This all happened about twenty five years ago, back when I was still in preschool. Psychologist said now was as good a time as any to share. The acuity has well and truly passed by now, she reckons, “…so, Brennan, get it out there,” she said. Find someone who’ll listen.
I was a sleepwalker as a kid. A “somnambulant” as the doctors called it. Common enough, but mine was more enterprising than average. This one time, for instance – and this is a mild example – I wandered up and back the length of the house with my eyes half open, and apparently mistook the bedroom for the bathroom, and Dad barely made it in time before I pissed directly on my sister.
My parents thought it was hilarious and relished a retelling of the story, but for several weeks the sleep therapist kept asking in one way or another if I had any ill feeling towards her.
Mostly though, it was the wandering. Waking up in this field or backyard, or that bushland. Waking in my bed covered in pine nettles, with a forked stick and a pinecone, or two, sometimes three, and a random pile of pebbles by my side.
Thing about sleepwalking is, for the most part, you’re only slightly more asleep than you are awake, and so you’re not really either. Just asleep enough that it’s remembered as a kind of broken dream. Images of the real world are there, but they blend into and change the narrative of whatever dream you’re already having.
And you rarely recognise the real as being real. The dim haze of the darkness made this easier, I think. Only occasionally would the images seem familiar enough to trigger a lucidity as to where I’d wandered to.
This wasn’t limited to our house in the bush. Susie and I used to go stay at grandma’s once a month, in the same old house on Davis Street that Mum grew up in. A small three-bedroom it was, lemon-yellow weatherboarded, with that classic shit-brown twirl-patterned carpet from the 50s, and off-white wallpaper in every room, save the bathroom, where the pattern had the bold pinstripes and floral curls of a tearoom more befitting to a Lewis Carol novel than where a morning dump is taken.
I loved my grandma. She made the. most. incredible. rissoles and veggies, and the saltiest gravy. For all her efforts over the years, Mum was never quite able to replicate them, even with the recipe. Gran was miraculous that way.
One of my favourite pastimes was when we watched Hey Hey It’s Saturday together, after which I would climb all over her and mess her hair and laugh, and she’d laugh too and then lay me on her lap and tickle me so much that I couldn’t stop giggling. “That boy has too much energy,” she’d say to Mum when she picked us up, but I could tell by her tone she wasn’t serious.
Hard not to miss those kind of memories. They settle like old scars beneath even the severest of burns, skin from then on neither one thing or the other. Just a bumpy, blotchy mess that, though it eventually stops hurting, never lets you forget that it’s there.
I think sleepwalking should really be called dreamwalking. The walker’s eyes aren’t fully closed, and so they see the world, kind of, but it’s a world augmented by the associations the dreaming mind makes. The confined space of Grandma’s house made this a very different experience to home. The suburbia she lived in was too dangerous to wander about in, and so Mum paid to have a special lock installed that couldn’t be undone from the inside, and the worst I could do was walk around the house.
For months I woke up remembering the same walls and corner turns of this surreal version of her hallway that never seemed to end. The loungeroom and dining area flashed by too, sometimes, but the main preoccupation was the walls.
Jim Henson’s Labyrinth was a popular movie among us kids at the time, so Mum said that’s all it was. I figured Mums in general were exempt from the foibles of confidence other adults made, especially my Mum, so it was easy to accept. It never occurred that I was looking at the walls to avoid seeing something else.
Gran’s rissoles were mince and powdered pepper and Worchester sauce and a liberal dashing of iodised table salt, the one made by Saxa, mixed with egg, flour, and parsley. Gravy always Gravox gravy, veggies always from the same Coles supermarket at the complex down the road. Always the same; always perfect. And to her delight I always went back for seconds. My sister was too young to remember any of this, but I could tell she loved these dinners as much as I did, in her own way.
Food so simple and good that your senses had it brought up a theme in a dream. Walls above steaming gravy pots and pyramids of moist meat patties and seasoned meatloaves a foot long, salty gravy smell a mix with the steaming meat smell; these circling tables that followed circling walls with their plates of peas and carrots and cauliflower, and even more rissoles.
I dreamt that buffet every visit in one of form or another. But, this one night, which my psychologist would later say was the beginning, I couldn’t dream eat a thing. I was passing the walls too fast to reach out without making a mess, and the last thing I wanted was to make a mess at Gran’s – even a dream mess, when I was lucid and knew it was a dream. Which wasn’t the case that night; the dream was immersive and as total as they come. Had no idea that I was practically running in the real world. Round and round the circuit, past the dining room, past the kitchen, down the hall and past the loungeroom, again, and again, getting faster each time that I saw from the corner of my eye the black thing.
