Stage 4 REM

By Leila Zeglen

Life has felt - for lack of better words - strange, lately. I wake up every morning and it doesn’t feel like I ever was asleep. Not in the sense that I am tired, but there is an unnerving familiarity in my bones when I open my eyes. It’s like I had already been feeling whatever this odd, blurry feeling I associate with waking up is for the past eight or so hours, throughout the entire night when I thought I had been asleep. 

Human beings are meant to go through cycles of consciousness. Awake, asleep. And there are stages within these cycles, too. The stages of sleep. Stage one: the transfer from wakefulness to sleep. Stage two: entering light sleep. Stage three: deep sleep. Stage four: REM, or rapid eye movement. In this stage, the body is immobilized and dreams occur. Have I been missing a stage? I’ve tried every trick in the book; counting sheep, lowering the temperature, counting my breaths. I am not entirely sure if I’ve been feeling awake while I’m really asleep, or asleep while I’m really awake, but all I know is that there is no sort of transition anywhere. It all feels linear; no morning grogginess, no late night exhaustion. I am in a constant state of… something.

I talked to my therapist about this in a recent session. She called it anxiety, and my mom drove me home with a paper note clamped between my shaking fingers, wrinkling under the pressure. It’s scribbled in that illegible doctor handwriting that apparently extends to therapists, too. It stings my eyes and makes my brain feel like imploding when I try to decipher it. 

Aside from being asleep or awake, existing in other parts of my life has started to feel monotonous. Every step I take, my foot does not touch the ground hard enough or loud enough. It's as if I am a magnet turned the wrong way, feeling the faint pressure of walking on intangible air but never fusing to the surface quite like I should. I feel too light. So I try to step again, stomping down with more and more force until it feels right, until it feels real and I feel enough like solid bone on solid ground again. Nowadays, it takes me a little longer to walk from place to place.

My condition has concerned me for awhile now, even more than it concerned my therapist when I told her that no, it isn’t anxiety, I feel more numb than anything, a faint static buzz accompanying every one of my senses. But no, it surely isn’t something like depression either. I described my experience in such a way that even she couldn’t fully comprehend. Still, it felt good to finally tell someone instead of reinstating it again to nobody but my own desolate mind. 

Today, I sit cross-legged in the shotgun seat of my mom’s silver Toyota Prius. The remains of the day die away in delicate rays of pale salmon sun as light drains from the evening sky. These rays melt through the windshield and lay their warm bodies down to rest in the car with us. There is an unspoken weight between me and my mother, a mass both too heavy to move and too delicate to touch, a space where no sunlight falls. This tangle of metaphorical string sits on the center console, taking up far too much space and making us feel cramped. The space was born from my secrecy. 

For the past 16 years of my life, I hadn’t needed a therapist because I had my mom. And this was that one thing I couldn’t tell her. She had always been on the receiving end of everything, from my deepest musings to my shallow, thoughtless replies, gently kissing scuffed knees and scraped elbows, tenderly wrapping aching bones, pressing cool washcloths to my fever-struck forehead. She had always combed my hair back and cut up fresh fruit and brought home four little cookies in a paper bag when I had had a rough day. It isn’t that she loves me any less now, or that I love her any less. That feeling is still just as present; it's the feeling that comes from a mother that is so inherently warm and constant, and so sure in itself that part of the feeling is the confidence that the feeling itself will never go away. A mother’s love is something reliable, something to depend on, something that will persist even when you can’t always give that love in return. There aren’t many forms of love out there that that can be said about. A love that, even if you feel that maybe it shouldn’t persist, it will anyways. Oddly enough, this is precisely why I have a therapist now instead of my mother. My mom cares enough to lose her own sleep over me, and I care enough to never make her worried enough to do that. So I don’t tell her about this feeling, this abysmal and off putting uneasiness that always lurks in the back of my mind, yet evades any label or name, and is so constant that it sometimes even manages to evade my own thoughts as I briefly forget all about it. I know, that despite what she says, she wishes I would tell her what is troubling me.

And now, as she turns her head toward me as the traffic light shifts soundlessly from yellow to crimson, and gives a smile so gentle and timid that I sort of want to sob and melt into the car seat, its like I can sense something – two tin cans knotted to either side of this jumble of string between us. I imagine us slowly lifting them upwards and entrapping our ears inside the hollow aluminum shells on either end, and it is her smile that speaks through to me, reaching me through the labyrinth of yarn. She is telling me, whatever it is, it will be okay.

