Lullabies for the Deaf

It's that disconcerting feeling, mired in hypnogogia, as the fabric of the universe shimmers in serene artificiality, that sense that there's something beyond the mundane constraints of our existence. Drifting towards the open arms of sleep as you recognize the tolling chimes that echo in anonymous caverns you never noticed in your mind, you begin to wonder if maybe you're just now waking up. What you were so convinced was reality is now suspect, rendered counterfeit by the conviction of dream. This inversion lulls you into paralytic stillness, comatose, overdosing on kaleidoscopic reveries of raspberry afternoons with pixellated pixies and simian tycoons. The world slides away infinite second by ephemeral eon, and you find yourself stumbling alternately through blissful utopias and their jagged reflections in dystopian dynasties. Prometheus labours in penitence, his cathedral crumbling with his altruism's decadence, his sentences colliding in the forge as if Hephaestus' mighty arms were tempering the elements. And Tom Sawyer waves from the raft, an imaginary captain of a fictional ship he sails through a permanent July to a crimson eclipse. How turbulent the skies become as harlequins arrest a beating heart beneath the floorboards of a desecrated science class, nostalgic reminiscences of skeletons and diaphragms and empires scrawled with silent hands, and unrequited love within the grip of stark irrelevance. Irreverent, their gazes lead towards a muted beam of light. A broken stage you stand upon, aware that it's a play and you're a character today but the audience is ominous, a scarab and a sage and when they dare you to behave as actors, changing chapters suddenly, swearing you're in love with me, the dungeons breathe in throes of passion, lonely bastion, underneath this parrot and a blade is just a boy pretending he's a pirate, seas as violent as his inclinations, trampling the Inca nation on his way to Easter Island. The Talking Heads are playing in a cellar with the walking dead and even as the scarab sighs the sage is watching hours dye the sour hearts and harpsichords that spark the floor ablaze because they're burning down the house in peristaltic memories of Science 9, refining lines so that Prometheus can find the time to intervene the splintered scenes of Huckleberry brandishing a mannequin, his mannerisms caged and repetitious, going on endlessly endlessly endlessly endlessly endlessly endlessly. And all of that occurs and they dare you to obey, and they don't care that it's a play, you're unaware of what to say. And then the curtain draws back, pierced by the dissonance of an alarm clock, a digitized banshee whose wails perforate the very fabric of reality. And the veneer slips away, gradually, and you wake to a sour disposition and the prospect of a new day. And in this transition, there's this disquieting sensation, mired in the grip of hypnogogia, where you know that you're discarding dreams. But for one split second those harbour schemes and Harvard queens  hardly seem like butterflies in the west, singing for nobody, lullabies for the deaf.