REM

There’s nothing like a midnight horror, or ensuing midnight panic attack, to get the blood pumping.

In the middle of last week my first REM cycle came to an abrupt end.

The dream was wrapping up – my dreams drift, cycle, and fade with as much panache as the late-afternoon sitcom lineup preceding a dinnertime Law & Order SVU marathon that used to plague daytime television.

In the back of my unconscious brain I could feel the change from one dream scenario to the next. But before the shift could happen, a sound somewhere between a wet squeegee and a cork popping exploded around me. I woke up.

Alarmed, I opened my eyes – only to find that something was very, very wrong with my vision.

I know the pitch-black bedroom well. Every outline faintly perceptible through the slim cracks of moonlight that peek out from behind the window curtains have been etched into my brain.

But those outlines were not there. Not in their places – and not even in one place.

Worse, even in darkness, I was seeing things. Bursts of purple and green color floated and danced.

Cloudy patterns of vision and vision-shadows shifted around. They danced and waved and shimmered on with a sense of timelessness.

As if roving on a fourth-dimensional circuit – appearing and disappearing in a way that could only have been patterned, following a perfect rhythm of its own, yet matching no discernible blueprint, everything in this Cubist vision stirred.

Lines which should have stayed still appeared where they did not belong; splintered shapes chopped to pieces set off from each other at jarring angles.

I saw the world of Bracques and it moves. It tessellates in sliding, textured movements with more depth and form than the normal shapes around us, unseen but felt.

The beat of my heart set it off to a frenetic tempo. Eyes opened or closed, real shapes or color bursts rotated and bounced, as if in a methodical, soundless melody.

Shadows would not fix. As if I had to pay for a lifetime of their reliability. Lights would move. First here, now there, turn your face – now not there either, nowhere.

Vision was a creature with a mind of its own – and my sleep-addled brain did not rule out malicious spirits in these moments of eye torture.

A spell, a punishment from a wicked being would be less cruel. Visions of ERs and early death – or hopefully just a safe, early blindness – please let it be true blindness and not seeing but seeing wrong – haunted me too.

I stood up, ready to wake and beg for a ride to the hospital, when it stopped as suddenly as it started.

In the hall light everything maintained regular shapes and stillness. Even the light soreness in my eyes was consistent with waking up after a short sleep.

Cubist terror faded to realism.

But I haven’t slept in the same position since.