I hear her, and it is more than enough for me. The corners of my mouth twitch upwards, and the promise of teardrops sticks to my eyelashes as I blink and turn away, staring out the window as the light is stagnant for 1, 2, 3, 4  seconds, I count, before blinking to green. 

~

With my eyes already feeling cloudy and bleak, I squint underneath the pale morning sunlight. The peach luminescence of the sun washes over my skin like a warm wave laps against the seashore. I am standing in the middle of an asphalt parking lot, legs pressing a good amount against the ground, my body feeling well-fused in place and gravity weighing enough. I scan my surroundings and look upon a column of colors with letters I could never read. Pupils swelling, I squint as the unidentifiable words swim around in a watery mirage on the wooden sign like little fish. Wiping my brow, I forcefully turn my head to tear my gaze away before the letters tear away first. Holding my clammy hand flat open, my mom shakes out some sunflower seeds from a quiet plastic bag into my hand. We devour a handful of the seeds in sync and quietly laugh.

For my mom and I, this shopping center has been a constant in our lives for forever. My hyperactive hurricane of 7-year-old legs found space in a quaint dance studio on the corner. There’s an empty lot tucked away where a Halloween store will inevitably materialize once September comes around each year. The restaurant with the swirling, green-lettered sign has held too many of my birthday dinners to count. Today, and more recently, this automobile harbor has been our favorite grocery shopping destination.

As we walk, my shoes push against the ground too gently for my liking, too meaninglessly. I start to feel light and at risk of floating, and I slow down to make my steps more vertical and forceful, sinking down into the asphalt for a second or two as it melts beneath my step like a pillow, rolling downwards like a slow, sticky wave. Mother’s hands in mine is another thing that feels too gentle for my liking, as she keeps pace with me perfectly and does not tug me forwards or backwards. I do not like it. Together, we do not feel real. So I tell my fingers to move one by one, regaining the steady present feeling of her hand, and I start to feel whole again, finding the solid matter of the ground pressing against the soles of my shoes and feeling the gentle weight of a firm hand in mine.

My mom ruffles my hair as the glass panel doors slide open and our shoes tap against the linoleum tile. Our bodies slice through the open space, the cool and sterile air.

The pleasant insect-like buzz of fluorescent lights, the beeping of registers, silver coins clicking against one another. I focus on these senses as my eyes whir around the absolute abyss of letters I can not, for the life of me, read. They are blurry and fuzzy and swimming, and they act such as mirrors; my irises bob in watery pools as my vision blurs and distorts. I hurriedly look around for something solid to balance my vision on.

My eyes find that point at the end of aisle 4. Vision snagging on a white, staticky dry cloud of wool, the mind-numbing peripheral of words fade away, but my brain feels even more scrambled than before. Because-

What?

I blink. That’s-

… a sheep. For no apparent reason.

My brow furrows as the corners of my mouth draw downward. I tentatively step closer to the newly appeared fence enclosure of dry wood that cracks in pale shades of brown. Entranced, I observe the oddity before me. 

Off-white wool. Dry fence. Blue cereal boxes. Linoleum tile. Four sheep, 1, 2, 3, 4. Stray yellow grass. A red glowing number, aisle four. Fluorescent light. I blink again and I count them again, for no apparent reason; 1, 2, 3, 4.  

Confusion ebbs into amusement and a surprised laugh bubbles up from my throat, mingling with the bleating of the sheep before me. They solemnly stand under the buzzing white overhead light fixtures, ears twitching and dark brown eyes full. Stray whispers of dry yellow grass cling to their wool. One feebly, gently lifts a cloven hoof and begins to move forward in a stumble. I watch, mesmerized as the other sheep get the memo and very slowly begin to circle like vultures in front of the display of blue-boxed cereal. It is slow and effortful. The sheep grunt and bleat some more, raw noise mixing into the grocery ambiance. Mother and I watch in gentle, warm curiosity. My shoe taps the pearly tile in a tally. 1, 2, 3 ,4.

Eventually, we pull ourselves away from this strange yet intriguing scene. We finish our scavenge of cartons and containers and bags and walk merrily toward the cash register, bodies cutting through the air, the area between each aisle, the phantom solitude in front of the deli, the empty space behind the fruit displays. Airy, feather–like giggles passing between me and my mother, warmth oozing holes in the rigidity of the crisp cool air, I make a stupid joke and she laughs loudly, unladylike. I am somehow reminded once again of my strange & monotonous recent feelings.

