i described to my therapist yesterday evening about the draining and bizarre nature of my dreams, how my dream-state blends with my waking mind, how waking up is such a frightening process. she said that it sounds like lucid dreaming -- where the conscious mind is actually present during a dream, and able to influence what goes on in the dream ... if you think of a dream as a movie being played out for you: normally you watch passively, a spectator in a private theatre. but in a lucid dream you stretch the muscles in your brain and start affecting what happens on screen.

i was startled that this most recent flavor of hell i've been going through also has a name, also has been documented. (the first being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder back in the beginning of the year.) it was a relief, to know that this has happened to others. lucid dreaming is incredibly disturbing ... i need to learn control over it. my recent lucid dreaming may be the key to treating the ptsd as well.

i told her that the term lucid dreaming did not sound totally unfamiliar ... i told her i was once lent some books about out-of-body experience and lucid dreaming. that i was remembering -- that i couldn't help but remember -- the one who lent them to me, that it was one of the first things that defined our friendship. i told her how it felt like cruel irony that this skill i've acquired was passed on to me by the one whom i remember with so much pain, so much i want to forget.

the therapist asks me how i feel as i remember and recall something from so long ago from which so much memory has been erased, pushed out of my brain. it's the most dangerous paradox, when the biggest event of your life is something you are literally trying to convince yourself never happened. that those emotions you felt weren't real. it tends to distort your reality and perceptions in all sorts of alarming ways. and makes the pain of remembering -- the digging out of the suppressed memories -- grossly amplified.

i'm in some kind of hypnotic state, here in the therapist's quiet room, eyes closed, breathing controlled, with the lights dimmed to nothing and the soft patient sound of her voice the only thing that exists. lost in painful remembrance, and silent grief. when i tell the therapist -- ellery is her name -- how i feel thinking about her, ellery asks me if she were to somehow be sitting here with me right now, would i be able to tell to her what i just described.

her image becomes too powerful in my mind, too intense, like being yanked from the last row of a movie theater, airborne, and having the screen rush right up to the edge of your face. the idea of being in the same physical space with her sends loud warning bells buzzing through my head. i can hear myself thinking "no. no." shaking my head violently. danger. little spasms, jerking me back -- electric shocks are being applied to my chest from an unknown source. i feel the breath of strangers whispering in my ear in the dark. a husky, old voice. horrible, horrible. no please, i'm so scared, please, no.

i'm starting to lose it -- i'm starting to freak out. the terror rising in volume and amplitude like a sea of pigeons startled into beginning one mass acension from the pavement.

i think this is what they mean when they say 'going to a bad place'.

ellery coaxes me to come back, to free myself of the suggestion. that i don't have to follow through with it in my mind. gradually i come back. my breathing has become heavy; i find that my face is wet with half-dried tears. i hold the palms of my hands up to my temples. my head hurts.

touching upon such searing pain is draining, and i'm left feeling exhausted, wanting to sleep.

that night, I have a dream -- the second time now I wake up from another dream into a new dream.

"It's a pleasant memory, stay with it ..."

I'm in a brightly-lit room full of comfortable crumpled white silk pillows and sheets, soft, safe, inviting, disarming. There is a large round bed in the middle of the room, raised up by a few steps. But me and the girl I'm with are not on the bed -- we're off to one side of the base of the bed, lying together, loosely embraced, relaxed, just below the few steps that lead up to it. We're not nude, but both dressed in white, loose-fitting silk pajamas, in each other's arms. Through our thin clothes we can feel each other ... her tiny, hard switch surrounded by warmth, and me solid as steel. I'm moving it rhythmically, comfortingly, slowly brushing back and forth across the top of her 3/4-inch length, ever so carefully. My eyes are closed; I'm visualizing it, seeing our two pieces through our clothes, magnified 1000 times. Sensing in detail every loving millimeter of movement, getting feedback from her torso's and limbs' imperceptible shudders and trembles, my ears attentive, gathering priceless info from the pace of her breathing and the faintest moans escaping her vocal chords. She is beautiful.

She's blonde, tall and lithe, with short hair and fair skin. It's a different girl in this dream, sent here to protect my psyche from the shock of experiencing the original character for this scene.

My mind misses thinking about this hyperrealistic sensation from years past, this meta-lovemaking, so it comes out in my subconscious, a soothing & pleasant fantasy/memory mutation. A disconnected, alien way of keeping one tendril to my past, barely the width of what a spider spins, intact.

The silk of a spider's digital spinning.