siesta 1.0

Woke up, only to find myself still, suspended (not floating) inches away from the soft ocean bed. I can’t breathe, rather, i realize that my body didn’t need to, and it felt comfortable and unusually cool inside, as if it became a passive funnel for seawater. This state would be most convenient if only i can move, but i can’t, not even the slightest twitch of an eyelid, my head flooded with the image of dancing light streaks from the surface, trapped by the filter that is depth, consuming the few free gigabytes left in my mind, overwriting all that i held before this, takeover. As if forcing my being to know only that abstract shining wasn’t rude enough, a large manta ray, large enough to block my blurred vision of the sun (not eclipse it) passed by. I can’t remember for how long, but long enough to introduce me to darkness; a blank sheet devoid of light. I fell asleep after that, with my eyes open. Come to think of it, this is by far the strangest sleep i’ve ever had; no somnolence. It was like taking an advanced course in college without meeting its prerequisites. But it was also the “coolest”, in the sense that it felt like sleeping in an air-conditioned room, when your body has only been accustomed to an electric fan. It wasn’t all that ideal, but it was nice for a change. In this weirdest sleep, a dream chanced upon me (or it wasn’t that hard to spot a body frozen in “midwater” near the bottom of the ocean). It took the form of psychedelics, not candy colored pills, but a myriad of neon jellyfish pirouetting in unison with their smooth domes and slender tentacles. It was vibrant, very beautiful, to the point that it was utterly sickening. One strayed too close to my chest, it glowed a bright artificial red, like those in movie house marquees. Too bright and too red that it provoked my subconscious into grabbing it by its tentacles. So i did, and got stung and felt pain, a lingering pain turning into an annoying itch. Whilst scratching, no, clawing at the itch with my other hand in a desperate attempt to expel the venom, a sensation of bliss dawned upon me, not because of the fact that the venom wasn’t potent enough to kill (which is weird because that should’ve come first), but because I realized that my body was mine again, from the moment my hand lunged for that living chunk of Jell-O. Told myself to wake up, it did, only to find myself back in that abyss with a huge manta ray for a sky; too bland for my taste. Then it moved, slowly of course, and left (I suspect that it read my mind and got offended), returning to me the hazy Kankan of light which I didn’t want in the first place. But my being was mine to will again, so I closed my eyes, and resurfaced.