I asked politely to stop dreaming, please. I put rocks
under my pillow, switching them out at intervals to see
which ones might make it stop. They didn’t prevent my
sleeping—in a new fairytale called The Prince and the
Stone, he doesn’t feel it. I dreamt of a precipice and a cliff dive, unequipped and thrown to the sea. I dreamt of white serpents backwards breaching murky green water against a gray slate shore. The books on my shelves were filled with a strange man’s annotations and the little pressed bodies of insects. I dreamt an axe brought off my head from behind in my childhood driveway. I bled milk out of the unfinished wound. I dreamt my father poisoned himself in front of me on his red leather sofa in the living room. The ghost of a lady on fire haunted the top of my stairwell and pulled a veil down over my pleading face. I dreamt of alligators on the highway and eels in my swimming pool and scuttling creatures ripping out my womb. I dreamt of a whalebone coffee table and discovered the matching spine upon the shore of Waking. In the kitchen, I was pierced by the four of swords. Blood barely pinks a finger
rippled by life underwater. On the path, I saw a frog broken by St. Catherine’s bicycle wheel, and failed to spare the suffering. I went to beautiful places I didn’t belong.
During hours 17 through 22 of glowing purple flights
over the Pacific, I wondered just how many fathoms it
might take to see change. With each arrow chipping bone I counted my martyrdoms. In the baroque and bloodied velvet tones of occult surgery theatres, I saw myself dismantled and cauterized. My serenity’s saferoom took the form of an old eldritch waterpark: defunct, tunneling and brominated. I taught myself the words for ‘submechanophobia’ and ‘phallic symbol’ and ‘sleep paralysis.’ If peace were possible, it would look like two clean quartz discs obscuring my second sight.