Somnambulist (1/1, PG, Sam Winchester)
Somnambulist
"In pitch dark, I go walking in your landscape.
Broken branches trip me as I speak.
Just 'cause you feel it doesn't mean it's there.
Just 'cause you feel it doesn't mean it's there."
--Radiohead
A/N: Written in April, officially posted now because I am a slow, meticulous waffler. Several references made to the illustrious elaeazeph 's A Boy and His Car (it's stunning. Read.) because her universe has pretty much taken over mine, and we share half a brain anyway.
Written because I was bored with straight prose style, and I felt like walking through some dreamscapes.
Disclaimer: Supernatural and teh Sammich belong to Eric Kripke, no matter how many hundreds of pages of crack!fic I've spent in his ridiculously large shoes.
♠ ♠ ♠
It’s a battered old book, one of those small moleskine things you can pick up in a pharmacy for ten cents. He had a dozen of them once, but this is one of the last to survive the years and the miles. He started it back when he was fourteen and curious. It’s about three-quarters of the way full with random phrases, garbled notes, weaving arrows and one-word references without significance to anyone but him.
Scrawled on the inside cover: ‘Avg. dream: 3 seconds.’
??/??/‘85: nightmares.
used to wake up screaming and inconsolable about things impossible to comprehend past waking. He didn’t understand dreams yet - why (if) they stop when you open your eyes, or why they happen at all.
Dream: cortex integrating cholinergic (?) PGO waves into story during REM.
déjà vu, jamais vu, presque vu
??/‘87: lost.
he’s wandering for hours around a big empty-full world cluttered with people he doesn’t know and tall obscuring shelves and walls and people, and he doesn’t cry - because that’s not what a mature kid like a four-year-old does - but he’s terrified and wandering and eventually the world empties out and it’s just him and then he does cry until someone wakes him up.
(Normal.)
The last REM period has the best remembered dreams.
??/'89: dog.
big dog, bigger than him, bigger than Dean. A dog that big is scary, right? Wide sharp crushing teeth big enough to grind his skull into dry powdery bits. But it's the smell of rotten eggs that lingers (that scares) long after he's forgotten scaly greasy fur and a lolling gray tongue.
??/’89: blanket.
lost his favorite blanket. Kept dreaming he found it - in a musty motel, in a dirty old cabin, in the pews of Pastor Jim’s. Never did. (Still think Dad tossed it…)
Alpha waves, theta waves, delta waves.
REM: low-voltage, high frequency.
??/’90: cold.
cold, never been colder, but this is a weird dream, off, empty, except for something that he can only think of as blue, light bright end-of-everything blue, bordering on white and black at once. It’s drawing him in, reaching through him, pulling him out in steady thin threads of Sammy and Sam and if he lies here long enough he’ll come apart into an awful empty frozen heap until Dad’s grabbing him by the shoulders and saying something and he’s really not awake enough to understand why Dad looks so scared. It was just a dream, after all, not even a particularly bad one, just… weird. Wasn’t Dad hunting?
11-12/’90: lake.
sees him fall over and over again because ice like that doesn’t hold, didn’t anyone tell him? He called Dean a dumbass and Dad yelled at him, language, but he was a dumbass.
WST - wakefulness-to-sleep transition state
04?/‘91: fucking CLOWNS.
shadows bleed up onto the ceiling and congeal there, unfurling into a heavy black clot that slowly cricks open wide clawed fingers. Pale jagged nails protrude from dirt-stained gloves, tearing long gouges in the walls and ceiling as it climbs higher, bright red blood weeping down from wounded plaster. It twists its head full circle with the dry crackle and grind of brittle snapping vertebrae, pale white face streaked with black and bright Technicolor face paint and it grins with jagged, broken teeth that clatter free one by one from swollen purple gums. Deep-set eyes aged at the corners like yellowed parchment, flashing malevolent. Deep in its throat, a rattle grows into a rasp grows into a cackle. He wakes up in hysterics. The sight of Ronald McDonald makes him cry for weeks.
asclepieions - Greek healing through dreams
Muscles fully paralyzed during REM sleep.
