The stupid dream I’ve had lately
“You can talk, can’t you?”
She’s standing over me and taking notes. I don’t know why I’m sitting on the ground; in real life I’m plenty short enough to be stood over, or at least looked directly in the face, provided someone can latch onto my eyes.
There are actually people who can do that to me in real life— pull in my eyes, for a time— with a fascinating sort of greedy charisma. It’s either exhilarating or terrifying before it drains me, depending on whether it’s friendly. She isn’t one of these people, thankfully, and she isn’t friendly. And this isn’t real life.
It’s that nightmare again, the one where I’m being observed. She’s a psychologist of sorts, and she’s doing a terrible job of acting like she’s actually interested. Except that she is, but I can’t perceive it that way, because it’s not really an interest in another person.
“Weirder than thou,” now aren’t we? Of course you can fucking talk.
This isn’t her voice (she’s in the background, unimpressed and scribbling notes about how the autistic adults turn out). It’s a voice in my head, which almost never happens in real life. It’s pissed that I have the audacity to remain silent and fall into myself and
“act like an adult. Stop indulging yourself. You can fucking talk.”
In the dream, I can’t.
“More like don’t want to.”
I’m staring in front of me, and I twitch the side of my mouth that’s half nerve-paralyzed in real life. I’m suddenly, extremely aware of how widely my eyes are opening, even though there’s nothing in front of me to stare at. I start to rock a little, back and forth, in sync with some sort of swallowing, and my eyes are still wide and empty. All the weight and pressure in my head is falling down, down and out, out of my expressionless gray eyes and into my throat, and the voice is shaking its head along with me, sneering,
“You don’t fucking rock. You’re a tryhard.”
In real life, I do, but in real life, I also talk.
The dream always ends in unbearable, pulsating fog, my throat still completely viscous and my lips squeezing themselves together for no reason as they continue to twitch. I’m rocking myself even more as the observer sits expectantly with a clipboard (or boredly with a clipboard; I can never tell) and I try to mouth to her that, yes, of course I can talk, thank you very much, but —
“Fucking showoff. You’re not getting worse with age. You’ve just stopped trying.”
I wake up from this thing to days that have more stuttering and more interpersonal asynchronicity than usual, lately. Or at least what I can remember of usual. I’m genuinely impressed that the shame voice (I guess we’ll call it that) manages to call it indulgent. Weirder than thou.
I’m not entirely sure what to make of the dream. On one hand, there’s been a creeping terror that I’m leaving this world for the one in my own head, and actually losing my speech and scripts and stability, regressing into the locked-in syndrome that the heartbroken parents (with the light it up puzzly-blue pieces or whatever) seem to insist their little boys are tragically afflicted with. I hurt for them, actually, and think we in the community would stand to empathize a little better, because they just don’t know better, but that’s a story for another day. More penitently, ‘low functioning’ wouldn’t pay my bills.
But on the other hand, there’s the shame voice. Weirder than thou.
Feeling autistic is presumptuous, it says. Letting go is presumptuous. Fears of helplessness are really just fantasies, and yes, damn you, I can fucking talk.
I’ve had a name for it for ten years, and I’m probably just calibrating.
