of us. I look up and indeed, there it is, as if I had willed it into being. It towers over the surrounding buildings, jutting up from the still waters of a harbor. It looks as if it has been in a state of disuse for some time; the white paint is rusty and there are vines and other foliage growing along the track and supporting struts.

I find myself wondering why they would go to the trouble of building it if they weren’t going to use it.

I turn and find Morpheus regarding me, his face placid and unreadable. He looks kind of like the actor Tom Sturridge from his role as Morpheus in the Netflix adaptation of “The Sandman,” only with features that reflect the way the character is depicted in the original comics; taller, skinnier, paler, his eyes like stars shining out of two black voids.

I once again recall I am dreaming, and in doing so, find myself on a veranda back near the market bazaar, with no roller coaster in sight.

“Do all people dream the same dreams?” I ask.

The Dream King gestures that we should sit at a small table overlooking the courtyard. There is a band playing below, but I cannot identify the tune.

“There are as many kinds of dream as there are dreamers,” he replies as we sit. “But, having said that, there are definite categories of dreams.”

I sip my drink, which I neither remember ordering nor remember it being served to me, and nod. “Do tell.”

“Some people dream of other people. Of friends, family, lovers. They dream of doing things with these people, of having conversations or going on adventures,” He tilts his head, “or having sex,”

“Of course.” I say.

“Some people dream of the past. Places they’ve been, things they’ve seen, events they witnessed. They live in their memories, or try to escape them,” He shrugs.

“Some Dream the future.”

I cock my eyebrow.

“Dream of the future, you mean?”

“No. I don’t.”

I try to wrap my head around the implications of this, but Morpheus continues.

“Some people have big dreams; fantasy and adventure. Others have big dreams of a better life, for themselves or others,”

He smiles.

“Some people have very small dreams. Making tea. Going to work. Petting a dog. Small dreams. But no less important than the big ones.”

He spreads his hands.

“Mostly, people dream stories. They have a start and a middle and a finish, even if they don’t always get there. But there is progression.”

I swirl my straw in my drink, watching the ice dance a slow pirouette.

“What about my dreams?” I ask.

Morpheus tents his long fingers and says nothing.

I look across the courtyard. It’s surrounded on all four sides with balconies and verandas, and people. People everywhere. It feels wrong to just be sitting here, not moving. It is then that I feel an unseen force grabbing at me, the undertow of the Dream King holding me in this place.

“Do you really want to know?” He asks.

I hesitate, suddenly cowed by the Oneiromancer’s power. Suddenly being acutely aware of being in his realm, where his wishes are paramount, and his word is law.

“Yes.”

I feel his grip release and we are no longer on the veranda, but walking the streets once more, navigating the crowd. I am dodging past people with a practiced ease. Morpheus, however, walks steadily, people swirling around him like water parting way for a boat.

“You dream big, complicated dreams. You are like a dream architect, far more concerned with the concept of the world than what occurs within it.”

His features have shifted, I notice. He seems more like a cross between Lawrence Fishburne’s Morpheus, from the Matrix movies, and Leonardo DiCaprio’s Dom Cobb from the movie “Inception”. The implications are not lost on me.

“You build these grand landscapes in your mind and then transition through them. There is rarely a narrative; you simply seem to be…passing through. You often dream of railway stations or elevators, places that are a means and not an end.”

He turns to me, his eyes now hidden behind mirrored sunglasses. The reflections of the people around us are distorted, but I can’t tell if it’s a feature of the lenses or that’s just how the people actually look like. I am too afraid to find out.

“This is perhaps reflective of your waking life, of your feeling of always being in a state of flux. You don’t know where you are going, you just know you aren’t there yet,” He turns away and continues walking. “Perhaps you prefer it that way.”

“Well, they do say it’s about the journey and not the destination,” I counter.

“A journey is only a journey if it actually has a destination. Otherwise it’s just…” he gestures around him, “aimless wandering.”

We’re walking alongside a river now. Small boats putter in both directions. The perpetual sunset casts a golden pathway down the center of the river, broken only by the shadows of bridges which criss-cross the water at various intervals. Morpheus turns on to one of these.

