Psychotic Views Part Seven:
I had a horrible night, I didn’t sleep much, no more than three hours and it took me forever just to get that much. It was after three in the morning before I went to sleep. The goddamn clock was driving me fucking crazy. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. It kept getting louder and louder. I wanted to bash the clock right in the face or rip it out of the wall. Anything to make it stop ticking, but I refrained from going so, somehow. At some point, I didn’t hear the ticking anymore. It was soon after that when I went to sleep, but it wasn’t a restful sleep, I had dreams. Three of them, three dreams in three hours. One dream would end then another one would start right up. Does a lot of other dream this way? Dream, dream, dream, bing, bang, bong, one right after the other. Which would be okay if the dreams were positive and enjoyable in some way, but I rarely seem to have those kinds of dreams anymore and none of these dreams were like that. Wait a second, someone’s poking their head in the doorway, “Yes?” It was a man of religion, a professional man of religion, a priest. “I was wondering,…” he said, “If you’d like to take communion”. “The answer is no”, I said. I was raised Catholic but I hadn’t done any participating in at least thirty years and now, now I was probably as anti-religion as anyone on Earth. “No, I didn’t come to see you about that..”. His voice was how, barely above a whisper, it was middle ranged, a little gravely and touched with subtle empathy. “What did you come to see me about then?” I asked. “I wanted to know if you’d like to talk to someone.” “You?” “Yes”
Company sounded like a good idea to me, but a priest wouldn’t have been my first choice nor my tenth choice for that matter. Given his views on religion, my views on religion, it was far from an ideal match. Company is company, though given my situation, I couldn’t afford to be choosy. I waved into the room and over to the chair beside my bed. He angled the chair around so we could evenly face to face. He was a small, frail built man with a genuinely slow, soft speaking voice. He was a few years younger than me. Late 40’s and his light brown eyes were large and heavy ringed underneath a habitual lack of sleep.
“Do you stop here often?” I asked; “as much as I can, but not as much as I’d like to.” “Making rounds?” “No, someone else is doing that, I came specifically to see you.” “ You did, why?” “Because…” “Because I tried to kill myself?” “Yes” “This isn’t going to be a moral lecture about suicide being a mortal sin?” “Not if you don’t want it to be” “Suicide is far from being the worst sin. They are much worse things than suicide, no suicide is the saddest sin and the church would do much better for the world if it expressed sympathy and sorrow instead of moral indignation.” “I see you have very strong opinions on the matter.” “I’ve earned the right” “Yes, I guess you have? “aren’t you going to tell me I’m wrong?” “No” “Why not?” “Because telling you so isn’t going to help you.” “Are you sure you’re really a priest?” He smiled, mostly with his eyes and pantomimed reaching for his wallet. My eyelids were hanging heavy in front of my eyes, closing part way and then opening up full over and over again. I yawned twice in rapid succession. The priest yawned once in reply.
“You’re tired, “ he said.
“So are you.”
“But not the same kind.”
“No.”
“Do you want me to go. I can come back another time.” “Do you want to come back another time?” “Yes.”
“You can stay now for a little while too, if you want.”
“Okay.”
“I only had two or three hours sleep last night. I haven’t slept well at all lately. Either too much or too little. That’s been my pattern, and dreams, always dreams.”
“Bad dreams or good dreams?”
“Mostly bad. Dark, negative, people chasing me. Inanimate arms reaching out trying to grab me and pull me away. When I wake up from that one, my legs were thrashing is someone leaning over the head of my bed, reaching down to touch me to wake me and then that’s exactly what happened. I woke up. One of my dreams even seems to have prophetic.”
“Which one? One of the ones you just told me about?”
“No. This was another one.”
“Could you tell me about it?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, the first part of the dream I remember had me flat on my back, at first I was moving. There was a lot of wild talking. I couldn’t understand any of it. Wherever I was, it was bright, but sunlight bright. The indoor lighting was kind of bright. I stopped moving, I was put on a table, things were being jabbed into my arms, IVs, needles. I could actually feel the pain as they went into my skin. More wild talking. I still couldn’t understand any of it, it stayed chaotic for sometime longer, then it finally calmed down, then I woke up from the dream.”
He sat there for a long minute, not moving an inch, not saying a word. He then leaned forward putting his elbows on his knees and stared hard at the floor. His eyes remained on the floor when he finally broke his silence. “Are you sure this was a dream?” he asked. “ Or could it have been when they were actually working on you. Maybe you were partially conscious and just seemed like a dream.”
No, it was a dream. There’s no doubting it. I had it just over two weeks ago.”
“So, this could have been your sub-conscious telling you something bad was going to happen. Some sort of trauma”
“You mean subsconscious knew I was going to try to kill myself.”
“It’s possible.”
“But in the dream I had, I never saw the source of the trauma. It was like walking into the middle of a movie. I missed the beginning
“So your conscious mind didn’t know what caused the trauma. It could’ve been a car accident, a physical attack, or some health related issue like heart attack or a seizure.”
“The beginning just wasn’t there. I would’ve remembered it if it had. If this really was my subconscious with some sort of pre-knowledge, why did the damn dream start in the middle and black out the beginning?”
“If you would’ve seen it from the beginning, would you have scared enough and aware enough to get help?”
“I don’t know, maybe. Tell me is it possible for someone to sue their own subconscious?” His face broke into a wide grin as he laughed quietly at my dark wit.
“I was told about your sense of humor,” he said.
“Oh yeah, by who?”
“One of the nurses.”
“Really? Which one?” Maybe I could talk her into climbing into bed with me when her shift was over.”
“You know, I like talking to you. You talk to me like I’m not a priest.”
“You’re a priest? I didn’t know that. I just thought you were some guy with the strange fashion sense of wearing his collar backwards.”
He stood up from the chair and stretched out his back a little. His face tightened a little from a twinge of paid, then reached down and put the chair back in its original place.
“Back a little stiff?” I said.
“Yeah, it acts up on me sometimes. I need to stand up and move around a little more. Too much sitting.”
“You have to go?”
“Yes, I have other things to do. Too many other things if you must know and you need to catch up on your sleep.”
“I can do that anytime. What else is there to do here?”
“It’s been good talking to you.”
“You too.”
“We’ll talk again. Although I don’t know when.”
“Okay.”
He walked around the foot of the bed and had reached the doorway when a nurse stepping in front of him. The two then had a short, hushed conversation. The nurse’s eyes panned over to me a couple of times while they talked. He didn’t take much detecting to figure out the subject of their conversation. Hell, it didn’t take any detecting at all, I was the subject of their conversation. Me. The conversations could not have lasted more than a minute. Maybe a few seconds more. When the talk ended, both of them turned and left the room without looking in my direction. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. My body seemed eager to do so. As I slowly faded into slumber, a long remembered song played inside my head:
‘ The sun don’t shine
The moon don’t move the tides
To wash me clean
Why so unforgiving
And why so cold
Been a long time crossing
A bridge of sighs’
‘Bridge of Sighs’ Robin Trower