some of this is true

I remember reading once that when we sleep, and in particular when we dream, we become paralyzed. While we are reliving and reshaping and reimagining the world, our body is forced to stay motionless, to watch idly as our minds spin out of control.

This stops us from moving our legs when, beneath the flicker of our eyelids, we are running away from danger, like fire or rejection or an exploding airplane. It makes sure when we are fighting off imagined attackers, which perhaps symbolize the struggles and hardships of our lives, that we don’t throw our fists in the air and scream with anger, surely prompting the neighbours to call the police. It’s a mechanism that, when we roll off of the fictionalized lovers of our subconscious, prevents us from in fact tumbling off the bed onto a cold, hardwood floor. It turns our bodies invisible to protect us from whatever we happen to conjure.

Lately this evolutionary skill seems to be evading me. A few nights ago I went to sleep in much the same way I always do: later than I would have preferred, underneath a synthetic douvet surrounded by too many pillows, none of which offer proper support, lying on the left-hand side of the bed with the cat sleeping on a blanket on top of a bedside table to my right. Six hours later, I woke up completely turned around, my head and my feet had traded places. Instead of staying paralyzed for my own protection, I had rotated a full 180 degrees without even opening my eyes. What danger I could have been in!

Did you know?: Ducks can rest one side of their brain at a time, allowing them to sleep with one eye open and keep watch for predators. In groups, ducks will sleep in a line, with the bird on either end facing outward — with one eye open, of course — guarding the rest. This is because animals have more important things to worry about when they sleep than nightmares and electric blankets and the fresh smell of their lavender on their sheets and what the symbols in their dreams say about their place in the world and their soul and the future.

We spend an obviously large amount of time sleeping, and it’s safer for us, even if that sleep is prohibitively restless or broken up with frequent bouts of opening our eyes, uncomfortably shifting positions to squint and look at the clock before, exhausted, trying to drift off again. All of that time very far away from the world, and it’s amazing how prominently sleep figures into my memories.

For example:

Being 12 years old and turning my stereo on, and lying in my bed as early-90s pop musicians sang only the songs that early-90s pop musicians could sing, and then suddenly opening my eyes again and it’s three o’clock in the morning, the CD has long stopped spinning and then I realize it is time to get undressed and turn out the lights and actually move under the covers, and really loving falling asleep like this, almost accidentally.

As a child — I forget the age exactly, but well under 10 for sure — falling asleep in my parents’ bed watching TV on Christmas Eve, and then waking up in my own room, but in a new bed, with a mattress filled with water.

Over subsequent years, waking up in a wet bed and realizing the waterbed mattress is leaking.

The feeling of being diagnosed with an imminently fatal disease, having to spend time convincing myself that it is real, that this is something to come to terms with, and then the feeling of waking up from this recurrent dream and convincing myself all over again. And then relief.

Sleeping in class during my last year of high school, bored and exhausted, being able to wake up on queue when the teacher called my name, and, surprisingly — to both myself and the teacher, who could surely see what was going on — I would usually have an answer at the ready. In math class once, I remember dreaming of falling backwards, and then waking up in a panic and sending my pencil several feet away, and there was laughter.

Lying in a sleeping bag in a tent in the forest, and that familiar sound of people walking around on leaves and dirt and zippers zipping and fires crackling outside, the sound barely muffled by the thick orange canvass of a tent that is far from waterproof.

Sleeping on the bus ride home from university, and missing my stop only once.

Sleeping alone, sleeping next to someone else, and then sleeping alone again.

Red-eye flights, thinking it will work, going to sleep in one city and waking up in the next, but never really falling asleep, the hum of the engines and the warm pressurized cabin making it impossible to drift off for more than a few minutes, and then not being able to function the next day at all. Also, not learning my lesson and flying on red-eyes again and again.

Dreams of falling, thankfully being woken up by the tingling feeling that you get when you watch something very bad happening in front of you, and then being grateful I woke up in time because it’s common knowledge, when you are a child, that if you die in your dream you die in real life.

Dreams of dying, the exact moment of dying, and realizing that common knowledge was wrong.

It’s the last day of October, and autumn is slowly collapsing into winter. If winter is the saddest season, then I decide today must be the saddest day of the year. It’s actually quite beautiful, with a clear blue sky that seems to be taking over everything, but that’s sort of the point. There have been clouds blanketing over us for weeks, it seems, and this is the first time I really notice how low the sun is, how early it dips below the trees. I realize that this morning I slept in and still woke up to a sunrise, and now here I am, just a few hours later, walking straight into it. I have to squint or hold my hand up in front of my face pretty much the whole way home, and I’m almost glad to find reprieve inside a grocery store.

