I woke up screaming. I do not know whether my voice had actually come out, but my body was still restrained inside sleep, while my consciousness alone had been dragged back to the surface, and I thought: this is sleep paralysis. My body would not move, and something was attacking me. It was not a vague fear. In the nightmare, I was thinking, and at the same time feeling, the ghosts of an era in which the Emperor had been worshipped as a god: the vengeful spirit of a system and a faith that refused to see a human being as human, made him into a vessel for the nation, and concentrated prayer, obedience, and offerings upon him; to make someone into a god is, before it is worship, a form of violence, and it arrives together with blasphemy against the divine. The thought would not stop, and I was attacked by it. More precisely, I kept feeling as if something were attacking me from the right, a strange discomfort and pain in my right side, and not knowing how to escape from it, I turned to the left.
When I turned left, something else attacked me. It hurt. Again, a sensation ran through my side, as if something had bitten into me. I had begun thinking again. I could not stop thinking. It was like the way a difficult horror film becomes more and more frightening the longer you continue to think about it after watching it. The pain on my left side was about words sealed inside the images of old films: silenced thought, like that of the era of the Red Scare; things that never appeared in dialogue, that could never rise to the surface of the story, but were buried in glances, pauses, compositions, and unnatural silences. Things that were not left unsaid, but could not be said. I had not noticed them. Watching those films, I had simply thought that I did not understand them, and that they were boring; but when, one day, their meaning suddenly opens, the past self who failed to see it is judged at the same time. Why did I not see it then? Why did I pass it by? Why did I mistake silence for nothing more than a boring interval? Along with these thoughts, the pain in my body would not stop.
From the right, I was attacked by the vengeful spirit of a history that had made a human being into a god; from the left, I was attacked by the sin of not having understood what could not be said. Between the two, I was being made to endure a bodily pain. At first I thought that, through thought, I could somehow avoid whatever was attacking me, but at some point I realized that this was a dream, and tried to wake myself by making a sound. I tried desperately to move my tongue. I felt it stuck to the roof of my mouth, and with it still there I strained to move the back of my throat. Then I groaned. I do not know whether I actually groaned. I thought I had bitten my own thumb in order to wake up through real pain, but apparently that, too, had been part of the dream. I do not know whether I made a sound in reality, but somehow I was released from the paralysis. In other words, still sleepy and heavy, I woke from the nightmare.
After waking, I tried to write the dream down. It was frightening, but objectively, it was also rather interesting, and I thought it might become a way of understanding myself. As I wrote, it gradually began to connect with memories from my actual life.
About two weeks ago, when I saw Tarkovsky’s “Mirror”at a cinema, I honestly did not understand it very well. I did think it was beautiful: the light, the water, the wind, the burning barn, the mother’s face. But I could not grasp its content, and there were moments when I became sleepy.
A Russian friend who watched it with me said, “The protagonist keeps accumulating sins.”
Keeps accumulating sins. At the time, I did not understand what the sin was. But sometimes, the very fact that one did not understand something later becomes a kind of guilt. It is not the work one failed to understand that returns after a delay, but the sin one failed to see. Meaning that arrives late is closer to an accusation than to a discovery.
Perhaps a curse is not something cast from the outside by someone else, but the feeling of judgment that arises within oneself when meaning arrives too late. There is a saying that curses and blessings are fundamentally the same. To put it rather unemotionally, perhaps this is also close to a kind of allergic reaction to spoilers. The moment one feels that one has understood, the spectator is no longer allowed to remain merely a spectator, but is forcibly turned into a witness.
While I was being attacked by history and cinema inside sleep paralysis, my lover, of all people, had been updating his writing. I learned this after waking. His writing had not appeared in my dream. I had not yet read it. Even so, when I noticed that the timing overlapped, I felt a strange cruelty in it.
He had written that he had decided to regard what other people say as the noise of a refrigerator. That in order to remove unnecessary noise, he would probably become even less involved with other people from now on. That what mattered was to create and expand his own world, and that any noise entering it should be excluded. That this, too, was the proper way for an artist to be.
Reading it, I felt tired before I felt angry. Ah, here again, I thought. Self and society. Self and others. One’s own world. Noise. Exclusion. For him, these words may be sincere and urgent. But to me, they also looked like words used to distance, once again in a vaguely ideological form, the pain and responsibility that arise from relationships with others.
I do not think I expect too much from him. And yet, it is true that I have entrusted something to him. The possibility of change. Of going outside. Of putting his life in order. Of touching a wider general society. Of moving with me toward the next place. Expectation resembles prayer. Prayer quickly becomes faith. And faith gradually removes the other person from the position of being human.
The dream of the Emperor was about the nation, but at the same time, it was also about something far more private. Turning someone into a symbol. Making someone bear salvation or the future. Realizing later that the person was, after all, only human. And then feeling, for some reason, that this completely obvious fact has arrived as a punishment.
What attacked me in the dream was not anyone’s specific sin. It was not the Emperor’s sin, nor the people’s sin, nor the sin of the Red Scare, nor the sin of cinema, nor my lover’s sin, nor my own sin. It was probably the general sensation of sin that arises when human beings can no longer see other human beings as human. The sin of making someone into a god. The sin of making someone into noise. The sin of making someone into a work of art. The sin of making someone into salvation. The sin of making someone into a vessel. And the most terrifying thing is to realize, too late, that one is not unrelated to that sin.
The sensation of sleep paralysis remained in my side even after waking. I do not know whether I had actually screamed in reality, but I did try to scream. I heard my own voice and woke, but I have no proof that it had really sounded in the room. Still, at the very least, it was not a voice meant to exorcise a spirit. It was the voice of a body about to be swallowed by meaning, trying, at the very end, to pull itself back toward the sensation of reality. Perhaps that is what a scream originally is. Perhaps that is why, when one is frightened, simply screaming is the oldest and most effective method.