Sensory Remnants Referencing A Cyclical and Enigmatic Design

Last night, I dreamt of one particular evening from my childhood, seemingly centuries ago. I was a young boy and had worn myself out galavanting around and admiring all the flowers in the rose garden in our backyard. I ventured into the house and commandeered my mother's bed before falling victim to the awkward lull of the mid-evening, just after dinner, when the body wants to shut off. My exhaustion nap was abruptly interrupted as I was suddenly ripped away from the onset of my first REM cycle, unceremoniously thrust back into this familiar, mortal coil. Although something was off, it reminded me of falling, accompanied by a violent hypnopompic jerk, as if influenced by something beyond my own autonomy. The entire ordeal sprang forth like a jump scare from my dream, although not from my own personal inner movie that continuously projected the linear progression of the stages of my life, nor through the dull, yellow light being cast through a roll of film in my head, or any machination of biological disruption, but from something I quite literally felt sitting on my chest. My mother had just finished trimming the rose bushes in the backyard. She rushed into the room and turned on the lights to survey the origin of what was unsettling me. When I rejoined the fickle yet stubborn realm of perception we like to label awareness, simply seeing her presence allowed the calm of motherly love to wash over me. I let out a heavy sigh. The waters of panic quickly flooded this brief, lonely island of relief as I attempted to sit up. I could bring my head up off the pillow and move my legs and arms, but my torso was pinned to the mattress. I didn't feel the weight of whatever it was, but my body acted as if an invisible, fleshy anvil were holding it down; it wouldn't budge an inch. My face became a canvas for the inevitable, impending artistry of fear and hysteria, upon which it rapidly painted its vivid colors. My widened, bulging eyes, quivering lips, and dampened hair plastered to my forehead were involuntary biological responses to something wholly unnatural happening to me. Bewildered, terrorized, and at the onset of hyperventilation, I locked eyes with my frightened mother and began to scream. I distinctly remember the feeling because it was one of those involuntary mechanisms in which the vocalization is the manifestation of the mind's perceived terror, and the screams wouldn't let up with each inhale. So instead, they persisted as I breathed in, creating an unrelenting and consecutive succession of anagnorisis, over and over again. My mother wrapped me in her arms as I convulsed in place.

Suddenly, I shot up off the bed and landed on my feet momentarily before collapsing to my hands and knees. Sweat dripped from my nose and hit the carpet. My mother held me while I recovered on the floor. She stroked my hair and whispered in my ear a litany of reassurances that, regardless of the hopelessness of the situation, mothers still manage to pull forth from their magical and endless reserve of protective love, the likes of which could only have been bestowed upon them by a Goddess. A gift of the feminine divine delivered on down from Hera. An emotional state of determination that evolved from the necessity to protect her offspring beyond the primitive notions of what constitutes an environmental threat. We remained suspended in time, but quietly seething with the teeth-gringing sensation of adrenaline at work. Norepinephrine, seeping with the viscous drudgery of mercury overloading our brain's receptors, which in turn begged for mercy not to be forced to communicate to the rest of our body with the burn-out intensity of electric impulse. We remained silent for those eternal seven seconds before it happened. As the transition back into security coursed through our veins with its warmth, we both shuddered in fear as the shock of that ancient neurotransmitter hit our receptors a second time. The abuse of that primal system in such a short span caused us to recoil against the bedroom wall violently. Our gawking, laser-focused search frantically for the genesis of each sound or sensation we were experiencing. First, we heard the bed creak as if someone was getting off the mattress, followed by the sound of shuffling feet across the carpet. Then the blinds covering the open sliding glass door leading to the backyard clicked and clacked together, and finally, the outside gate at the end of our patio, which led downstairs to an open field, creaked open and shut. My reluctance and curiosity battled with each other for microseconds before I ultimately sprinted over to the blinds, slid a few aside, and peeked into the dark void covering our property. My observation revealed a blinking spectral of red, digital numbers flashing "7:15 AM" in that vast darkness, accompanied by an incessant beeping that grew louder and louder and...

