Living a Lifetime in a Few Minutes of REM

Sometimes my nights are haunted by the fall of Vukovar. Other nights the distress is due to my dreaming brain remixing memories of Anne-Marie Forker. Yet my last sleep saw me crying out not from events in my history, but due to the tragedy of an imagined life that was not my own.

In my sleep I sometimes become other people. Living a lifetime in a few minutes of REM. Dreams so detailed I wake unsure of who I am until I can shake of this dreamself's memories of families I have never had, schools I never attended and jobs I never worked. Once I dreamed I was dying a lonely death in Harlem. Lying in cold room, it walls swollen with damp, my skin as thin as paper and tight across my crumbling bones. I remembered everything. The pneumatic sound of a binding machine in the cardboard factory I had spent 20 years toiling in, the claustrophobia of sitting in a ticket booth, the heat of the 1973 summer, a childhood fight with bullies on West 118th Street and the shame of not being able to read. When I checked on maps later, I was shocked to see that I really could have navigated around South Harlem on the basis of what I brought back into the waking world from this dreamed life.

Last night I became Tom, became all his small joys, victories and losses. His flaws and his strengths. Even his addiction to the pleasure of vinyl in a digital age. The moment this other life lurched into nightmare was when Tom's employer and best friend – who just happened to be his brother – had a total psychotic mental breakdown. At this point I lived Tom's shock and loss as the person he had known for 19 years disappeared from view. Lived his anger at the ridiculous stigma visited on those suffering from mental health issues. Lived his guilt at not spotting the signs earlier, lived the way his chest tightened every time he visited his brother in hospital. I lived Tom’s relief when his brother was allowed home and most of all, I lived in his devastated emotional landscape after his brother committed suicide.

I woke with tears. They stopped only when Tom began to recede, the coherence of, his memories evaporating as I struggled back to full consciousness. Where ever he is, returned to dreamland or hiding out in the synaptic shadows of my mind, I hope Tom is doing better.