Acre Under a Green Sky

My bed was a magical and terrifying place. It was identical to my brother's –– red maple with a three masted schooner carved on the headboard. That ship was the first thing I ever drew with paper and crayon. It was a dream ship, and I sailed it through the tranquil seas of fantasy and daydreams as well as the storm tossed seas of illness and nightmares.

We kids didn't fall asleep. We were sucked down from wakefulness without warning –– without conscious awareness. Lying on the living room floor in front of the TV, draped over your mother's shoulder in the middle of the day while she goes on chatting with neighbors, in the back seat of the car –– sleep takes you down so effortlessly that you don't know you're asleep until you regain some degree of wakefulness again. And there are degrees of wakefulness. There's the awareness that you are no longer at the drive-in watching Jerry Lewis, but that you are now being carried under your father's arm. You're outside. There are voices, and you hear the car door slam. That's the porch step he just went up. Now, someone is pulling your shoes off and you're in your bed.

And it's all mixed up in a dream. And sometimes the dreams are heart-pounding 'scareful', and you cry out and suddenly there's your mother in her white gown bending over you in the dark with just the light from the hall behind her so you can see her figure through the sheer cloud of her nightgown. And you're sucked back again wondering if the smell of her is real or a dream.

Then there are the bizarre fever dreams brought on by illness. Along with hot tomato soup and the smell of Vicks on your chest and a blanket of coloring books comes the sick dream. Mine was smoke. I dreamed a waft of smoke as if from a cigarette left burning in an ashtray rising without a source into the air. Clearly, the goal was to have it be laser true with just the slightest wavering, but invariably a breath of air would disturb it and set it oscillating wildly and breaking up into uncontrollable clouds of smoke.

There seems to be no bridge between wakefulness and sleep; just a precipitous drop, but the way back is a slow ascent through layers and layers of thick sleep with images of real and imagined creatures; of sounds and smells and touch. Half awake is half asleep is half real is half a dream. It's all a netherworld. It's the reason kids can believe in fairy tales.

Parents make frightening noises in our sleep. The sounds of love making are dangerous and violent. We half hear them till they wake us. All of us. Danny once said, "If it feels so good, how come it sounds like it hurts?!" I knew then that he, too, had been awakened in the night by cries and a chorus of bedsprings thrashing to a mad metronome.

Voices are raised in our sleep. Arguments, safely tucked away on the top shelves of closets out of children's reach until they are bedded down for the night, are then brought out and allowed free rein. Words; sometimes whole sentences intrude into our dreams:

"Coward! You're letting him run your life!"

"I don't care! I hate this town and everyone in it!"

"For Christ's sake, what do you want from me?!"

"And what about me?! What am I supposed to do?"

"Be a man!"

"What kind of wife . . ."

Cries are heard. Weeping is heard. Doors slam.

The night world of my parents was an awful, mysterious world in my sleep time. It was a secret half-told amid dreams and nightmares. It was a secret I had to keep, because deep in my heart I believed it was their real world and that the world of day was a pretense. And a scream heard by Old Lady Eagle could shatter that secret. If it was a scream; a real scream, and if it was my mother screaming. It could have been. I think I might even remember it. I don't know.