At times in my life (historically when I’ve been very cyclicly stressed and/or surfacing a trauma or transformation), my dreams hang on after I’ve woken up. Along with lucid and recurring dreaming, there have been times I will wake from a dream, open my eyes, sit up, and still be seeing the dream scene as a transparent holograph in the room I’m in.
Like when you trick your own depth perception looking at a mesh ceiling to make it appear very close to you, I am able to hold the image easily. The actual experience is disorienting and gets uncomfortable, though. I want reality, to touch it. Usually, I break the dream fairly quickly by reaching my hand out in front of my face, obstructing my depth perception, and the dream scene will fade off and disappear.
I’d all but forgotten that I’ve been doing this over the last year, until my super weird night last night (proceeding a pretty fucking dark and intense week), which I will only talk in detail about one on one because it was that god damn strange. It involved salt, nearly a decade of cumulated synchronicity, feeling wind that was not actually there, two days of cleansing fire, draining a psychic wound, being stung by a wasp, and the quiet support of my new friend: The spider that lives in the bathroom of this dusty, haunted cabin.
I’ve been completely enamored with her in a way I have not felt attached to spiders before, and rarely feel attached in general. I talk with her when I see her and call her a pretty girl and take pictures of her. She is my friend, and I care for her deeply. It took over a week of this for me to remember; A few times a month, I’d say, and often in successions over the course of days, I will wake up in the van, looking at a spider.
Sometimes she is in my bed. Other times, just floating. I wake up, and I feel her there. I feel she is a she. I can see her through my eyelids, sitting on whatever it is I am facing, or, if nothing is close enough to me for her to be perched on, floating in front of my face.
She, and my surroundings, become more clear as I move from sleep to wake. I know when I open my eyes I will still see her. I open them and I see her — AND I see my surroundings accurately, just like I knew I would before I opened my eyes. The folds in my blanket are correct, or the view of my keyboard covered in a towel and piled with things I should have put away by now is correct. She is solid and also partially transparent. I know she is not “real”.
Over the course of a few beats, I am smiling inside as she fades away.
These are the days I wake, feeling seen.