 I feel the world slow around me and come to a stuttering halt. The grocery store bustle dies down for just a moment or two. Time drips by unnaturally slow in this moment, sickly sweet like honey.

 She’s so happy.

We’re only grocery shopping, that’s it. It’s simple, and yet, her eyes are sparkling. I haven’t really done anything, aside from maybe hassle her a bit too much about buying the sugary cereal instead of the healthy alternative because it tastes better.

And yet, she’s looking at me. It’s me who is making her eyes do that motherly thing they do so often. 

My heart aches in my chest, and that’s when I know one thing. Something deep in my bones tells me it's the right thing.

I want to tell her everything.

~

I am entangled in a heavy wool blanket, sunken into a corner of the sofa. My mom enters the living room with four apple slices in a ceramic dish. Setting them on the coffee table with a gentle click, she looks at me. 

As my mom’s gentle weight settles onto the fabric couch in front of me and she rests a hand on my knee, so close but still feeling miles away, I imagine the blanket made of that tangle of string, enwrapping me, a barricade between me and the person who I love most. It weighs on me and tugs pressure on my heart, tying knots in my bloodstream and causing me to struggle for air. It feels too glaringly obvious, too close to my eyeline to ignore, when I look into my mother’s warm coffee eyes, coaxing me to tell her, to let her in.

Taking a shallow breath of this warm air between us, I allow the salt to drain from my eyes as I speak her name in a shaken, desperate whisper.

Neither one of us blinks, holding a sincere and sorry gaze. And now, I imagine us both with either end of that string between our shaking fingertips. Together, we begin to unravel as I break down and tell her everything.

My mom sits still and listens as I cry, and cry, and cry. Together, we untangle this yarn I’ve named solitude and many, many minutes later, it leads her into my arms. She holds me firmly, and I melt into her touch. I feel light. Light, yes, but still a mess emotionally. I cry some more.

Once I finally pull back, using all my might to lift my muddled head off of my mom’s shoulder, I make a pathetic noise that is somewhere along the spectrum from embarrassed laugh to sob. And my mother – she laughs quietly to herself through streaming tears, but she does so more delicately, more endearingly. She is so full of every tender emotion, that it almost suits her well, to be both so tragically melancholic and so relentlessly comforting. She is a juxtaposition. I do not see how those two things could ever coexist within myself, how either one could exist without becoming a killer, hunting down the other like prey, a virus that needs to be the only thing to exist. How does she have room for both?

My mom grabs my hand, and she tells me that she’s glad I told her. I smile weakly, widely.

And that’s when something shifts, in an instant. I don’t know something is off until my mother speaks again, but as soon as she does speak, I realized that this, the silence before her speaking, was when the exact moment happened. I knew I had missed the exact moment.

My mother looks at me gently, delicately still, but her smile drops away. “I’m glad you told me tonight.” She looks sad. She looks afraid.

“...What?”

I blink in confusion. It – 

What?

Here’s the thing: it wasn’t even that particularly off putting. But the strangest sense of dread creeps into my chest, and I cannot place why. It is a feeling akin to acting in a play, and your co-star says something so wildly off-script, and it disrupts that state you had entered, that state where you had been so immersed in your role and the world of your character that it is all the more jarring when they say that thing. The feeling fades in a second, and the comparison is lost on me.

“Y-yeah.” I say. She squeezes my hand four times.

My mind is in on a secret, and it won’t let me in. My mom is in on it too. It’s something I know, I should know, I’m supposed to know. My heart feels heavy, and dread crashes over me like a wave. I feel a sense of remembrance, an epiphany melts on to my shoreline. But I only feel these things; there is nothing there. It is the feeling of knowing something when I don’t know anything at all. It is the sense of reaching out into a phantom wave, searching for that epiphany, and coming up with dry hands and a mind at war.

~

I sink into my mattress and tug the pink patchwork quilt over me. My skin singes at the feeling, as it has become associated with that monotony, that familiar feeling of numbness. It feels oddly like a sheep’s wool, and I trace my fingertips over it in remembrance. 1, 2, 3, 4. Its threads are interwoven with the numbness, and it was stitched from the hand of a shadow, looming over my twin-sized bed in all its nameless, shapeless, mystery. The strange feeling will grow throughout the night, as my sleep feels incomplete but I am somehow still well-rested. My mother knows now, and it feels a little less abstract, easier to put a name to. But at the same time, it feels less tangible, a little less looming. I really am happy I told her. My mom comes into my room with a kiss on the forehead, and I hug her tightly, for longer than I usually do. She holds me both firmly and gently, rubbing my back and rocking us gently from side to side. 

