Between still and restlessness in bed, I could not move my body into the necessary sleeping position. This is tough because you cannot know the correct bend and curl until you have collapsed into sleep. I turned, flipping side to side, and then fell into a digital world. My body became a .pdf document. All I had to do was click the ‘rotate’ icon over and over, sorting through a twister game of positions, around and around a pinwheel until I must’ve rotated into a comfortable place. Somehow I was no longer in the dark alcove, but instead in a lit, active screen. Somehow, I was the operator of the computer mouse, watching myself rotate, rotate 90, 180, 270 degrees. Moving a body, however, is not like hands turning on a clock, The shifts are subtle, right side, left side, back, stomach, hand under the pillow, outside the covers,. Maybe it was more like computer animation, but myself in the white, blank document was clear, it was only me. No bed. No covers, No person beside me. Just slowly shifting, click by click. It’s hard to say how long I sat at the wheel, turning myself. It must have been between the hours of 2 AM and 6:40 AM, I know from exiting the screen to check my phone in the morning, and well, later morning.
I guess I rotated myself out of the dream, back into the real world. No longer in the computer and outside of it. I began rotating myself manually this time, not digitally. Physically, I tossed and turned in the bed. ‘Not a co-sleeper’ I thought. Never good at feeling that hovering other body at the edge of the bed. I wondered, in his snoring and movements if he was also clicking his way through? Were we all in a warped computer game shifting ourselves around in sleep? Perhaps for just a moment, I was actually looking at the control room of the brain. A power plant of energy, synapses firing even in sleep. A thought of the chaotic Chernobyl nuclear plant ran through my mind. An electric current of a memory from the HBO mini-series I had just finished watching. A bunch of little me’s were running around, operating a multitude of switches—maintaining breathing sleeping, core temperature. I thought of the core melting down during the disaster. Is that what happens when you die? Does the brain just meltdown, folding in on itself and the energy just seeps and seeps our of our body? Transference. The energy is now in the world, leaking into the ground. Slowly or sometimes rapidly leaving the body. Our brain melts down, the nuclear reactor shutting off and all the me’s acting as engineers file out in streams of computer operators, They fade away, no longer rotating me in my sleep or actively leveling out the brain activity.
Our brains will meltdown one day. That reality is far scarier than death. Will the first sign be me not turning in my sleep? What if others cannot see this already? Are they closer or further from a meltdown? Inside the switchboard means something has gone wrong and outside means everything is fine. Or is that backwards? I am more enlightened and will live forever or I am disintegrating quickly. My .pdf dream was very real, very visceral but I still stand, brain intact. The core remains a balanced center of the positive and negative ions.
YOU Are HERE 