In sleep my mind is agile. It uses whatever it finds lying about the corners and goes to great lengths to weave together a mostly coherent tale that I often remember with amusement and sometimes amazement when I wake. Sometimes too, it tells me things that are true and more frightening than any fiction I can invent. Such are the apnea dreams. I know when I stop breathing in my sleep. I am fully aware that I am suffocating. Sometimes elaborate incredibly vivid dreams are built around the fact that my body has simply ceased to breathe.
Sometimes too I experience straight out awareness. Asleep and paralyzed, trapped between unconscious and awake, I know that I cannot breathe, that the function of drawing breath, usually automatic and completely thoughtless, has ceased to be possible for me and through no amount of strain or will can I get it to begin again. I know that I am not breathing and if, this time, I do not start to breathe again, I will die.
I used to be terrified by the awareness of the apnea, long before I even knew that was what it was. It was the same with the apnea dreams. Oh, the hundreds of ways I’ve died over the years - the ropes, the gas, the hands about my throat, the mudslides, the snakes, the avalanches, the drownings, the cellophane, the quicksand… - the so many inventive tales my mind has woven around my ceasing to breathe.
But after so many years and so many deaths, even these death-courting terrors, it seems, grow stale and cease to move me the way that they used to. I am often able to make note what is happening without engaging in fear. I can feel the pull of my lungs, the oxygen deprivation, without the panic. I can note my heart racing, pounding, fighting to push oxygen my blood doesn’t have, and realize it isn’t psychological alarm causing that slamming in my chest, merely physiological reaction, a completely logical physical response to not breathing. The detachment can be oddly satisfying.
The ocean is vast and silent and in it I am utterly alone. Far far above me is the surface of the water and far far above that surface is the full moon, its reflected light filtering down in undulating shafts illuminating the depths in a kaleidoscope of blue, shimmering, morphing light. It is stunningly beautiful, overwhelming. I am dazzled.
The water feels like silk sliding over my body as I swim effortlessly through it. I am weightless, graceful, agile, and, most surprisingly, strong. My arms pull me forward in great powerful strokes and it feels incredible, like music in my muscles, a pleasure in moving I’ve never known. I feel young. There is no ache anywhere, no pain loud or quiet, nothing nagging or screaming at me, reminding me that I am aging and broken, nothing but palpable joy.
I feel perfect.
Perfect.
I move through the water, going nowhere, just going, going, going, because I can go, because I must go, on and on, because to stop, to interrupt this flow, this feeling, is unthinkable. I have never felt this way before. If I stop now, I will never recapture the moment. I will revert, devolve, become what I am, no, what I was, heavy, leaden, gravity-bound and crushed, deteriorating, crumbling, a mass of symptoms and diagnoses, of escalating unpleasantries, of ache and pain and loss of hope.
Oh no, better to slip through the water, roll my arms over my shoulders, over and again, like tireless pistons, kick my legs behind me, twist and roll, revel within this wonderous flesh that before now was merely endured.
But then (of course) I feel the first sign. It starts in the bottom of my lungs, a small nagging sensation. I had forgotten.
I must breathe. Like a whale, a dolphin, I must surface and take a great breath. I must put a purpose to my blissful mindless going and travel up, moonward, to fill my lungs. Somehow, I know, that going up, acknowledging the need for air, will break the spell, no, is breaking the spell. I will begin, have begun to return to the reality of myself, my life, my body and all its hideous humanity, its unpleasant limitations and sensations.
And I do not want it.
I will not, will not, cannot surface. I cannot let this go willingly.
I continue to swim, ignoring the instinct to surface, the pull to survive, the hunger for oxygen spreading out from my lungs into every part of my body. My flesh machine, so strong and graceful just moments ago, slows, falters. It cannot continue as it was. It screams for oxygen.
And the surface, so far above me, is now too far away. If I choose to rise now, I am too weak to pull myself upward in time.
I look about me, such beauty, such astonishing blues and greys shot through with silver shards of moonlight undulating silently.
Magnificent. I never imagined such a place.
And I realize, with thoughts swimming as slow as my body now, that I cannot cry. My eyes wide open in the salty waters, do my tears even exist?
So I decide. I will stay here. I will recapture what I have just lost. I belong here, here, in the liquid tranquility. I will breath the oxygen that is in the water. It’s there, I know it is. All I need do is pull it in, just breathe it in, and I can stay.
So I try. I try to pull the water into me. Try as I can, though, I cannot pull the water in through my nose. I open my mouth and try to gasp it in. But still it will not come. The water has turned thick like gelatin and its surface too cohesive to bend. There is oxygen all around but it will have none of me.
There is no fear now, no panic, just a wistful sadness. It was so marvelous, so sweet, and now it’s over.
How bizarre, I think slowly. At the bottom of the ocean I will suffocate without drowning. I rather like the idea that, if I must die, at least I am dying in a state of irony.
It was, perhaps, my best death ever.
The waking hypoxic headache was almost worth it.
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