10/’91: freaky eyes.
yellow, kind of like jaundice but not the cornea, the iris, eaten up by this yellow fluorescent bile. That’s all there is to it.
Scrawled in a wrinkled corner: I never dream about Mom.
??/’93: car, Wisconsin.
he doesn’t dream at all, curled up in the backseat of the Impala with his father’s jacket tugged up to his chin, smelling of leather and smoke and oil. He’s watching the world of dark and darker past the windshield and he’s watching the rearview mirror, too, in case something comes at him from behind. Then his brother is there, his hand on his shoulder, shaking him awake, and he can’t even remember when reality lapsed into sleep.
‘A dream is a short-lasting psychosis, and a psychosis is a long-lasting dream.’ -Schopenhauer
(Cheerful.)
??/’95-‘96: the window?
a window against a black sky. Orange fluorescent light blocked by the grasping fingers of a twisted oak tree, just out of sight, but its shadow reaching high across a ceiling streaked with lines of dark, cloying smoke. The glass reflects sparks of red and gold, and it’s kind of mesmerizing, except for the bitter taste in his mouth.
Inconsequential things: hunts, the terror and adrenaline bleeding into sleep when he wasn’t exhausted to the point of utter obliviousness. He doesn’t write most of them down because he’s already lived them, can live them whenever he wants, in his head, and he has another neat little book of towns and hunts and injuries.
05/07/99: “I will not kill.”
He doesn’t remember that one.
10/30/00: SATs. Ha, ha.
forgot his pencil, or his calculator, or the Latin root of diastereomerics, or something equally asinine. Wakes up laughing, hard, because dreaming about SATs.
12/’00: no more.
teeth bared against the grind of dislocated shoulder, this is killing them, he won’t let this stand and no more no more no more no more.
05/12/01: telling them.
dreams of it for weeks, but it doesn’t really prepare him for those nice harsh genuine John-fucking-Winchester words. Still, he does it.
DAMT: dreams of absent-minded transgression - dream of performing an action you’re trying to stop.
’02: them and them and more of them.
empty roads, empty forests, empty cities, no one around to hear… He doesn’t even bother with dates because it’s almost nightly. Dad hunched behind an unfamiliar dashboard, thermos of coffee (or something) in hand and that perpetual pensive expression; Dean taking a long jagged slash to the hip and digging his fingers into hard steering wheel. But Dad wouldn’t let Dean go off on his own, would he? Empty roads, empty bars, empty world.
(ever gonna pick up the phone?)
he does, and puts it down, and picks it up again.
Where’s the dream saying they’ll be alright?
10/‘03: that girl in Intro to Soc…
Squeezed into the margin, with a crooked arrow hurled headfirst into the text, jesting: Need more dreams like those, huh?
Lucid dream: awareness of and control of dream
(Never had that one before)
08/’05: asphalt. Vivid.
asphalt cold and dark and solid, as solid as the night sky overhead, and yellow halogen light scatters across into a hundred droplets of solid rock. Broken cubes of ice (Safe-T Glass) catch the light and throw it exuberantly back, except the ones drenched in dark red, and the taste of blood and oil and gas as sharp as the jagged edges of broken windshield (disorienting, because it’s upside down, bent wheel turning lazily). Soft face streaked and broken beyond recognition but it’s a she, sort of, broken by unforgiving tarmac. To the right: the familiar turn-grind and stutter as an engine he knows, knows really really well, cuts off into silence. Guardrail warped and twisted by a dark frame, sparkling wet. All sleek curves, she’s a beauty, isn’t she?
(Why are there always dreams like this?)
Dreams go downhill after that.
‘06: Jess. Scrawled dates: 09/02 09/20 10/01 10/07 10/17 10/20 10/23 10/25 10/26 10/29
dreams leave him with the too-real taste of ashes in his mouth and a godawful headache that he can’t shake for hours, days. But they’re just dreams. He’s used to them.
‘The lunatic is a wakeful dreamer.’ -Kant
Can’t find that little book anymore. It burned. But if he could’ve pulled it from the ashes he would’ve written on the inside of the charred back cover one be-all-and-end-all phrase:
I never want to dream again.
