In progress, "Nocturne: Disintegration"

I live with a condition that makes my sleep wonky. The older I’ve grown, the easier it’s gotten to live with it. I’ve also grown to appreciate it. More than appreciate it, actually—at times, it downright delights me.

One of its features is that the steps of falling asleep and waking up sometimes get mixed up. I may find myself unable to move, my body having paralyzed itself to keep me from acting out dreams—but I’m actually still awake. Or I may begin to dream before I’m fully sleep…or I may be waking up, but the dream still holds on.

I received the diagnosis a few years ago, but by then I had already adopted expressions of my own to describe my experiences.

One of them is disintegration.

Disintegration often happens when the dreaming comes before the sleep. First, I hear what sounds like every voice of every person on the planet through countless radios. All at once. Rapid-eye follows the radio-voices as they tune in and out, turn up and up. It builds up until it melts down into static… Static that comes in from the edges of the Universe, eats away the seams between shape and dimension. The pieces tease apart and lift away in a black rapture until at last the atoms effervesce away along with my consciousness.

When I was a child, it scared the shit out of me. In objective time, disintegration probably unfolds in a matter of seconds. But time is a function of mind. And this one bends and stretches. Back then, I used to think I was having seizures or that demons were tormenting me or that I was simply losing my mind.

These days, disintegration is one of my favorite things.

It reminds me that I’m just a small part of a vast living Universe.

During the pandemic, I imagined the voices were the Universe’s way of reminding me that there were still people alive in this world—more than I could imagine—and I needed to hold on and do whatever things I could (small though they may be) to help keep the things that are most important to us—the things we love—alive.

I needed to help the dreams hold on.