keyword: drowsy, title: armed against a seam of trembles in "the next big thing" flash fiction

I’ve been falling asleep in my dreams a lot, as of late. I don’t mean that I’ve been beginning to dream at the start of sleep, I mean that I’ve been having dreams where I fall asleep inside them and start having a dream within the other dream, where I must wake up once and then wake up a second time before I can return to this presumptive real again. Dreams within dreams, layered slumbers, matryoshka dolls of sub-consciousnesses, nightmares nested into other nightmares. Everlasting Gobstoppers of reality, confection on confection on confection, teeth cracking on sugar-glass as I try to bite back my way back through to my bedsheets and this waking sphere.

On one layer or another of the infinite regression I battle upstream through each night, it ends up I’m driving. When I lived in Los Angeles, I was a gopher, go for this, go for that and after that, a medical courier doing much the same. Returning a Louis Vuitton dog-purse worth more than my car, running a rush semen analysis to West Hills lab, the only real difference being if people back home would be impressed by proximity to minor-fame or horrified for my former prodigal failed fate. It was all just driving dusty sun-bleached highways to pay the too-high rent.

It doesn’t matter what the other layers of the dream are, whether I am witnessing the heat-death at the end of the universe or winning the lotto on a ticket that turns out to be a fake, whether I am having my identity consumed by a technological-horror hivemind or just talking to my deceased father about how I shouldn’t be able to talk to him because he’d dead, one of the layers that I’m waking out of or into, I’m always stuck rushing around for some driving job.

In dreams, I drive to make someone else money, shaving a paycheck-to-paycheck pittance off for myself and I’m falling asleep behind the wheel. It’s the end of a long day spinning in circles for others and I’m drowsy, I fight to keep my eyes open and I’m think: maybe it’d be better if I just fell asleep. Let go my hands and crash into the In-And-Out Burger, freed of working for other’s profits, slip into the prophecies of what dreams may instead come.

I battle heavy eyes and my desire to just give up until I finally fall asleep inside the dream then crash and die. Sometimes I wake up into a higher layer of the dreams, maybe to an antique mall where I find a cache of Little Falls Mets minor-league baseball souvenirs, proving that the thing that filled me with aspirations toward big cities was real after all. Sometimes I’ll just wake up in my bedspreads, my real bed instead, drenched in sweat and more tired than when I went to sleep.

At least, I believe that it’s my real bed. There’s always a chance I’ll just have to wake up again.