31

I wake to the sound of a moan by my left ear.

It’s the usual night-time shtick; I was sinking into a half-sleep, accompanied by the sounds of tinnitus and the CPAP machine hissing when this roused me.

This happens so often it’s become the norm.

It used to scare me, until I started dismissing the experiences as hypnagogic hallucinations – there: classifiable, safe, and unimportant.

But some of them shake me – like this one.

And the reason is it sounds so much like something occupying physical space in my everyday world, rather than some projection of an overactive subconscious kicking it up as my logical mind tries to shut down into sleep.

The other thing is the sound – like energy shaped into some human exhalation. That’s the only way I can think of it. Like standing at an electrical plant and hearing the lines buzz with power, but here it has some shape that feels like it’s trying to communicate with me.

They always feel like they’re coming from somewhere low, too. If there’s a totem when it comes to planes of existence, and the hierarchy is from the most anarchic and subversive, if not potentially evil, then this is coming from somewhere lower than us.

Only this wasn’t a voice this but a moan – somebody old and in agony.

I can’t just keep accepting these nightly occurrences as part of my sleep routine. My sleep’s always been weird – from when I was a kid and my mum would push the bedside drawers up against the bed to ensure I wouldn’t roll out (which I’d done several times), to kicking covers clear off the bed, to a bout of night terrors, to wandering from bed and finding myself on the floor in the corner when I was on Paxil, to restlessness so bad I was briefly prescribed medication given to Parkinson’s patients, to this.

My mind keeps going back to the experience a fortnight ago, feeling as if that was an altered state of consciousness – not pure, because some idiot, misbehaving part of my imagination kept kicking in, but a taste of a space that is free and wonderful and where everything’s possible.

I miss it.

But this is some flip side.

I used to read a lot about spirituality, what happens next, and what happens before – part of the ideology that recurs through a lot of literature is that you agree to take on the issues you’ll face in life as a means of spiritual evolution before you’re born into the physical world. If you don’t learn, you do those things over.

There’s a logic to that – evolving spiritually to ultimately merge with some pinnacle of consciousness, be that God, the Universe, some overreaching collective, or something else.

But look at all the shit happening in the world, at murders (I used to read lots about serial killers, the mob, and crimes in general), rapes, violence, abuse, corruption and shit that exists beyond any genuine classification, and you have to wonder how any of this could possibly be a plan anybody could agree to.

Like who would agree to be hunted, imprisoned, abused for days, and ultimately murdered by a serial killer?

Which leads me to believe either there’s no plan, and everything is random and capricious and just sometimes unfairly shit, or if there’s a plan that’s about growth and evolution, then there also has to be a plan that’s about destruction and devolution.

Because that makes sense.

Everything has its opposite: light, dark, day, night, good, bad.

Maybe my sleep’s verging on the flip side.