itch: [noun] an uneasy or restless desire or longing

I haven’t been able to sleep.

Or rather, I’ll fall asleep, and wake up five or six times throughout the night.

Lately I’ve been waking myself up from having to itch a mosquito bite, one of the very few downsides of summer. Sometimes I’ll wake myself up from kicking the covers off of me- I hate the AC but the fan doesn’t quite do it sometimes.

But other times, recently, I just wake up. For what seems like no reason at all.

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There is this very, extremely difficult fine line of “time” in the moment before I am fully awake from my sleep, where I’m caught in between the dreaming state and the “reality” state. I studied dreams, I did a 10-page paper on dreams, and I still couldn’t tell you, just as all those authors I cited in my bibliography, what are the true mechanics and means of a dream.

There are theories, of course, which have truth to them. But there is something more, something spiritual in the sense that science can’t grasp with works of the psyche and chemicals and biology about the dreamer, the dream, and the world that’s left behind once we are awake.

Most people I know don’t dream as vividly and intensely as I do, and if they do, they don’t remember it. But if you are one of the people who know what I’m talking about, who can wake up and actually feel a sense of loss because your dream is over, then you know; you know this magical, unexplainable concept that I am trying to communicate.

My dreams are a scrambled show of specific people that I turn off to in the morning and resume when I enter the REM state. My dreams withhold all the people of my past, like they live there, in this completely intangible realm, they exist, waiting for me to close my eyes and revisit them. To haunt me, to tease me, to play with me. Maybe they miss me. Maybe they are bored and come out at night to taunt me, knowing that they can get away with anything.

But this isn’t about them. This is about that line, where time and space do not exist, or if they do, it’s in a way I have yet to learn about. The best way I can describe it is this: There is the dreaming world, and the reality world. And you cross over to the other side depending on your status of asleep or awake. But sometimes, for a split second, I’ll catch myself in between states, where I know I’m leaving behind the dream, saying goodbye to the ghosts of my past, saying goodbye to that place where time has no bearing, and coming into a different being, where none of what just happened for the past 6 or 7 hours matter anymore.

Leaving moments that I was experiencing behind to evaporate into an existence that I can never return to. It’s a real bittersweet thing. And I hate using clichés, because what’s cornier than a cliché? But it just reminds me about life. The bitter sweetness of it all. We work so hard at relationships, just so they can fall apart and die off in some place called “the past”. Some work so hard at not remembering, just so they can fall asleep and be reminded by their sub consciousness. And we work so hard to make things “right”, we work so hard to make things work, here, when we are awake, and sometimes I think maybe that’s all just a big joke. What if this is the dream, what if this is the nonsensical land of make believe? And regardless of what it is or isn’t, it’s so sad- so heartbreakingly confusingly sad- in a really ridiculously beautiful way.

I have all these bites that I keep scratching; a relentless itch keeps waking me up, even when I just want to keep dreaming…

KV ©

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