I opened my eyes to my alarm going off. It was 7:15 AM. It was time for work, and I swore I just had the strangest dream, but I can't remember what it was about exactly. I was with my mother in my childhood home, and there was pressure in my chest as I tried to remember. All I could picture was cold grains of sand slipping through my fingers.

I walked into my job at a warehouse sorting facility with the strange fog of recalling a forgotten memory looming over my head like a rain cloud. I dragged my feet over to the coffee machine. The coffee tasted stale, as if I had made the cup in the present, forgotten to drink it, and was now tasting a past iteration of it. It's like the whole world has moved on from me, and my five senses were experiencing past iterations of everything. I'd entered a place where drinks had lost their carbonation, taste, and potency, batteries had lost their charge, gasoline had oxidized, and every color was a dull, grayscale version of itself.

I couldn't help but feel like I had slipped into a purgatory of sorts. A place where everything became a shell of what it was before, including me.

As I moved pallets and stored boxes, I had the urge to drive to Jacksonville to see my mom. I know she was in my dream last night, and something was telling me I had to see her, what was left of her anyway.

I couldn't help but notice that the sides of the road to Jacksonville were covered in an overgrowth of vines and moss, for almost the entire length of the journey. I listened to a podcast about the many-worlds interpretation in quantum mechanics on my way there. My mother was a high school physics teacher and was the one who turned me on to science in general. She loved talking specifically about Schrödinger's Equation. Most people know about this equation because of Schrödinger's Box. A radioactive isotope sits in a box with a cat; if the box is opened, it reveals whether the isotope has decayed and whether the cat was alive with a non-decayed isotope and dead with a decayed one before the box was opened. The idea that this thought experiment is trying to illustrate is that with this equation, if it's mathematically possible for something to be at position A, and it's mathematically possible for something to be at position B, it's also mathematically possible for something to be at both positions A and B simultaneously, as well. It's called superposition. So, it's entirely possible that the cat exists in a state of both being alive and dead at the same time. I'm not sure whether my mother's infatuation with the concept was born of academic reverence or something more. Was she subconsciously trying to reason out something that happened in the interweaving peaks and valleys and rivers and tributaries of our shared life experience?

I put it out of my mind, or maybe I'm diving right into the heart of it, because I'm here, at my childhood home, with her, and it all feels so entangled.

My aging mother had fallen into the throes of dementia. Once a thriving, beautiful home filled with laughter and Thanksgiving dinners, it succumbed to the empty nest of generations who have moved on, forgotten her in the past. The walls of that house became an extension of her grief, a longing for what once was.

I opened the front door and called out for her. No response. I called out again, and my voice seemed to echo waves across the yellow corduroy wallpaper, like it was a distorted, nostalgic paint coating the valley of unrelenting time. I wandered the halls of that valley searching for the womb that plucked my consciousness from the void of non-existence into whatever the fuck this place is we find ourselves. When I climbed down into the canyon of memory that was my mother's room, I found her perched on her cheap, Medicare-supplied walker that she fancied as her matriarchal throne.

I let my gaze of solemnity unassumingly descend upon her, accompanied by concealed pity. A son could never conjure or display a disparaging notion of his maker, especially when their child-rearing methods were effective at creating a submissive and obedient offspring, no matter how frail they may appear to be. That's the power of conditioning. It creates an illusion of limited space for the mind. She seemed to realize I was there, but I couldn't be positive she was looking at me and not through me, into the other world, the realm of possibility that she made her constant observation. In her lap, she gripped a bushel of wilted roses. I wondered how many years she had had those relics in her grasp. For all I knew, those roses could've been the very ones she was carrying that night when she came to check on me after my early evening nap, the night a demon allowed the weight of his lethargic disposition toward humanity to imprint a trauma on me. I just realized I remembered every aspect of my dream from last night with extreme clarity and lucidity. Maybe it was these walls.

