The trouble with the deep blue medicated sleep is the nightmares aren’t gone. The demons don’t go anywhere. They don’t fuck off. They lurk about. They might be tucked safe in a box or hiding in shadows in a back corner of your skull but they remain. They are present. They are intact. If you keep them ever squashed in the blue for a tick too long they may bubble up to the surface in daylight. Take them out and dust them off for a ponder sometimes when you least desire. Gather your wits about you boy. Bend your eyes and ears to the fractured sense of self. To the roar of unknown voices. The endless loops of recorded dialogue. The buzzing radio crackle the stream of consciousness broken up only by intermittent static ringing in your ears. Zero in on the clarity. The bleached bones. The knife edge bright yellow sun on a silent yawning stretch of desert highway.
The only time you feel anything resembling the zen the dharma is when you take that first drink. When you close your eyes and disappear and the edge of black that becomes yellow rushes in. Near as you can tell the alcoholic blackout is a kissing cousin of the near death experience. Loss of consciousness while still functioning still operating motor skills is defined as the temporary removal of self from the spacetime continuum. Meanwhile the reacquisition of consciousness tends to be jarring. Like snapping out of freefall in midair. Opening your eyes from a blackout fully dressed in an empty bathtub or sitting on a park bench with bloody feet and no idea how you got there is bad enough. Unsettling but familiar. Like waking from a bad dream you’ve dreamed once before.
But arising from the black to find self in the middle of doing something dangerous mundane weird shameful or horrifying at full speed is next level fucked up. Making pancakes at midnight in a totally trashed kitchen. Dodging headlights on the freeway. Fucking a stranger in a stolen car. Chopping firewood in the neighbor’s yard or swimming up through black water to the shadow of light at the surface. Thrown violently into an alternate timeline with your sensory input drastically slowed down by internal gravity. Not quite sure you’re awake or dreaming and realizing oh shit I am awake. Time and space become smeared together and stretch into slush. Like falling forever into a blackhole slipping endlessly and ever more slowly into a singularity of one’s own making.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Involuntary to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.