The Pillow That Stole My Dreams
The memory foam in the pillow was cool, enveloped in soft synthetic material to provide comfortable airy surface. It was surprisingly perfect contouring to my neck, a promise of the deep, restorative sleep I had been chasing for days. Here on the edge of the noisy city the nights were quiet, a sharp contrast to the cacophony of the urban traffic that last almost whole night. I drifted off, feeling the familiar, heavy anchor of exhaustion pull me down into sleep.
But as I slipped into the threshold of sleep, something felt amiss. Usually, my dreams were a relentless, the turmoil of sounds, surroundings, weird stories with some traces of real happenings and faces of people that I forget almost instantly after waking up... Tonight, however, there was only a vast, unfiled silence.
I woke up a few hours later, with dry throat, feeling a strange, hollow sensation in the back of my mind. It wasn't the relief of peaceful rest; it was the unsettling feeling of having been erased, of forgetting something that I should not forget. I had not dreamt of the refuge over border crossing in the mountains and over the repaired railway bridge, the cold rainy night in the heaviness of silence in the unrealistic quiet bus, mother keeping purse in her lap, or the burning sky and war rumbling not far from a road that we passed with lights turned off...
The pillow beneath my head felt heavier, somehow denser, as if it were gorging itself on the intangible filaments of my past.
I tossed it to the floor and pulled the blanket up to my ears, shivering.
The next morning, I found the pillow exactly where I left it. It looked ordinary, innocuous, almost innocent, a stark light contrast against the dark carper. Yet, as I picked it, a sudden flash of memory struck me: A daydream of my parents laughing in a kitchen filled with the smell of roasting red peppers prepared southern way when I was kid, my brother gifting me first teenage photo equipment, the sunlight streaming in through a curtain, and a nice view from the terrace of my first, long lost home that I will never see again.
The pillow had not just stolen my heavy dreams, but it was releasing my old happy old memories back, but in a sudden and unsettling way. I sat on the edge of the bed with tears in my eyes frighten to close my eyes again. I thought, I didn't ask for it. I wondered if by stealing the hard edges of my life journey, the pillow was trying to help me? Or if it was slowly emptying me out, replacing the person who I used to be, with some older and softer, memory foam filled version of me? Was it a pillow's guilth at all, or it was just a dream within a dream?