Chapter 15: What My Soul Does When I Am Asleep by Stephen Simpson

I am on my back, on a hard metal bed in a cold room, with only a flimsy hospital gown to cover me. Two doctors and a couple of nurses move things around the room. I am not exactly sure what they are doing, since I cannot see a lot from my point of view.

A doctor, with hair as orange as carrots and eyes as blue as a Smurf, comes to stand by my right-hand shoulder. He smiles down at me, and from this angle I can see his one top front tooth is a little crooked. “Are you ready, Gaby? You're going to have a nice deep sleep now.”

I look up at him, worry pulsing through me. I am sure I read somewhere, being anaesthetised is like dying. What if I want to wake up and I cannot? What if I dream of that horrible building again?

He fiddles with something behind my head, and then he says, “Count backwards for me, from ten.”

“Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, fi…”

To me, it is a place of pure peace, yet intense emotion. It is as if I am floating in a warm swimming pool. The sun is shining on my skin, and the water beneath me is making soothing movements as it supports my weight. It feels as if this warmth is not only around me, but it is me.

The water on which I am floating is swept by rays of light in shapes and hues that are constantly changing, as well as the light above me as it passes over me. It is as if all the colours of the spectrum come and go constantly. It is as if I am within and a part of an eternally glowing sunset, and with every changing pattern of colour, I also change. It all feels familiar to me. This is where I belong. This is home.

As I float on the water, I can feel music. It is not something I become aware of. It is there all the time, and I vibrate in harmony with the music. It evokes a deep emotion in me. Infinite patterns of strings in all shades of subtle harmony interweave with each other, and I resonate with them.  The music is all around me, in me, and I am a part of it. It is me.

I feel a nameless emotion, longing, nostalgia, and a sense of destiny. I feel as if I am where I belong. Where I always should have been.

I am not alone. I am with others. They do not have names, nor am I aware of them as shapes or people, but I know them, and I am bonded to them with a great single knowledge. They are exactly like me, they are me, and like me, they are also home. I feel with them a completeness of love. It is not something I need or that needs me. I am in perfect balance with everything around me.

I am aware of the entire span of my existence, of the vastness beyond my ability to perceive or to imagine.

Without warning, I am standing in the dark building. I am not on the stairs as I have been before, whenever I have this frightening nightmare. I am standing in a long corridor and I can only see a few inches ahead of me.

From the corner of my eye, I notice a movement and quickly look in that direction.

Fearful yet utterly fascinated, I don't know what I expect to see, but standing in the doorway to one of the rooms leading from the corridor is a white ghostlike figure. It actually looks like the traditional figure of a ghost, about six feet tall. It or he or she holds onto the doorjamb and watches me with a serious expression.

I try to see the face, to see if I recognise the figure from somewhere, but it is as if my vision is impaired, and the more I try to see, the blurrier the figure becomes.

Then it attacks me. I know instinctively it is ruthless and its only purpose is to keep me away from finding what I must find. It is here to get rid of me.

At first, I do not fight back, stepping away from it in bewilderment. Then I realise I need to fight back, or I will lose, and losing is not an option. Losing to it will mean losing existence.

I throw myself into the fight, fuelled by desperation. I fight to save myself.

The thing fighting me knows all my weak spots and it feels as if we have been fighting for hours. I am starting to feel as if I am going to lose when it seems to stumble and in that brief moment, I turn on my heels and run down the dark corridor as fast as I can.

I am not sure where I am running to, and I cannot see anything. It is as if I am blindly rushing toward something, but I can sense the thing behind me as it follows me, and I run even faster.

Afraid of running headfirst into a wall, I extend my arms to both sides of me to see if I can touch anything.

The fingers on my left hand brush against a wall. Dropping my right hand, I alter my direction and run closer to the wall, letting my hand on the wall beside me guide me.

There is a sudden sound all around me, in me. It is as if I am part of the maniacal laughter. Then the wall under my left palm disappears, but my fingertips brush along a sharp edge, like the corner of a wall.

I give myself only a second to make the decision and then I dodge to my side. The fear in my chest propels me around the corner. I am not even afraid I might be running into deeper darkness; I only know I must get away from the thing following me.

A light seems to be coming from somewhere. The utter darkness is replaced with a dull grey. I can only see ahead of me. If I want to see to my side, I have to physically turn my head. The corridor I am running down looks like an old discarded hospital. Metal framed beds are scattered diagonally in my way. As I run, I weave between the beds. Papers are scattered everywhere on the floor. In some places, the plaster boards are pulled away from the walls, and I can see the grey skeleton of the building.

My heart races in my chest, but I keep running.

The thing behind me wants to trap me here. I am not sure how I know this; I just know it. A deep, deep fear settles in me.

Ahead of me, I see my grandma.

Why is she here? If the thing behind me gets her, she will be going back into the coma. She might die. I will not be able to handle my mum's pain and sadness.