I walk inside the automatic doors into crowded aisles, shelves filled with too many things, useless things, all designed to slowly kill you. There is an easy-listening, all-instrumental version of Hey Jude filling what could have just as easily been a warehouse, in between announcements of today’s sales, recipe ideas and notices to department heads to check their checklists, whatever that means.

I always fill my basket with more than I came for. Too many things that make it awkward to walk, and I feel too warm in my winter coat, which, it turns out, could have stayed in the closet for another week. I should have come here in the middle of the night, when this place would be deserted and I wouldn’t have the urge to chain the doors shut and burn the whole place down. I should have come when the only people here are people that work nights anyway, and being awake, shopping, at three in the morning doesn’t seem like a big deal at all, in fact it almost feels normal. But even then, I’m sure the sensation of being here, slowly boiling over, would not be altogether different.

Very little of my basket’s contents are for me. Cat food, cat litter, laboratory-tested odour-absorbing litter box baking soda, cat cream and a furry fake mouse toy, for good measure. It’s not until I’m at the cashier, unloading it all onto the black, spill-stained conveyor belt with an oddly arraigned rendition of Stayin’ Alive playing in the background, that I realize what the world must think to see this collection of cat supplies next to a set of no-kill mouse traps. What this contradiction says about a cat, and, more importantly, a cat owner. What sort of admission this is, the waving of a catnip-lined white flag.

This is what I imagine a certain breed of parents must feel like when they realize their child is a failure at sports, and not just because hockey isn’t for him, or she’ll do better with basketball, but all sports. When athletic parents realize their child is the sort of person who would rather chase ladybugs on the soccer field than pay attention to the ball, which will invariably bounce hard off the side of his face. The sort of person who, let’s be honest, is nothing like her ma and pa.

It’s not like I am a very good mouse hunter. Believe me, I’ve tried. I’ve chased mice around the apartment holding all manner of cardboard boxes, plastic bags and laundry baskets, with the ambitious goal to carefully trap the mouse and carry it to freedom. I’ve hopped around in a motion not dissimilar to drug-fuelled dancing, but it’s never clear whether I’m trying to avoid stepping on the mouse, or avoid being stepped on myself. I’ve watched mice escaped traps right in front of my eyes. And nearly every time, I’ve watched the mouse, almost in slow motion, dart under a closet door or under the radiator, probably escaping into another dimension. More importantly, I’ve watched my cat, Morgan, actually pick up the mouse in her mouth only to quickly decide to let it go.

But a cat — just like the child of a failed minor-league hockey prodigy should be predisposed to skating gracefully around a sheet of frozen water — is expected to be able to catch mice. There really isn’t much else a cat is really expected to be good at, except maybe chasing the beam from a laser pointer around furniture or shitting in the litter box.

And this is what I’m thinking about while waiting in line at the cashier, my overabundance of pet supplies barring me from the express checkout. I think, briefly, about making a joke about the whole thing, like a CEO getting in front of bad news, but I decide against it, just in case she hadn’t yet noticed, which is probably impossible.

I instead try to change the subject, take control of the inevitable small-talk and take it somewhere else entirely. October 31st is the one day out of the year when the employees here are allowed to wear something other than their uniforms, and she’s taking advantage. She’s dressed as Medusa, her hair pinned up in a giant, black and white beehive with rubber snakes peaking out, her face painted ghost white. “Nice costume,” I say, with too much enthusiasm. “Thanks,” she says, not looking up from the bar code scanner and its hypnotic red lights. “I’m sure people have been through here all day pretending desperately not to notice,” I say, thinking I’m being very clever. “Yeah,” she agrees without so much as a smile, and likely thinking, “Your cat must be a real piece of work. Is it lazy or stupid or both?” Red-faced and ashamed, I pay and leave.

I walk home and the sun is almost gone completely. It’s nearly dark, and this means more time for the mice to scoot around the apartment undetected under the cover of night. Morgan should have a distinct advantage, being able to see in the dark, but I fear this will only make things worse.

If human ears were powerful enough to pick up the conversations of mice, through my walls you would surely hear violent laughter. And in between the laughter they would tell stories about great escapes, daring treks through the short carpet and over vinyl flooring from the water-heater closet to the washing machine, even convincing themselves they actually talked their way out of the cat’s mouth and weren’t, as it turns out, clumsily dropped. They would share bread crumbs and bits of dried food, maybe even a piece of cat kibble out of spite, and they would feel like they were the smartest mice in the world. They would know it was winter not by the shortening of the days, but by the clicking of the warming radiator, and in this heat they could almost pretend they were somewhere tropical, a sort of mouse paradise. They would dream of faraway places where there isn’t snow and the ground doesn’t freeze, a world where they could forget about traps and mouse poison and cats and humans lurking throughout the house, and just stay like this, safe from harm, and be happy forever.