#326

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I’ve never seen a poem about this, and can’t recall reading anything about this—yet, we all have thoughts on it. How do we sleep? Where is the pillow, how do we arrange our heads and feet, what is comfortable? Back, side, belly? So there’s all of that, but also, a fairly involved analysis here of what a particular body/bedding arrangement engenders as far as thoughts. Mainly, if he wants to avoid the nightmares that have plagued him forever, he lies on his back. No sleeping there, but also no nightmares, and his “thoughts are different & more straightforward. No “bouts of rest” to scuffle with. But “Henry’s shaming past / can’t get him either, on his back.” It’s all pretty ridiculous and banal, actually, except for the admission that I charged him with a while ago: These nightmares aren’t being sent from some callous and cruel God. They’re psychological payback. Karma.

Lie on your side, and “the horrid waking night, why / it beats underground.” Sleep or not, your choice, determined by which position you settle in. If you sleep, you risk dreaming. If you don’t sleep, then you don’t dream but go crazy anyway. We have to sleep if we’re to stay sane and healthy. He was caught between a pillow and a soft place, as it were.

In college, I had a roommate suffering from some seriously disturbing nightmares. It was plenty freaky because there would be these demon characters in his dreams messing with his soul, one I remember making him float down some long hall, and he couldn’t stop it. He was out of his mind over it all. We were living in this small, one-bedroom apartment, and the atmosphere in the place would start getting a bit heavy as bedtime approached. I had gone to some self-hypnosis seminar sponsored by the university and learned a little trick for getting at subconscious knowledge. (If anyone cares, I never did quite hypnotize myself. I didn’t try all that hard, to be honest.) But the trick: You make a small pendulum out of a piece of string and a personal object, like a key or ring or something, and you suspend it over an alphabet wheel you draw on a piece of paper. The pendulum will swing and point out letters, answering questions you ask it. It does work, and it really gets going sometimes. You can find lost items this way, he told us, or find out what you really want to do in facing a complex decision, etc. It seemed to work, at least in that recognizable words spelled out pretty routinely. They didn’t always make sense. I took it with a grain of salt, but we were open to this kind of thing. So, my roommate was under the impression that something was trying to get in touch with him in his nightmares with some kind of profound message. We went to the pendulum wheel in the spirit of something like a solo Ouija board. We had been using the words “unconscious” or “subconscious” in talking about the subliminal layer of his tormented undergraduate psychology. So we asked the wheel, “Who is trying to reach John?” It started swinging, one letter at a time—“I”—“D”—we waited for the next letter, and then the pendulum stopped. We looked at each other—what does that mean?—and it hit us at the same time: His id was sending him a message! It was a wonderful, freaky moment. Nothing supernatural about it. It actually settled the nightmares down. No devils at all, turned out, just the twisted atavistic roaring of his pent-up id. Totally explainable. That’s basically what’s behind my fairly glib assertion that you earn your own nightmares, that nightmares are some id-level, or maybe superego-level, message that we do well to pay some attention to. B. lets it be known in this poem that he knows exactly what’s happening in his nightmares: They’re emanations of his “shaming past.” What goes around comes around, don't you know. My friend didn’t have that much of a shaming past at 20 years old, which I can vouch for. We influenced each other’s teenage years quite a lot. But maybe there was something I didn’t know? Hmm…