I try to call out to her, and I forget that here in my dreams I do not have to speak to her for real. The words will not come out of my mouth. “Gah,” I force the words through my lips. “Ooo mmmm gooo.” I try even harder. I must get her out of here if it is the very last thing I ever do. “Gah, ooo mmmm gooo.”

She remains standing the same distance ahead of me, no matter how fast I run toward her.

Again, I feel the maniacal laughter in and around me. A voice in my head says, “You cannot control this. We won't let him go.”

Let who go?

“Gah, gooooooo,” I scream. If only I can say the words properly, then she will hear me and leave.

I hear her from a distance, “Gaby, you must find him.”

Find who?

My grandma fades from my view, and I run into one of the empty rooms to my side in an attempt to escape from the thing following me. I turn to my right and there is a metal frame hospital bed angled in the corner.

A stained used-to-be-white sheet hangs sloped across the blue and green striped lumpy mattress. I fall to the ground and slide in under the bed. I pull the sheet down, so it hangs in front of me and obscures me from the view of anyone or anything coming through the doorway.

I pull my legs up to my chest so I can push my lips against my knees and soften the harsh breathing escaping through my lips.

Let who go? Find who?

A dark shadow crosses in front of the doorway of the room I am in. It is like the sun moving in and out behind a small cloud. It is a fleeting change, and then the light around me goes back to the same blurry greyness.

Every breathing, living thing on this planet has one primary focus. One thing that is the same in every person, in every animal. We are coded to survive. It supersedes everything else, even love.

This is why we become scared and fearful when faced with something that might kill us, an event that will cease our existence. Inherently, we hoard materialistic things, we share our food reluctantly.

However, when someone who gives without expecting any direct benefit, or who deliberately endangers and possibly sacrifices their own life for others, they defy this primary code. In our eyes, this person becomes respected and a hero, almost god-like.

If we stopped fearing the death of our physical bodies and believed our souls are immortal, will we still need to feel the overwhelming desire to survive? Will we feel saved?

If we believed in a higher power, instead of our own preservation, will we be redeemed and then our souls will not need a physical existence to feel as if we are alive? Whenever we consider accepting the concept and existence of our own souls, we fear ridicule.

Even in Christian religion, we believe when we will rise from death as the Bible foretells on Judgement Day, we imagine it will be in our physical bodies. Why is it so difficult to believe we are, in fact, more than just a physical body?

Am I asking my mind to work out a setting it has not been programmed to do? Is it something only my subconscious or soul already knows?

My eye catches a glimpse of light bouncing off a small sliver of metal where the white paint on the metal frame of the bed is scraped off. I look to the doorway to see where the bright light is coming from. There is a sharp glint of a light on a discarded bedpan in the middle of the corridor outside the room.

My hands around my legs loosen and I push my palms against the dusty floor beneath me. I slide on my bottom until I am out from under the bed. The dirty sheet catches in my hair and pulls it away from my forehead. It smells musty and damp.

Slowly and petrified I get to my feet and then shuffle to the door, one step at a time.

I stop at the door and turn my head to the right. I cannot see the thing that was chasing me. I turn my head to the left and peer through the grey haziness, but I cannot see it on this side either.

The light on the bedpan forms a string, like a thin thread of cotton. My eyes follow the string to a light bulb on the roof.

I follow the string of light. It bounces off a door handle, a screw on a bed, a piece of broken glass on the floor. The light leads me around corners and into interlinking rooms to a closed double door. The door is made of dark wood and the strange light glimmers on the surface.

I hesitate in front of the door for a moment, then without thinking about it, I step to the door and push down on both brass handles. The doors swing inward, and ahead of me, I see a short corridor with another set of closed double doors ahead of me. The string of light reflects off the door handles of the door ahead of me. The corridor is narrow, and it looks as if the walls are papered with a dark burgundy coloured paper. It looks velvety, but I am reluctant to touch my fingers to it, to see if it feels the same as it looks.

I walk forward to the door and then open it. I do not give myself time to think about it. The sliver of light is leading me somewhere, and I am curious to find out where.

This happens again and again, and it is as if I am stuck in a continuous cycle, but I keep walking forward, keep opening doors.

I get to a door. It looks worse than the other doors that came before it. The wood is splintered, and the dark brown veneer is peeling off in long strips. Some of the strips are still attached and hangs from the door like drooping lilies.

This door feels different. This door makes me feel afraid.

The thread of light reflects off the dull bronze handles, and I feel a compulsion to step forward.

Let who go? Find who?

Taking a deep breath, I thrust down on the door handles hard and shove the doors away from me.

Far ahead of me there is a window, and through the dirt-smeared glass I can see a lighthouse. Its bright light shines through the glass and onto me. The light is on me and in me. It is as if I am the light.

Continue reading Chapter 16/19

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