FINIS.
"In pitch dark, I go walking in your landscape.
Broken branches trip me as I speak.
Just 'cause you feel it doesn't mean it's there.
Just 'cause you feel it doesn't mean it's there."
--Radiohead
A/N: Written in April, officially posted now because I am a slow, meticulous waffler. Several references made to the illustrious elaeazeph 's A Boy and His Car (it's stunning. Read.) because her universe has pretty much taken over mine, and we share half a brain anyway.
Written because I was bored with straight prose style, and I felt like walking through some dreamscapes.
Disclaimer: Supernatural and teh Sammich belong to Eric Kripke, no matter how many hundreds of pages of crack!fic I've spent in his ridiculously large shoes.
♠ ♠ ♠
It’s a battered old book, one of those small moleskine things you can pick up in a pharmacy for ten cents. He had a dozen of them once, but this is one of the last to survive the years and the miles. He started it back when he was fourteen and curious. It’s about three-quarters of the way full with random phrases, garbled notes, weaving arrows and one-word references without significance to anyone but him.
Scrawled on the inside cover: ‘Avg. dream: 3 seconds.’
??/??/‘85: nightmares.
used to wake up screaming and inconsolable about things impossible to comprehend past waking. He didn’t understand dreams yet - why (if) they stop when you open your eyes, or why they happen at all.
Dream: cortex integrating cholinergic (?) PGO waves into story during REM.
déjà vu, jamais vu, presque vu
??/‘87: lost.
he’s wandering for hours around a big empty-full world cluttered with people he doesn’t know and tall obscuring shelves and walls and people, and he doesn’t cry - because that’s not what a mature kid like a four-year-old does - but he’s terrified and wandering and eventually the world empties out and it’s just him and then he does cry until someone wakes him up.
(Normal.)
The last REM period has the best remembered dreams.
??/'89: dog.
big dog, bigger than him, bigger than Dean. A dog that big is scary, right? Wide sharp crushing teeth big enough to grind his skull into dry powdery bits. But it's the smell of rotten eggs that lingers (that scares) long after he's forgotten scaly greasy fur and a lolling gray tongue.
??/’89: blanket.
lost his favorite blanket. Kept dreaming he found it - in a musty motel, in a dirty old cabin, in the pews of Pastor Jim’s. Never did. (Still think Dad tossed it…)
Alpha waves, theta waves, delta waves.
REM: low-voltage, high frequency.
??/’90: cold.
cold, never been colder, but this is a weird dream, off, empty, except for something that he can only think of as blue, light bright end-of-everything blue, bordering on white and black at once. It’s drawing him in, reaching through him, pulling him out in steady thin threads of Sammy and Sam and if he lies here long enough he’ll come apart into an awful empty frozen heap until Dad’s grabbing him by the shoulders and saying something and he’s really not awake enough to understand why Dad looks so scared. It was just a dream, after all, not even a particularly bad one, just… weird. Wasn’t Dad hunting?
11-12/’90: lake.
sees him fall over and over again because ice like that doesn’t hold, didn’t anyone tell him? He called Dean a dumbass and Dad yelled at him, language, but he was a dumbass.
WST - wakefulness-to-sleep transition state
04?/‘91: fucking CLOWNS.
shadows bleed up onto the ceiling and congeal there, unfurling into a heavy black clot that slowly cricks open wide clawed fingers. Pale jagged nails protrude from dirt-stained gloves, tearing long gouges in the walls and ceiling as it climbs higher, bright red blood weeping down from wounded plaster. It twists its head full circle with the dry crackle and grind of brittle snapping vertebrae, pale white face streaked with black and bright Technicolor face paint and it grins with jagged, broken teeth that clatter free one by one from swollen purple gums. Deep-set eyes aged at the corners like yellowed parchment, flashing malevolent. Deep in its throat, a rattle grows into a rasp grows into a cackle. He wakes up in hysterics. The sight of Ronald McDonald makes him cry for weeks.
asclepieions - Greek healing through dreams
Muscles fully paralyzed during REM sleep.
