“Between Worlds”
Feb 23, 2020I was lying in bed and saw her sitting at her desk across the room. My vision was fuzzy and I wasn’t sure if my eyes were even open. She faded in and out of existence. To the right of her, on the couch, a pile of clothing looked like the back of her head. My mind couldn’t decide whether she was sitting at her desk or on the couch, or maybe both at the same time.
I recognized this world. This was the world between sleep and wake, and I was stuck. I couldn’t move, and my screams weren’t being heard by the woken. The sleeping, however, heard me loud and clear. The disembodied head on the couch turned 180 degrees and stared at me.
“She can’t hear you,” it said.
I was determined to be heard. I tensed my body and shook myself as violently as possible. It was enough to make a ripple in the fabric between worlds because I saw her turn around in her seat and look toward me. She stood up and disappeared.
I reached out my hand, which disappeared into the fabric.
“Pull me up,” I cried out. The bed was like tar holding me down as I sank like a helpless mammoth. I needed out of this sleeping world.
“She can’t hear you,” the disembodied head said again before fading back into a pile of clothes.
I didn’t know if she could hear me or not, but I cried out again. “Pull me up! Pull me up!” I couldn’t see her, but I sensed her standing over me.
I shook my body and screamed and kicked like a five-year-old having a tantrum in a crowded store.
“Wake up,” I heard her voice say. I felt her presence move onto the bed. She started shaking me.
Teamwork makes the dream work—or something—because all the shaking finally pulled my sleeping brain into the waking world. My words became audible, and I felt the restraints soften and my body could move again.
“You were having some sort of seizure,” she said, now lying next to me with her arm draped over me. “I didn’t know what to do.”
My heart was racing and my breathing was heavy, but I knew I was fully in the waking world again.
“I was trying to tell you to pull me up,” I said. “Could you hear me?”
She said no, that she only saw my body trembling. I said that was me trying to shake myself awake, and that I was trying to reach out to her, but hands kept disappearing into the fabric between worlds. She said she didn’t see or hear anything but my body trembling.
My breathing calmed, and I lay quietly, glad the ordeal was over.