Hypnopompia

of rude awakenings...

The jungle-like crow of the peacock sounds, and I know I am awake, or rather, that I should be. Trapped bodily, my mind is now awake; sense of self, of relation, of place, of chronology - the successive, building quest of my life and and others - the progress of which all floods back ‘online’ as it were, while my body, the vehicle, does not. Not right away, at least.

No one, it would seem, for it would be unfair, comes into this life burdened thus bodily; it is, my situation: extended and acute hypnopompia, as a car gaining an idiosyncratic lurch, belch, and rattle after taking on too high a rock to the undercarriage; like a dog not quite ever the same after some abuse, or a horse after too sudden a spook, never to move quite the same again. I do not sleep as well or as seamless as I once did. I do not wake with the sort of freshness and ease original to all we humans waking, and thus thrown off proceeds the day for me, once awake. Why? you ask. What did I do to deserve this fate? The witch at her dark, lithe hour flies in and lands on my chest. The Old Hag, in her infernal, nocturnal infamy, whispered about in secret mostly only by those afflicted, stations her broom and haunches, heavy with curse, dread, and parasitized life, upon my heaving pectorals each and every early morn’. Her very approach begins to wake me. By the time she pins me down, it is too late: the whirling sound, quickly increasing in volume turns to building in pressure, on my chest and in my head, and no I do not mean the abstract mind, vague and indefinite in location, but my literal head, cranium, and brain - all terrifyingly definite in place and sensation. I feel at once awry; panic sets in. Whatever dream I was dreaming ends, and her unique brand of swirling, vaporous blackness, her macabre entourage, floods my vision as my eyes attempt and fail to flutter open, like terrified prisoners promised their freedom, lied to.

I feel, with suffocating, mortal terror, that I must heave her off. I am awake now, after hours of good and normal sleep. Either she woke me at her onset, or I was on the precipice of waking and she knew (knows) this to be her time, the time to pounce and land heavy on her victims, succubus she. Either way, consciousness of permanence, awareness of the daily continuum of the daylit world, has returned to me; and I know I should be awake, would be awake if not for her (and I feel she knows this too, devious she), if not for her weight, for the wretched, hope-draining pressure she installs. Even as mauve daylight engulfs my home in hoary winter, or golden sunlight energizes all in Lammastide, the hypnopompic witch plagues my mornings without fail, ever since I slew the great tyrannical goose of a mayor at Shallidon, where morning is forever.