She then sits at the foot of the bed and sings softly in the darkness. Her voice floats shapelessly through the dark night time space and makes me feel content enough to settle a little further into bed, but not quite content enough to put me to sleep instantly like it used to when I was younger. It is okay. I appreciate the effort, and my heart beats fondly. But I think my sleeping habits are out of both of our controls, at this point. She leaves the room eventually, voice burning out like a dying star. I eventually manage to force myself into the state I can’t quite call sleep.

~

I wake up the following morning, and I know immediately that something is different. 

The slight ever-lingering buzz of the air is a little quieter, but it feels more crisp, more sharp and purposeful than usual. The oozing static that melds around heavy limbs, puts a feeling of carbonation in my bloodstream, is gone. I feel… different. I do not feel monotonous.

I raise a hand over my smiling mouth in disbelief.

I had fallen asleep, and woken up, two different types of consciousness finally hit with full force, back pressing flat against the rock bottom of sleep, mind shut off, falling downwards, and then rising back up, emerging fully ashore, waking into the clean morning air, inhaling the light of the sun.

I am healed.

My hands grasp at the material laying over me. I am about to throw this quilt off of my energized body and call out my mother’s name to tell her the good news, but I freeze when I notice the quilt feels cooler than usual. The unnerving sensation of dry wool is gone, but it still shocks my skin. 

Something isn’t right.

My brain freezes over for a moment as well, stuttering into stillness alongside my paralyzed-feeling body as my eyes fully adjust to the morning light. Frowning, I look down at the quilt I hold in my hands. It is not pink. It is… blue, like a wave crashed ashore.

My mind dives headfirst into the wave, plunging back to last night. I reach for that epiphany again, that wave melting on my shoreline, and my heart stops when my hands come up soaking.

I begin to realize what has really happened as my mother’s name dies in my throat. My heart is picked up by the wave as it melts and returns to that vast, lost world, carried out to sea. Every pore floods with saltwater, and I frantically realize all at once that this isn’t what I want. Gasping for air, I want to sprint into the sea. But I can’t go back to the water; I can’t go back in and save her, I can’t pull my mother to shore and breathe life into her hollow shell of a body. I can’t get her to wake up with me. I am left stunned, speechless. I feel my heart begin to sink and drown as I watch, gutted and lifeless, from the shoreline.

It’s back. That strange, monotonous feeling is back, so familiar yet so different than before. The other side of the same coin. If before I was soaking wet, peacefully, quietly drowning, underwater for so long that I couldn’t even tell whether I was wet or dry, now I have been thrown violently ashore, coughing my lungs out on the sand, heart already taken back to sea, left to spill out my insides, bleed out and die. 

…Before, I was asleep, lost in a dream for what felt like so long that it felt real, that my mom felt real and alive and okay again, and now…

 I am awake. 

I don’t want to be awake. I need to go back. I need to go back. I need to go back. I need to go back. Slam your eyes shut, don’t open them. Don’t let in any light. Materialize it in your mind. Bring her back. Fall asleep. Fall asleep. Fall asleep. Fall asleep. Why isn’t this working? I’m doing everything right; the tricks, the tricks to fall asleep faster. The temperature is low, it's cold, I desperately try to count my erratic breathing. The sheep. Counting sheep. 1, 2, 3, 4. Come on. Stage 4. 1, 2, 3, 4. Rapid eye movement. The sheep. Stage 4: REM. Go to sleep, start dreaming. Bring her back, hurry before I forget. Bring her back. 1, 2, 3, 4. 

1, 2, 3, 4.

 1, 2, 3, 4.

My chest heaves and my eyes snap open to a blue quilt. 

And all I can do is lie there. Too tired, too scared to move.

I can’t sleep, and I don’t know what to do with myself. 

So I fall still and silent, the ghost of my mother’s name haunting me. It is abstract, and I try to say it aloud, a final resort to make it feel a little more tangible.

Anything to make her feel real, and present, and alive, like she had in that dream.

I say it in a broken, dying whisper. It does feel more real, but it does not help, because feeling real is not always for the better.