This is not a gift.
We used the lone voice to depict a public summoning. Men split in half at the very word. Others chewed loudly with their mouths open, their shirts and ties stained. The color of cruelty. The automatic go-between was so drunk he looked amoebic. No body, only a slather of excretions he was more than willing to share. The warm green place kicking and coughing noncommittal. Inveterate falsetto surrounding us, a shared zero. A mirrored crescent.
The storm came home from work. Heads like balloons tossed about, the darlings. Some broke free of spinal threads, went spinning off into the charade. The dread show. Everything recorded in permission with saturnalia. Blood state profile state your purpose and intention. We bite the lure sap of the moon. We rest and rest. When the sorrow moves the amplifiers sweeten. Rub up against quality, friend. Catatonic granules of her breath. Enough to put you under.
This is not an exit.
Sleepytime is blowing out the candle you carry; that which you have been told to carry always. Sleepytime is letting go. Rhythm at rest. Learn the contours of the eddying antimatter and reject the map habit. See the dark for what it is. Learn to leave, but know you cannot. Sleepytime is not dreaming. There is no possibility. You cannot enter. You have never left. Your only choice is to allow the dark to blossom around you or remain.
Standing in the amphitheatrical void, where yourself used to be, empty of all preconceptions--that is the way. The humble journey. The insignificant destination. Your minutiae is irrelevant on this road. If you do not understand, you are not traveling. Do not hesitate. Grandfather Death will snuff out your candle eventually. Hesitation is fear. Fear is reflection. There are no reflections in the dark.
If you choose to journey into the miasma, Sleepytime as it is henceforth known, do so with open mirrors. Leave behind light, and you will find that which you have been told does not exist. You may even see past the reflections of yourself that have always surrounded you. The hibernation is over. Please welcome the tiny, beautiful machines.
This is not a cure.
Sickness is desire. Blood mist, the skin of a tourist. Something to push against, pushing against you. Hindering beginnings, poisoning endings. To be sick: a basic condition. Born of unbalance, a condition we worship: a god who smells like a hospital. Colored in milligram capsules. Throughout your short life, this terminally mad god, swinging one side to another on a curtain shaped like a coma. There is no known cure, there is only the treatment: Sleepytime therapy, long term and at a high dosage. Enroll a dirty ashtray: face the dust. Tie up your flesh, open your mirrors. Sorrow drunk on its own wings, gutted and preserved above the fireplace.
Sickness is resistance. Thunder clouds scuttling under the bed. A wave breaking in delirious joy. Expressive fragments of memory as guilty cinema, aggressive horrorshow. Frustration to fear and fear to anger. Catatonic pride feasting on high gratitude. The sharp edge of satisfaction. We are not patient. We are patients. There is no place for our condition. We are sick and we have to keep moving, but we cannot take another step.
There is no therapy. You are not diagnosed. The short-term is beneficial. However, there is no lasting benefit. Upon entering program you will be unable to resist the doses. Your mind is greedy. All waking day your head starves, teased by fleeting moments, kept on a tight leash bound to cerebellum. You cannot help it, you would have us believe, and to continue on this way is impossible. Carried around all this time, it has become Gargantua upon your shoulders. An old saying around the Factory: Awake you bite your tongue, but when you sleep your tongue bites back. This beckoning gargoyle welcomes the newest dose from the Factory even if you do not. This is not a deaf warning, this is a statistic. Quick tip: Mass paresthesia with severe side effects is most common.
This is not a pipe dream.
The Factory is not a structure. It cannot be defined. Its essence is unknown, but, for reasons of corporate transparency, the following statement has been released in good faith by the highest levels of power. May it help to elucidate, obfuscate and otherwise nurture your curiosity:
What is known as “the Factory” is a nameless series of infinitely curved and infinitely compressed loops, or “fates” tightly packed into a series of molecular knots and cascading pseudoholomorphic curvesthat continuously fail to create empty. This conflict fuels the comorbidity of the double helix; one Sleepytime antimatter, the second dark matter of Sickness. An unstable mixture pumped through a myriad of pipes eventually bound to, for lack of a better term, “the dreaming” in a complex chemical bonding process. There is no danger. Our engineers have experience over millennia in fragmenting and rebonding memory to slivers of spirit in a remarkably painless process. The resulting murky skein is then reprocessed back into vessels such as yourself through an ancient arachnid-like pipe system which fills your mind with a thick diesel-like smoke nightly.
Each flickering column of “smoke” churning in your neocortex resembles a totem pole made up of shambling, opaque beings and flickers of other dimensions all bound by webbed helixes of trembling tracheae spiraling out like a spokes on a wheel. Your mind overflows with this dense muck, although it takes up precious little space. As thousands of plains beckon in different directions, the only solution for the mind is to deactivate all processes and give into the flood or risk sensory overload. Like relaxing and falling backward, you throw all your energy toward the swirling fragments by letting go. In this way, every night, you enter our pipeline.
Slaloming between hulking tombs of forgotten machinery and darkened gateways detached from any visible passage, your glutinous mind--drunk on obscene amounts of energy--reels through the pipes in a frenzy. And, unaware of the hidden machinations guiding the flow, ends up deep in the heart of the Factory. Brief flashes of immortality loops. Second-guessing catastrophes long scabbed over. A boar laughing underwater in slow motion. This is not the death shroud, this is the fit of the world as glimpsed from its multi-limbed center. The eye of the storm. Your mind, never satiated, continuously on the verge of overdose, gorges itself on us. Empties itself and is refilled a thousand times in one night. And because night is infinite, sometimes you will feel quite mad just as the pipes disconnect and the mind, fatigued and shaken, has no choice but to Wake. We are grateful for your contribution. Without getting under your skin, without releasing your energy we would not be able to operate at this level. We are drunk on you. We extend the eternal invitation: A hand grasping with primate thumbs.
This is not an answer.
Every night you pray to us. On your bedded shrine, you beg. For rest. For dreams. For a moment without pain. You beg to see, to find again what has been lost. You beg not to be reminded, to stay lost. You call out to us in your unravelling language. And you lay down into a myriad of arms, vast pipes running in and out of us. Every morning we take back what is ours and give you back your self. We empty the somnambular ships. We polish the inside of your eyes. We light the sky for you. This is not a dream. This is our pledge. We are the Sleepytime Sickness Factory. You are keeping us alive.
Quick tip: There is no factory.