I Have Lost an Idea

All last week I was plagued with a recurring nightmare.

The first evening of the nightmare, I had been listening to Joni Mitchell’s Blue album. I am quite fond of this album; my mother detests it as my penchant for eras I never experienced. As I listened, my ear caught a particular line.

When I think of your kisses, my mind see-saws.

That lyric rang out so clearly to my ears that evening in a way it had never done before. I think it was all the more particular to my mind because I had, up until that moment in the lounge, believed the line to be –

When I think of your kisses, my mind sees stars.

After hearing this line for the first time, for what it is, I also had the first occurrence of my nightmare.

I am unaccustomed to fitful sleep. I have always, as a rule, enjoyed the average eight hours of sleep each evening. I have, over the years, developed something of a bedtime ritual. I begin by taking a hot shower, making sure to both shampoo and condition my hair. I take extra care to lather my underarms as I am disgusted by my armpit's ability to accumulate deodorant clumps; these small white masses have a manner of metastasizing and becoming hopelessly bonded to my underarm hair. I typically pee in the shower as well; in truth, I feel as if I have skipped a step on those evenings when I do not need to. I also brush my teeth in the shower, but more for convenience than a sense of habit. Unlike with urinating, I would still feel a sense of completion if I were to brush my teeth out of sequence.

This ritual is important to me because I enjoy the feel of clean sheets as I fall asleep. The highlight of travel with my mother is hotel sheets. They are always pristine, crisp, and industrially clean. Taking a shower just before bed helps me to keep my sheets as fresh as possible.

The therapist my mother sends me to asked why I don't simply change my sheets daily. I told my therapist that I have been banned from approaching the laundry machine after an incident with a number of mother's table linens and gelatin. I told my therapist that I have also been banned from making undue work requests from our housemaid because, as mother describes her, she is an unfortunately constructed woman on the brink of the lower class. I told my therapist that, in light of my mother's edicts, I thought it wise to limit myself to changing my bed linens only once a week until such time as we have a more sightly housemaid.

In the meantime, I explained, I recognize my evening bathing ritual.

On the night of Blue anew, I was able to complete my bathing ritual, but was distracted by a lingering sense of shock.

The therapist my mother sends me to asked me what was so shocking about the shift from seeing stars to see-saws. I told him that it likely made quite a difference to an astronomer or a child.

Each night I would wake from my nightmare entirely dampened. I would refer to it as having a cold sweat except that there was nothing cold about it. I would wake each night in such a humid state that I would need to get out of bed and stand with my limbs akimbo and swinging to cool myself. My hair along the scalp would be wet, giving my hair an athlete's volume as he breaks a sweat. The back of my pajamas would feel thin as the fabric clung to my skin. Worst of all, there would be a damp imprint on my linens and pillow as if a great anthropomorphic sponge had been laid and pressed onto my bed.

The therapist my mother sends me to asked me to describe what happens in the nightmare. I told him that I wasn't upset about the nightmare. I was upset about the state of my bed after the nightmare. I asked him if he knew of any methods to make the effects of nightmares less destructive on one's laundry and linens; after all, I am uncertain of what brought on this recurrent nightmare, but I would like to be prepared if it is to recur again. He told me that it would be necessary to analyze the contents of the nightmare if I was ever to understand why it caused me such troubled sleep. To sleep, he said. To sleep, perchance to dream. Aye there's the rub.

I reminded my therapist that Hamlet was speaking of death, not nightmares. In any case, I failed to see how discussing the electrical impulses of my brain would prevent them from causing such violent sweating.

We spent the rest of the session identifying Rorschach blotches.

I have always loved Joni Mitchell's Blue. I have loved it from the first time I came across the record at a small flea market near a farmer's market where my mother was searching for a particular type of honey that is meant to bring renewed luster to the skin. But, more to the point, I have always understood what I meant in saying that I loved Joni Mitchell's Blue.

I have loved Joni Mitchell's Blue the same way I have loved funeral processions, loved the smell of tension in a room after the meeting of a deadline, loved Magritte's Empire of Light, loved cornbread. For each of these things, I have enjoyed their strengths and weaknesses, neither celebrating those things that made them superior nor castigating those things that made them inferior. What is the good of emphasizing that perfect way that cornbread absorbs butter, only to turn about and criticize the way it disintegrates at the slightest nudge? These are both characteristics of cornbread and, so, reasons to love cornbread.

I have always comfortably loved things because of their entirety. Perhaps this is why there are so few people whom I love, the proclivities of people being so less suited for balance. Their motives and abilities are so much more difficult to understand, to even ascertain.

But this shift from

When I think of your kisses, my mind sees stars

to

When I think of your kisses, my mind see-saws

changes everything about loving.

See-saws are unstable. It is their nature. If the mind see-saws, it becomes this teetering thing, capable of anything. Kisses may lead to laughter, to embitterment. It would all depend on the weight of the players on either end. And what of days when a player has had a large lunch?

The therapist my mother sends me to told me that my interest in this lyrical shift is merely a diversion. I asked him what he felt I was trying to divert attention from. My therapist told me that that was precisely the question he wanted me to answer.

I think the therapist my mother sends me to may be something of a lazy thinker.

In my nightmare, I have finally found my friend. We are on the dirt track of a dog racing course. My friend takes the place of the rabbit on a track at dog races, but I am cemented to the starting line. As my friend races away, I am forced to watch as he slowly grows smaller with distance. Then, when he is out of sight, I must wait for him to come up again behind me. I cannot seem to even turn my head to anticipate his approach. I am forced to stare straight ahead, as if awaiting the starter’s gun, and wait for my friend to pass through my field of vision again.