Every morning, as i wake up, and often at night, as i am falling asleep, i have to remind myself of where i am. Narcolepsy keeps me from having a gentle entry or exit to and from dreaming– leaving me where i was right where i am. i pop out of sleep, and start planning a day in Gainesville–i’m going to get my coffee at the Slice and then ride my bike to campus. i don’t teach until 1:55, so i’ll hide out in my office and catch up on grading. After class i’ll…go to the pool? Wait, for some reason i can’t…go to the pool…today. And, this bed. It’s too close to the windows and there’s only one cat on it…where is the back i sleep with my face pressed right into, knees tucked into the back of knees, arms tight around waist. Not, no, no. Stop it. Back, it starts coming back–i’m in Brooklyn. i run the details for myself–everything that’s different, the arrangement of these rooms i live in now, the people i will or will not find in them, the weather. Gradually, i am convinced.

For as long as i’ve lived in New York, my dreams are mostly set in the only house i’ve ever lived in for more than 3 years: a brick house with yellow linoleum in the kitchen and the hallways and differently colored carpet in each room. The house with a fireplace and a long kitchen and a back porch lined with railroad ties and flower beds. It has a yard with a concrete basketball court and a chicken coop wrapped in honeysuckle and palmettos around the pines and antique roses and blackberries in the palmettos, and rattle snakes and a white cat and two golden retrievers. For a long time, when i was little, this was the place where i grew up. When my parents left Miami, where they had both grown up, they moved to Palatka, Florida–famous for the assy stench of its paper mill. My Dad worked for Florida Power and Light, and some of his friends from work had transferred north already–setting up idyllic, vaguely hippie, enclaves. My parents were still married for most of my time at the house in Palatka, and i remember an antique sewing machine that was the perch for a tall, skinny, wooden birdhouse with little finches flying around inside. i remember a fuchsia crepe myrtle tree in the front yard, waxy, prolific gardenia bushes, zinnias and petunias and roses and pine trees and oaks and Spanish moss and a creek in the back yard. An above ground pool. Macrame and wallpaper and wood panelling on the walls. i’ve never been someone who writes down my dreams or looks to them for clues to my waking life, but the sheer persistence of this place in my subconscious makes it hard for me not to ask what i might be trying to tell myself. i’m not so good at listening to the advice my rational self tries to give–i don’t really trust it, but maybe i could find something in this other non-linear register more persuasive?

Sometimes i think there is already too much in there, and the narcolepsy is like a systems crash. Many people who have narcolepsy are also obese, because the brain protein that tells you when to stop eating is like? the same as? the one that lets a body sleep deeply enough to earn regular sleep cycles. Physical obesity is luckily a problem i don’t have, but physically, emotionally, and intellectually–i can’t really get enough. i want to know everything, feel everything. Nothing feels like too much until i wake up on my kitchen floor at 4 in the morning, curled up under the ironing board, usually with a snack clenched in my fist. Sometimes this means i came home from work, walked in the door, opened the fridge and grabbed the first thing i saw and then sat right down. Whether or not i’ve had anything to drink seems to be irrelevant–exhaustion is the trigger, and it seems to be a kitchen v. bedroom sort of thing–like sleeping on the couch in your underwear while your wife is out of town.

The only thing i have from that house is a photo album. Shortly after my Mom left, when the house was kind of a wreck all the time and we were trying to figure out what it would be like without her, i made a photo album. There were little 4×4 photos with dates and notes in my grandmother’s handwriting shoved into kitchen drawers and newer envelopes of 4×6’s falling out of other albums and in closets that no one thought they cared about. For a minute maybe it seemed like a time we might be better off forgetting. i started saving them when i found them, and eventually put them into a kind of crappy brown photo album. The pages are mostly yellowed now and some of the photos were taken out and never returned, but they are the pictures of the time we all spent together in that house. Like all of the other photos i’ve saved, and the walls of books that watch me sleep, and the crates of records, and my portable turntable that i pull up close–they are evidence. Tangible proof of another place and of a different way of doing this.