Feelings are more potent in dreams compared to other senses, than they are in real life. Vision’s only there to help inform whatever deep feeling a dream wants us to have. The terror that I felt that night, thick, intense, came before I knew what I was responding to. When on one go-round finally I saw it, this black motion in my periphery as I passed the loungeroom, the validation of that fear overwhelmed all that and sunk it into the deepest dread I’d felt before. A nightmare, the worst of nightmares, sharpened dreadful by its hint to some black thing that I couldn’t properly see.
Soon I was moving at impossible speeds, more like I was gliding on water, tables of food gone, the walls turned a blur, and then I was screaming. And awake under the bed, and I grandma’s feet were there as the light turned on and she called my name and bent down with an expression of concern almost tender.
“Harris Brennan, what on earth is the matter?” she quizzed, but I was too hysterical to respond. She helped me up and I hugged her as tight as I could manage. “There, there, sweetie. Everything’s okay.”
The next month, back at home, the nightmare kept coming back, and the dreamwalking stopped almost completely. A dozen nights I slept in my parents bed, come to them in the early hours with tears in my eyes, that same dread feeling carried to wakefulness with a weight more overwhelming than it was while asleep.
Curiosity can be problematic when the mind is left at the mercy of its dream faculties, when everything is once or twice removed from direct experience. When consciousness drifts vague. I think that’s part of what facilitates how senses become secondary to feelings, actually. In good dreams this is the whole raison of course, but in the case of a nightmare centred around the avoiding of an unknowable black thing, curiosity’s free-floating boldness only serves to amplify the terror.
Whenever I passed the loungeroom, and caught that peripheral glimpse, the magnetism of the pull to look was so strong that it felt like a physical tugging. That I had to pull away from, with more effort each pass, until eventually the tension was too great and I would turn and see it, this flickering jet-black figure without a face, for the briefest moment, before waking to my own screaming.
The sleep therapist did her best to help, part of her speciality thankfully being severe night terrors. She said that what we think about prior to sleeping influences the dreams we have, and because I’d been going to sleep afraid of having the nightmare again, it actually caused the nightmare. A lot to take in for a preschooler, but Mum explained it better when I got home. To help, the therapist suggested she get some storybook cassettes for me to fall asleep to. A week of listening to Benjamin Bee later, it started to work, and the prospect of sleeping at grandma’s again didn’t seem so bad. Mum had held back that month’s visit until I was more settled, and I was by then missing Gran and her rissoles so much that I didn’t even care if I had the nightmare or not.
In fact, I was ready. Well, determined as you can be, knowing control would be lost after my eyes closed. Felt like standing up to some playground bully who wouldn’t leave me alone in the sandpit, and that’s all the black thing was, I decided. A bully in the sandpit of an otherwise serene dream of rissoles and veggies and gravy. I didn’t even bother with the cassette that night. Just slid beneath the tightly made blankets and stared at the ceiling, soon asleep to the drift of Gran’s smoker’s cough from down the hall.
Soon thereafter, I was dreaming. An almost lucid dream, this time. I remember my fingers sliding along the emboss of the wallpaper as I walked, and I knew exactly where I was; but the awareness was still a sort of hypnotised hypostate, and I couldn’t hear anything, or feel my body. Just my fingers as I floated smooth and silent around the usual walking path. It felt good in a dumb way, better than any dream in weeks. Think I even started smiling. Smiling and gliding around without a point, or story.
Subversion is a rare thing in dreams. The narrative is being authored by the dreamer, changing scenes then having a certain flow in transition. Or, the shift creeps up on you. Never does it come suddenly, from nowhere. The unconscious mind is still the mind. All of which was implicit to the expectations of a kid my age. So when after however many laps of the hall I turned to the loungeroom and saw Darth Vader tearing up my Grandma’s couch cushions, the dream, as it was, stopped stark to a halt. I stopped moving, any sense of body disappeared, lucidity caved-in, and I was immediately nothing more than a point of view. Frozen stiff a witness to this malevolent Darth Vader who was feverishly ripping the fabrics of Gran’s old couch, black helmet faced directly towards me.
The numbness of the initial shock proved no more than a short buffer. As I registered things, through me came a wave of that same soul-tearing dread as before, with magnifications of terror so great it was like riding an elevating siren whose sound was the pure embodiment and accumulation of every possible fear. Everything about this nightmare Vader was wrong. Its stature was shorter and rounder and the helmet out of proportion, and its movements were wildly frenetic and dramatic and rapid. The feeling that followed the manic energy of its cushion ripping was the peak of it all. That it told the evil beneath the mask of its terrifying, sinister monster. A siren that elevated to an emotional white noise so total that I soon lost consciousness altogether.
