somniloquy raze i used to fall out of bed in my sleep. my stepfather and my mom would be watching tv in the living room. they would hear a soft thud and find me on my bedroom floor. still dreaming. my stepfather would pick me up and put me back in bed. they didn't always hear me. sometimes i woke up in the dark with something hard and cool against my cheek that wasn't a mattress. it always took me a minute to work out where i was. it started right around the time i had the ghost dream. i had this fear i would wake up in the morning and i would be dead, but i wouldn't know it. at night i would stare at the digital clock in my bedroom, watching one red number become another, convinced if i fell asleep i would never wake up again. i woke them up once. i told them i couldn't stop thinking about dying. "think about good things instead," they said. one night i had a dream i was sitting at the dining room table. i was trying to talk to my mom. she wouldn't say anything. no one explained it to me. i just figured it out. i was a ghost. when i woke up, i had to make sure i was still alive. i asked my mom, "can you see me? am i a ghost?" she said she could see me. she said i wasn't a ghost. the next time i fell out of bed, she heard me hit the floor. i sat up when my stepfather was tucking me in and said, "you always tell me what to do, what to do, what to do!" he was getting ready to punch me in the face when my mom put her hand on his arm. "look at his eyes," she said. they were closed. i was talking in my sleep. i was six. she always liked telling that story. it made her laugh. 220116 ... unhinged i had a reoccurring nightmare as a child of falling. just falling free the coefficient of gravity tugging on my limbs the ominous implication that i would eventually hit something hard splat my legs kicking a scream welling and then i would wake up always before i hit anything maybe it was a internal movie of the free floating terror that lived inside of me when i was young because of those first days alone in a plastic box screaming with little to no comfort so i had nightmares of solo free falling with no parachute i would wake right before the splat my real life legs kicking my sheets into swirls a scream coming to the top of my real life voice all of it abrupt and violent like a shove from the universe i never could sleep in top bunks i felt like i would fall out and break a limb even though it had always only been a dream of falling that terrorized my sleep 220116 what's it to you? who go blather from