“I do not know what it is you are looking for,” he says, striding up the gentle incline to the center of the bridge, “but you are unlikely to find it by just drifting along, and hoping to bump into it some day,”

“I don’t know where to begin,” I tell him.

“Pick a focal point. Then walk towards it.” He replies, swinging one leg over the railing of the bridge.

“But what if it’s the wrong direction?”

He shrugs. “Then find a new direction,” he says simply, “The point is, you’ll never find out until you start moving.”

He hops off the bridge, but doesn’t fall. He starts walking along the pathway of golden light, heading towards the blinding sun.

I shake my head, squinting.

“Hey!” I call after him. “Why do I feel like I’ve had this conversation before?!”

I can no longer see him, his form eclipsed by the burning sun, but I can hear him as clearly as if he is still standing next to me. He is laughing.

“Perhaps you dreamt it!”

And then I woke up.

*

Dad Thoughts #12

Stop me if you’ve heard this one…

Two introverts decide to have a child. It’s exhausting and confusing and has a steep learning curve but eventually the child learns to sleep through the night and goes to daycare and stops being a constant drain on their emotional resources.

So what do they do?

Decide to have a second one, of course.

Two kids hits different. Two kids in the middle of a global pandemic hits very different, and hard.

But even without a hugely transmissible and deadly virus running amok, having two children, two boys, was a whole different level of tiring and hard that I just wasn’t expecting.

It doesn’t help that, even at 14 months, Milo is still not sleeping through the night. He will invariably wake up at least once, but more likely twice during the course of the night. We’ve tried letting him “cry it out”, but the problem with that is that he shares a room with Thomas, who very much does not enjoy having a screaming (and I mean screaming) toddler disturb his sleep.

So this means, ultimately one or the other of them ends up spending the night in our bed. Which means that neither myself or Megan have had a decent nights sleep in months.

(That’s not entirely true; there’s been a few nights where we’ve been able to fob off one or both of the boys to their grandparents. Last night was one such evening and it was the most undisturbed and fulfilling sleeps I’ve had since Milo was born.)

Couple this with Megan having to be home with Milo all the time (due to pandemic), and it’s been rough.

Thankfully we started Milo at daycare this September, which has been some relief during the day (for Megan, mostly. I just bugger off to work most days and that’s my reprieve)

Unfortunately, daycare brings its own trials and tribulations, namely an almost constant rotation of illness. Milo has had four ear infections in less than 6 months; not to mention the usual coughs and sniffles that toddlers seem to accrue by virtue of being Very Bad at hygiene. Which means the rest of us have been sick in one fashion or another since September also. I’m pretty sure I’ve had RSV at least twice this fall.

So combine lack of sleep, constant sickness and just general anxiety about, y’know… *gestures vaguely at everything* and, well..:

Some days I feel like there’s barely enough of me left to pull together and function. I’m getting behind on chores; the house is a disaster. I’m pretty sure our house could qualify for FEMA assistance at this point.

And forget about being creative. Even writing Haiku right now feels like too much, let alone trying to write a story or do art. Hence my lack of blog updates this past two or three months. (Did anyone notice? Answers on a post-card.)

It’s not exactly making me a great parent either. I feel like I’m constantly losing my rag at Thomas. Ironically, Milo is much more agreeable most days. He’s at that stage where he can’t quite talk, but he can communicate, and say a few key words, and he can understand simple directions, so will happily do something if you ask him to. He loves to dance to music and he loves to watch Sesame Street. He loves getting to go outside. And he’s finally getting into books, even if it’s the same ones over and over (and over and over…)

And him and Thomas get along for the most part, although there’s usually competition when it comes to snuggles with Mum.

(And, of course, Megan has it far tougher than I do. At least I can get away most days.)

I just need the dang kid to sleep through the night. All I want for Christmas is uninterrupted sleep! My Kingdom for undisturbed slumber!!

I love my boys. I do.

But hot damn am I struggling with being a Dad right now.

*