I rolled Mother over to the kitchen table. I made her a bowl of cream of mushroom soup and a cup of chamomile tea. Her favorite combination, although I don't understand in what culture, period of time, or culinary trend those two extremely diverse items would ever be considered a delightful pairing, but she enjoyed it, and that was fine for me. We sat silently at the kitchen table, the same table where she used to provide for me. Mother kept expressing concern about spectres in the house. She said she hears noises from the vents, footsteps, blinds moving, cabinets opening and closing, and the scent of a familiar perfume in the hallway that she knew was popular among adults in her childhood. It's difficult to accept the rambling thoughts of dementia coming from a loved one, so we lie to ourselves. We fabricate half-truths, just beneath the surface, lingering somewhere between the shrouded thicket of denial and the vast, mirage-ridden desert of belief. Since I came home, I have noticed one thing that unnerved me. I peered into the backyard and saw something peculiar and out of place. The rose garden was lush, green and thriving. It was perfectly and tediously tended to, and existed as it was when I was a young child. Somehow, the entire house, the room I grew up in, the primary bedroom shared by my father and me, where we had moved in together at one point, the kitchen and dining area that hosted any number of extended family get-togethers, were all in severe disarray. I'm not even sure my mother could get down into the rose garden in her current condition, anyway. I asked her if she had hired a landscaper to tend to it, or perhaps a neighbor, but she only gave a tired, wry look. She then followed that menace with a subtle, forlorn laughter that signaled a complete abandonment of hope as she muttered a vitriol that was both engrained in and born from our shared, undercurrent of trauma, that when she said, "You know who it is," it came slowly frothing out of her dilapidated maw like a viscous, sour milk so unnaturally secreted from the breast of some heathenous reptile, symbolic of every kind of torment and torture that the notion of a a cruel existence could inflict upon anything living that hasn't realized their attempts at living nobly or naturally, are so pathetically futile.

It's an affront upon our right as children of Gaia to experience a natural path of navigation through the tall grass of life choice. We know those towering blades obscure our view from a higher vantage. Still, the consequences and influence of humanity's confidence in our own hubris imbue those blind decisions with a uniquely human ownership of accountability for whatever they might take. Whether our choice flourishes or is destroyed, it is fully ours, with no credit given to the illusion, under no disillusion that we must also sustain the obstacles of encumberment that close in from all directions and emanate forth from the damp, invisible treachery that wages opposition against the audacity of us fleshy masses to pursue said path: we, the fallen, paradoxical children of our own machinations, set forth years ago. We, the outcasts, refuse to integrate into a community of blind eyes, imbued with the gift of complex sentience yet cursed with a lack of determination to spark change. A phenomenon sprang forth from our biological self-referencing system, forcing an awareness of our unique predicament within us—the unfortunate and unforeseen consequences of our method for managing the way we choose to tolerate this existence.

Why am I analyzing the philosophy of the connection between my subconscious dreams and the everyday reality of an older adult with dementia who is imprisoned in a positive relic from my past? My once-called home? The grains of sand seem to be packed firmly in my palm now, with no indication of them slipping through my fingers. At least not at this moment.

We had decided to leave the kitchen and go back to her room as she started feeling the confusion of a painful migraine commencing. Which also meant I should get her settled in and head back home too. I grabbed the handles on the back of her seated walker and rolled her, still clutching a bouquet of worn roses, into her room. I sat here facing the backyard from the edge of her bed. I stretched my neck and shoulders and sat down on the edge of her bed.

