Wednesday 1 June 2011

AWAKE

Waiting for Sleep




Your lips touch the familiar ceramic rim, as hot liquid rushes down your oesophagus and warms your aching limbs. You close your eyes in an attempt to extinguish the embers of consciousness, to sooth the dull burning of exhaustion. All is still in the room, as the silence embraces your body; but still synapses crackle and spark behind your eyes. This is going to be a long night.


You feel paralysis, like being conscious on an operating table. These sheets become your shackles, with your mind whirring in panic, but your body is aching and lifeless, unable to respond.



The darkness dissolves around a branching form, and the ground drops away into infinity. You are suspended above the canopy of dreams, a plethora of swirling images and sounds.


Behind your eyelids, the day’s events play themselves over and over like a familiar movie stuck on loop. Reality dissolves and distorts into a flickering phantasmagoria of feathers and mountains, hot and cold, soft and hard.


A distant seagull’s gabble marks the birth of a new day as light trickles over your face and washes away the fragile construct of unconsciousness.