Dreamwalking

What happens when you die? Nobody knows. But does anybody really know what happens WHILE you die, either?

I sleep, and when I sleep the darkness falls. I am immobile, even if I manage to wake in my mind and open my eyes. My body remains paralyzed, and my eyes see all of what is, and also some of what was, and a tiny bit of what will be.

But the most terrifying is when I see what is, just not "what is" by the definition we've all come to know and love and grasp tightly to.

I fell asleep once, for example, and dreamed up a lovely afternoon on a yacht, sailborne across the mighty ocean, just like my great-grandfather.

I can only imagine, in another world where he had not died at sea, my grandmother might not have become so terribly afraid of the water, and would not have kept her kids and grandkids away from it.

Maybe in such a world I could have sailed the seven seas, a modern-day pirate in my own right, living free on the open waves.

But now, I don't know.

About the time Grandma Kate died, she lie in bed for a week talking out loud to my Grandfather, telling him how lovely it was to see him again and how she was no longer afraid, how he could bring her anywhere in all the worlds with him and across the most daunting ocean and she would have no fear.

If you didn't know, when you begin to die, the brain releases a powerful psychedelic compound called dimethyltryptamine, the entire purpose of which is to ease your transition from life. I guess what that means is that it tries to take the fear out of your death so you can die peacefully no matter your situation. My dad went out thinking he was playing in the Super Bowl with New England.

I'm guessing if we had brought Grandma to the real ocean while she was in this state she still probably would have lost her s**t. It was the real ocean, dark and massive and seemingly endless to the limited human observer, that she'd been afraid of most of her life, not the one in her fever dreams and death throes.

Anyway, maybe I am seeing images from somewhere and somewhen else, but it could just be those childhood memories of watching all my friends, shirtless, towels thrown over their shoulders and rubber flotation devices tied or snapped or buckled about them, piling into a car on a hot Saturday afternoon without me.

But I've been waking up in terror a lot more than usual lately. I feel an abrupt lurch, and it wakes me, but my mind and my eyes only. I'm sleeping in the stateroom on the yacht, rather than in my own bed at home. Waves crash against the hull, and the whole length of her creaks and groans in travail as water and sand begin rushing through the companionway, bursting through the various portholes and skylights.

My death is coming. I can feel the grit of the sand scouring my body and the bitter, freezing cold of the ocean. I hear distant gulls warning me to get up and run, but the Old Sea Hag continues to sit unseen on my chest.

That's about the time when the water drains rapidly away, taking the sand and the ship with it and leaving me alone and secure in my own warm bed at home. Golden syrupy sunlight drizzles onto my face through the open blinds and slowly returns my full faculties and motor functions, bringing me back to my real life.

Or at least what I perceive to be my real life. What I'd prefer to be my real life, I should say, although I'm beginning to think that it's not. The visions of my shipwreck are happening way too often nowadays, and sometimes even creep in while I'm awake.

It's been more and more frequent lately, and it's getting to the point where I think I spend more time on that boat than in the real world.

Oh, God.