Have You Been Half Asleep?

And have you heard voices? Yes, I’ve heard them calling my name.

So I was quite unsettled last night, because of a dream of all things. I’m going to try to explain, but dreams are the kind of thing where no matter how scary it was at the time, it never sounds so bad when you try to describe it. But, I’ll try. (There’s also a kind of random commentary by me on “good and evil”… but what good entry is complete without one?)

It all began, I think, the second after I fell asleep. Except, in the dream, I was lying in my bed in the dark. Impossible to tell I was actually asleep, really. I was (in the dream) lying on my side facing the wall when suddenly some invisible force pushed my shoulder violently forward. Considering the odd nature of the dream, (being asleep but seeing the exact things I’d be seeing if I were awake) I can’t say for sure if I really was pushed by something, but of course it’s easier to assert that I was asleep and it didn’t really happen.

However… I believe easily in the supernatural, and stranger stuff has happened in the world. It’s an odd thing… I’m reading Mere Christianity right now (great book) and to me, whenever I get immersed in Christian literature and find myself thinking for hours and hours about things like human nature and God and the universe and natural laws and striving to follow them and so on, a big part of me feels like I’m stepping closer to the front lines of the war. The epic war, the war of all time, since any conflict could ever exist: good vs evil. Many would deny the existence of such a war… or, in any meaningful, beyond-the-grave type sense, I mean. Even a child understands the concept of right and wrong, but if you don’t believe in an after-life, is it really worth the effort to do good in the instances where it inconveniences you greatly or even puts you in danger? Likely not, if all life is simply temporal. And it’s not that temporal things can’t have a purpose, because of course they can. But I am and always have been inclined to believe that all purposes fulfilled here in this life are precursors to some greater purpose after life.

There are a lot of things in this world that seek to destroy faith, and I’ll bet they succeed often, but none of them have taken away that sense of “something” I can feel but can’t describe.

I want to follow God in helping the world; no one can serve two masters and we all must choose a side. There’s no such thing as being ultimately ‘neutral’ in the war of good vs evil. The truth is, humans aren’t perfect and even the most devout unwittingly carry out the devil’s wishes (in part) every day. Plainly, if you’re not with God, you’re against Him, because human nature is selfish. It’s a higher power that calls us to be unselfish. So, it takes effort to choose to be good. In any case, there’s a bit of a paradox for me, walking closer to the front lines of the war. I want to be with God and that automatically makes me against the devil. Which is also what I want. But it also makes the devil and all his agents against me, me personally, and that fills me with fear. Surely it’s a paradox to say I want to be against the devil but I don’t want him to be against me.

I have no way of knowing for sure whether I was awake or not last night when something unseen pushed me hard enough on my shoulder to force me onto my stomach, but I’ll tell you this, it’s amazing how being afraid in a dream and being afraid while awake feel similar to the point of indiscrimination. I felt like I could sense something hovering about and then I was shoved. Rather terrifying.

I wonder what God thinks of people praying in their dreams. It’s such second-nature to most that I’m sure it happens a lot, obviously when there’s no chance of real danger or repercussion. Just an interesting concept… anyways…

The dream continued, and I have to say, I am still shocked at how real it seemed. In most of my dreams, some part of me still knows I’m really asleep. They have a fuzzy or airy quality to them somehow, but this one seemed so solid.

After being pushed by the shadows and being scared for a long time, I got up (in the dream) and sat in the kitchen. It occurred to me that I had to get up early for work and should go to bed again, but I didn’t want to go back into my room alone. Then, Kim phoned me and urged me to come out with her. It didn’t strike me as odd that she called me so late, as is usual in dreams, I guess. I said yes.

So, I was in a small bus with only Kim, myself and the bus driver. We were driving through narrow streets downtown. The nice part of downtown, with the lamp posts. The driver was going quite fast and was about to drive right across an old-looking rope bridge with wooden planks when Kim started to get quite panicked. She said, ‘No, doesn’t the driver know that they haven’t repaired that bridge yet? He’s going the wrong way!’ Apparently the driver noticed, and he stopped. Kim and I got out of the bus and she went into a shop to get a Jones soda.

Suddenly I was back home in my front entry way, standing there with André. Again, the dream teleportation is common and I didn’t question it, it still felt very real. I said, “It’s getting late, you have to go,” and he didn’t resist, he just said, “Okay,” and walked out. (I should have known then that it wasn’t real!) I looked down and saw that my pants for some reason were tattered beyond repair. I couldn’t remember how they’d gotten that way and that scared me too.

I changed into my pajamas and must have left the ripped pants outside my room. I started playing a CD (I even remember the song) and tried to go back to sleep.

Here’s where it gets really confusing… Sorry if I can’t explain it right.

In my dream, I was trying to get to sleep in my bed, with my door closed but with music playing quietly. Then, my mom came to the door and said from the other side of it, “Colette, did you notice that your pants are completely shredded?” Of course I had noticed, but I knew I had to get to sleep so I wouldn’t be tired in the morning. So I decided to ignore her and pretend I was asleep so we could just discuss it in the morning. But no, I had music playing and she’d assume I was awake. “Colette? Your pants!” she called again. “I know,” I replied. “Mom, I know about my pants but I need to get to sleep now.”

Then, this turned out to be a dream within a dream, because in my dream, I woke up. (But in reality I was still asleep.) My mom was still outside my door, but I had woken her up with my nonsensical rambling about pants. “Colette? Is everything okay? Don’t you know what time it is?”

Suddenly, I couldn’t move or speak. (In reality, my brain had woken up and my body hadn’t. It was a bout of the sleep paralysis I get sometimes.) I was prepared to reply to my mom that I was sorry that I woke her up, but as I became more lucid and the paralysis wore off, I realized that there was no one outside my door at all.

It was just the strangest transition into sleep and out of sleep I’ve ever had in one night.

In that book The Horizontal Instrument that I mentioned last entry, there is a man whose wife is losing her memories and language skills to dementia. He tried to describe how it must be terrifying for her, to wake up and never know where she was, to be perpetually confused. I kind of understood, but after last night I think I have a much deeper understanding of how scary just half a minute of full disorientation can be, let alone a few years.

This entry was very scattered, wow… It’s late.