Then it happened. I felt, no. I don't... know, yes, I do. It was an abrupt heaviness in my chest all of a sudden. I hung my head down in an attempt at relaxation, but the longer I stayed in the spot on the bed, the more panicked I became. I tried to breathe, but the intensity became too much, so I quickly stood up, and then I heard a bump against the wall. It sounded as if a body thudded against the drywall. A sudden cloud of lightheadedness washed over me, so I sat back down in the same spot. Peculiarly, the heaviness in my chest completely disappeared, but it took me a few seconds to register. At that very moment, I felt as if my fundamental particles weren't vibrating on this plane of awareness anymore. I inclined that this experience I was perceiving was no longer stemming forth from the dimension I would normally call my "waking life". A mist settled in all corners of my mother's room. A mist so faint that I couldn't tell if it was the shadow of floaters trapped between the lens and iris of my eyeball, or if some rare element of gas spontaneously appeared and covered the room. I heard that uncomfortable, just-under-the-surface laughter emanating from my mother again.

"Spectres, son. Is it we? Has it always been?"

I stood up off the edge of the bed again and shuffled my feet over to the open sliding glass door that led to the backyard. I suddenly knew what she was talking about. There was a palpable, thick haze of fear, or maybe it was the uncomfortable aura of panic that was latching onto the edges of the room, creeping along the floor and imperceptibly infusing itself into our lives from the ground up. That fear I sensed, it was like wide, terrified eyes were watching me. Isn't it I who should be afraid of what's haunting these walls? Do the ghosts of our past lives not realize they're ghosts? Or maybe it's us, the potentialities of those previous iterations, who do not realize our lives were the apparition of failed and unrealized potential. But there is a third option, a superposition, we are both in all of these realities simultaneously.

I moved some blinds aside to peer out into the backyard, into the rose garden, which seemed to beckon me. Yes, in fact, I've never been more sure of anything before. I walked through the open sliding glass door, and the blinds made a cacophony of clicking and clacking. I opened the side gate, allowing it to announce my arrival with the squeal of the rusted hinges. I slowly approached the rose bushes as the feeling of fulfilling a lifelong objective set in. Just as I entered the perimeter of the garden, I glanced back up to the blinds of the sliding glass door and noticed that a few of them were slid to the side, like someone was looking out from inside, like I just did. Once I shifted my focus to that spot, the blinds released and covered the opening. Again, all I felt was a strange familiarity, and then an overwhelming intuition that whatever the hell is going on right now, my hands aren't, and we're never, and will never be, on the steering wheel.

I crossed into the rose garden and began skipping along the walkway. I ripped off overgrowth from the thickets and plucked dead roses. I was worry-free. I stopped for a moment and rubbed my eyes. I squinted and surveyed my environment because I felt like I had just opened my eyes for the first time. In fact, I don't even remember where I was before this. Who was I before this? Did I go to school today? In any case, I felt a current of exhaustion wash over me. It's still early evening, maybe I could take a nap.

I journeyed inside and lay down in my mother's bed. The potent aroma of beef brisket she made for dinner still permeated every corner of the house. I heard her open the creaking gate to tend to the roses, or maybe to see if I'd caused any damage in my galavanting. The television in my mother's room was playing commercials and warnings about the impending Y2K bug and the widespread destruction it would cause this new year. My eyes slowly closed, and I dozed off. I dreamt of a towering, monumental, circular apparatus operating surreptitiously under the barrier of our own awareness. Within it, the possibilities of all our choices are trapped in a cyclical purgatory of sorts. The ominous, looming, and intimidating presence of such an influential structure was actually overshadowed by a powerful sense of inescapable familiarity. I must've accepted the existence of the omniscient reach of influence that this enigmatic object had centuries ago. My eyes suddenly opened. A creeping sense of ascending dread latched onto me as I felt pressure on my torso. I couldn't move my body.

Why does it feel like I've been here before? There's something worse about the sudden realization of some grandiose, ancient horror that immediately slips out of grasp like a fading dream, yet leaves an unmistakable imprint of dread that lingers like a bad taste in every facet of daily life.

My mother burst into the room. Bewildered, terrorized, and at the onset of hyperventilation, I locked eyes with my frightened mother and began to scream.

THE END