Saturday mornings were sitting on the carpet watching The Saturday Morning Fun Show on Gran’s old wood-panel TV, then her fried egg toasted sandwiches, which, to be fair, were almost as good as her dinners. By far the tastiest eggs I’ve eaten, still. No-one has any idea how she managed the flavour. My guess is, something about the powdered pepper she used.
But that Saturday earlier than the cartoons started, and stayed in bed. Legs felt like they’d walked a mountain, and emotionally I was more or less exhausted, and dead flat – a new sensation that would often repeat itself in the years to come. Gran got up at 7am as per usual, and soon the fried egg smell wafted in. I can smell them now as I write this, is how delicious they were.
A nightmare about Darth Vader shredding her cushions was a difficult topic to broach over breakfast. So I did my best to act normal, not to worry her. Gran was a big worrier as it was. Always calling home and asking Mum, “How’s my Harris doing?” even though we’d just spoken and I’d told her myself. Always wanted that second opinion to be sure.
She knew something was the matter. There was no fooling my loving grandma. But instead of saying anything, she just knelt beside the dining chair and gave me a big hug. One of those extra long hugs where she rubbed my back to let me know everything was okay.
The rest of the weekend was fairly typical. A visit to the shops, went to the pictures – what she called the local cinema, bless her – and we watched Hey Hey It’s Saturday. But Saturday night I barely got an hour’s sleep. Listened to Benjamin Bee some dozen times, to no avail. The feeling that came with the memory of the malevolent Vader crept back the moment I became drowsy, until the drowsiness was finally too great to resist.
Mum’s car pulled up the drive at 3pm, a couple hours later than usual so she could get her hair done at this nearby salon she liked. A kind of reddish brown, which smelt like sweetened dry cleaning for three days before she washed it. I was never more pleased to leave for home, and to get back to my own bed, where I would hopefully be dreamwalking again. Who cared what the therapist said: waking up with some new mystery trinket was the best part of waking up. If I’d known it would never happen again, I’d have tried taking a better mental snapshot of the last time it happened. But, as Vonnegut said, so it goes.
We were packed and backed out of the driveway when I realised I’d left Benjamin Bee in the tape deck. “Be quick,” Mum said. The car door slammed behind, and when I approached the house, that same feeling, albeit a milder version, rose in my stomach with foreboding. I pretended not to notice and walked through the still-open door and called out for Gran and went down the short hall to the spare bedroom where I slept. Cassette in hand, it was then that I noticed, the house was completely and utterly silent. Just the traffic from the other side of the back fence, and the ticking of the clock down the hallway. Sudden the dread swelled fast as an electric geyser. Complete mental paralysis, broken a minute later by Mum honking the car horn. I collected myself. Gran was just taking a nap, came voice-of-reason’s antibody.
I tip-toed from out the bedroom. Gran’s door was wide open, so I peered around to check on her.
As it turned out, Gran wasn’t napping at all. She was standing in front the white curtain of the window. Her body completely stiff, her arms straight down her side, and she was staring wide-eyed and stone-faced, directly at me. Directly, at me. The same paralysis, seconds to a minute, car horn then come from some other dream being had by some other person. This lady that was Gran kept staring as she then bent down, and stood up, holding a black thing. That which had already been forever branded: an oversized Darth Vader helmet, slowly raising over her head, slowly pulled down over the suddenly maniacal smile on her face.
When I came to, I was belted in the backseat of the car and we were halfway home. “Gran said you had a dizzy spell,” Mum said, slightly concerned.
The previous shock of the nightmare had been a kind of psychic prelude, my psychiatrist said the fourth session. One that compounded with the later trauma to cause the PTSD. Made sense. She was better than the sleep therapist, the one who didn’t have a clue how to help after that weekend. The insomnia ended up lasting more than ten years after that.
I got over it eventually. Burns stop stinging with the benefit of time, but to this day it takes the focus of writing to see the better scar beneath. Truth is, I couldn’t stand it when Mum tried making those rissoles. The closer she got, the more disgusting they tasted. And poor Mum, she attributed the nausea and sometimes vomiting to her cooking. Calling it an allergic reaction wasn’t too far from the truth, though. And it meant she made lasagne more often, which suited me just fine.
Her homemade lasagne has been my favourite dish for about twenty five years now.
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r/wordsofbrennan