The Art of Falling Asleep
A Conversation Between a Dream and a Nightmare
BY HANNAH TERAO
Here. Come here, lay down with me.
Close your eyes.
Breathe with me—yes, just like that.
In, out…Good. In, out…
Is it working? Do you feel calmer now?
No? Okay. Keep breathing. Keep your eyes closed and your arms around me.
You’ll know when it happens. The air will soften and melt around you, and you’ll warm with it. Your thoughts will melt and soften too, and then you’ll be dreaming with me.
Just keep breathing steady.
Liar.
What?
Liar. That’s not how it feels.
Not how what feels?
Dreaming.
Dreaming isn’t soft. It doesn’t melt.
Dreaming is when you’re lying awake and you’ve tossed and turned so much that you’ve woken the monsters under your bed. They come crawling up around you and start weaving in the air above your head. They toss and turn you themselves, and if you reach out into the eight-legged night, you find that they’ve wrapped the darkness into a silken cocoon around you, preparing for your metamorphosis into a denizen of the night. And when the world flips upside down and you start to fall upward, they catch you in the net that keeps the good dreams away, so you can’t get lost among the stars.
They pull you through the dark to a parallel world—an exact replica of our Earth, lovingly rendered in grayscale by some arcane master craftsman. They pull out threads from the cocoon, allowing you to amble along, the sole occupant of this dreary planet, until your thoughts tire of wandering and at last you close your eyes. The monsters weave your eyelashes shut to hold the nightmares in. They wrap you back up in your cocoon, bring you back to your bed—and when you wake in the morning you can’t open your eyes for too long or else the colors will blind you, and your mind is fuzzy because the monsters dragged it from here to eternity and back again, never minding if it got caught on the spokes of some distant galaxy.
That’s what dreaming is.
No.
No. I won’t call you a liar, but I will tell you that those are not dreams.
Come here to me, Broken One, and lay yourself down.
Close your eyes, and when the monsters return, I’ll watch them weave their web. But if they try to carry you away, I’ll scoop them up one by one and lock them away underneath your bed, sealing them in a fortress that will hold strong no matter how you toss and turn. Then I’ll take their web and reform it into its own mirror image, so that it catches the nightmares and lets the good dreams through.
You can do that for me?
I can. But only if you close your eyes, and b r e a t h e.
Breathe in, and I’ll keep the monsters out.
Breathe out, and I’ll let the good dreams in.