The light slants low through the window as I lie, prone but awake, in my bed, sheets disarrayed around me. A grey morning--the air is heavy but no rain is falling.
On this morning I have the impression that the world is driven away from itself by the weight of physicality--that the sky and the ground are leaning on one another like two injured comrades beating a slow retreat from the field of battle.
It is the same weight of physicality that drives me into sleep--senselessness, unconsciousness--night after night. I can't tell you what sleep is to me, for I never do remember. But on mornings such as this, with grey light streaming in, as long as I remain perfectly still--remain a perfect cipher--I can look down into the well of my unconscious. The well is round and grey-blue and deep, and perfectly clear though perfectly obscured.
Descend down a real well and light eventually disappears, but as I descend this well, the light grows brighter and brighter, and I see the crowd gathering, the murmuring crowd, all of them white white white in their Roman garb with their expressionless faces.
And in amongst them--causing a rippling disturbance in their numbers as he passes by--a crab-like man clad in black, short, with features pressed as though he had suffered at the hand of an inventive sculptor interested in the grotesque.
I say crab-like not because the man is a dwarf, though he is, but because he is like the image of the dwarf; the archetype of the dwarf. He smiles and shows his black teeth, large in a small head. His wiry beard, with bits of detritus tangled amongst the hairs, descends and then billows out over his barrel chest. In one broad, gnarled hand he clutches a dark wooden staff.
He gives a short, barking laugh and points the stick at me briefly, then steps forward into the circle of people that has formed around me and walks past without giving me a second glance. An intense murmur start up in the crowd. I turn my head sharply to follow the man as he leave--
And smack it hard on the headboard of my bed. The half asleep vision deserts me in an instant; I am awake, though I lunge after my departing drowsiness. Nothing is left but unease. I return to the sensation of gravity.
I lift my head and stare down the length of my body. I am lying diagonally across my queen-sized bed so as not to drape my legs off the end.
Here is the body that obeys my commands and brings me pleasure. Here are the feet that push against the ground, the arms that lift as I ask, the legs that uncomplainingly churn up and down hills some mornings, the fingers that carry the knowledge of finer skills.
That is my litany, anyway, but this morning I feel a strange, gravid weight. I grab the first clothes that come to hand and put them on absently and descend the stairs to pour myself some cereal for breakfast.