WOMB

You could call it a nightmare of sensation.

Or an anxiety undirected, its plot is loose at best. The production team should be replaced.

Freud would relish it. A feast of latent content to make manifest. But I worry cigar fumes would only add cloud to the already misted room of recollection.

It’s made of a feeling in my vascular system, somewhere at the base of my head:

A poem of textures and tastes set to time. A temporal tableau that bleeds through from dream into the doors and windows and bathrooms of the day-awake-world,

giving rhythm to my walls in an off-key,

echoey,

too-slow

heartbeat,

without a body for a background, nor a heart to place the pulse. It's not coming from me.

Just a beat to a backdrop of backlit flesh, a sense of interior, a cushioned passage set on a slight slope, an incline inverted, and I am not at the top.

Remembering feels like walking through water. No. Running through water.

That other well recorded dream feature. The speed of a nightmares always seems to contradict itself.

A ball is rolling.

Neither towards me, nor away from me. Where am I, am I ‘I’.

Gravity and temporality seem to have revoked their contract agreement. Physicists everywhere are in outrage.

The ball rolls slowly. But it rolls.

Is the pulse coming from the walls or in my head? Below or above?

In situ within my own muddled syntax, like trying to draw the face of an artificially intelligent computer, constructing a knowing mouth and doleful eyes from zeros and ones.

I just wish it wouldn’t step in and out of my waking life so brazenly. Does it not know its below common courtesy to confuse dreams with reality? Not the done-thing. What would all the people say.

They'd speak in time to the rhythm I imagine, at least until I found a word,

or a tune, or a song, or a noise to repeat over and over.

Pause the pounding, disrupt it so it shifts back into its little dream-space hidey-hole.

And then there's the taste.

The one that takes lodge in the roof of my mouth. Or maybe it is the taste of the roof of my mouth. Metallic, a little sweet, like inhaling water vapour or a sweet saline at the dentists.

That comes too. Sometimes before the beating. Sometimes on its own. For a second. And accompanied by the void tummy dread feel.

The funny thing is the dread has no extension, no dread of something, no object, no referent.

It is just the character of the dream.

Its definition, like the mustached-mumble-man, or the hay fever-girl,

or the baby who never cries.

The unreality of it has very physical manifestations.

But it all comes before words, like it happened before I thought in words and hence

can't translate it fully into linguistic expression. It's just a sense.

A whole and a fragment of itself.

It all reminds me of death. Or birth.