10/’91: freaky eyes.
yellow, kind of like jaundice but not the cornea, the iris, eaten up by this yellow fluorescent bile. That’s all there is to it.
Scrawled in a wrinkled corner: I never dream about Mom.
??/’93: car, Wisconsin.
he doesn’t dream at all, curled up in the backseat of the Impala with his father’s jacket tugged up to his chin, smelling of leather and smoke and oil. He’s watching the world of dark and darker past the windshield and he’s watching the rearview mirror, too, in case something comes at him from behind. Then his brother is there, his hand on his shoulder, shaking him awake, and he can’t even remember when reality lapsed into sleep.
‘A dream is a short-lasting psychosis, and a psychosis is a long-lasting dream.’ -Schopenhauer
(Cheerful.)
??/’95-‘96: the window?
a window against a black sky. Orange fluorescent light blocked by the grasping fingers of a twisted oak tree, just out of sight, but its shadow reaching high across a ceiling streaked with lines of dark, cloying smoke. The glass reflects sparks of red and gold, and it’s kind of mesmerizing, except for the bitter taste in his mouth.
Inconsequential things: hunts, the terror and adrenaline bleeding into sleep when he wasn’t exhausted to the point of utter obliviousness. He doesn’t write most of them down because he’s already lived them, can live them whenever he wants, in his head, and he has another neat little book of towns and hunts and injuries.
05/07/99: “I will not kill.”
He doesn’t remember that one.
10/30/00: SATs. Ha, ha.
forgot his pencil, or his calculator, or the Latin root of diastereomerics, or something equally asinine. Wakes up laughing, hard, because dreaming about SATs.
12/’00: no more.
teeth bared against the grind of dislocated shoulder, this is killing them, he won’t let this stand and no more no more no more no more.
05/12/01: telling them.
dreams of it for weeks, but it doesn’t really prepare him for those nice harsh genuine John-fucking-Winchester words. Still, he does it.
DAMT: dreams of absent-minded transgression - dream of performing an action you’re trying to stop.
’02: them and them and more of them.
empty roads, empty forests, empty cities, no one around to hear… He doesn’t even bother with dates because it’s almost nightly. Dad hunched behind an unfamiliar dashboard, thermos of coffee (or something) in hand and that perpetual pensive expression; Dean taking a long jagged slash to the hip and digging his fingers into hard steering wheel. But Dad wouldn’t let Dean go off on his own, would he? Empty roads, empty bars, empty world.
(ever gonna pick up the phone?)
he does, and puts it down, and picks it up again.
Where’s the dream saying they’ll be alright?
10/‘03: that girl in Intro to Soc…
Squeezed into the margin, with a crooked arrow hurled headfirst into the text, jesting: Need more dreams like those, huh?
Lucid dream: awareness of and control of dream
(Never had that one before)
08/’05: asphalt. Vivid.
asphalt cold and dark and solid, as solid as the night sky overhead, and yellow halogen light scatters across into a hundred droplets of solid rock. Broken cubes of ice (Safe-T Glass) catch the light and throw it exuberantly back, except the ones drenched in dark red, and the taste of blood and oil and gas as sharp as the jagged edges of broken windshield (disorienting, because it’s upside down, bent wheel turning lazily). Soft face streaked and broken beyond recognition but it’s a she, sort of, broken by unforgiving tarmac. To the right: the familiar turn-grind and stutter as an engine he knows, knows really really well, cuts off into silence. Guardrail warped and twisted by a dark frame, sparkling wet. All sleek curves, she’s a beauty, isn’t she?
(Why are there always dreams like this?)
Dreams go downhill after that.
‘06: Jess. Scrawled dates: 09/02 09/20 10/01 10/07 10/17 10/20 10/23 10/25 10/26 10/29
dreams leave him with the too-real taste of ashes in his mouth and a godawful headache that he can’t shake for hours, days. But they’re just dreams. He’s used to them.
‘The lunatic is a wakeful dreamer.’ -Kant
Can’t find that little book anymore. It burned. But if he could’ve pulled it from the ashes he would’ve written on the inside of the charred back cover one be-all-and-end-all phrase:
I never want to dream again.
FINIS.