Max Blecher - Adventures In Immediate Irreality

Suddenly I feel the sleep growing heavier, trying to drag me down. I would like to wake up, but it weighs heavy on my eyelids and hands. I dream that I am tossing, flailing, but it is stronger than I am and after battling it for a while, I feel it, tenacious, taking hold. I begin to scream; I want to resist, want someone to awaken me; I slap myself as hard as I can: I am afraid sleep is going to drag me too far down, to a place from which there is no return; I beg for help, for someone to shake me awake. .

My last scream, the most powerful, finally rouses me. I am suddenly in my actual room, which is identical to the room in my dream, and in the position I dreamed I was in while struggling with the nightmare. What I now see around me differs little from what I saw a second ago, but there is a feeling of authenticity in the air— about objects, about myself. It is like a sudden winter frost that magnifies the sound of things. .

What does the feeling of my reality consist of? That the life I shall live until my next dream has returned. Current memories and sorrows weigh heavily on me, and I wish to resist them, to avoid falling into their sleep, a sleep from which I might never return.

Now I am struggling with reality. I scream, I beg to be awoken, to awaken into another life, my true life. True, it is broad daylight and I know where I am, I know I am alive, but there is something missing, as there was in my nightmare.

I struggle. I scream. I flail. Who will awaken me?

That precise reality around me is dragging me down, trying to sink me. Who will awaken me?

It has always been like this. Always. Always.