“Night, suicide of the eye”

Every evening, I hesitantly unlock the door to my fifth-floor-apartment and listen. I put my ear to the gap and try not to make a noise. 

Every night, I hear something. Something suspicious. 

I close the door to my apartment again, go down four floors and ring my neighbor's doorbell. 

I say: I think there's a burglar in my apartment. 

Rolling his eyes, he walks up five floors with me, walks ahead of me through the apartment, quietly at first, then louder and louder.

First in the dark, then turning the lights on, one by one. 

There's no one there hiding. 

Of course.

The scene is repeated every evening when I come home. 

I open, 

I listen, 

I hear voices, 

but there is nobody hiding. 

After a while, the neighbor says that he no longer wants to look for absent burglars with me. The five floors are too much for him. He has to set a boundary. I have to master the imaginary perpetrators, my self-conjured ghosts, myself.

From now on, I wake up every night. 

Again I listen for suspicious noises.

Instead, I hear a beeping: Is it the fridge? The radio? My Casio watch? The fire alarm? 

I think about what the heaviest objects are that I could use to knock down a burglar or a ghost, just in case: The fire extinguisher? A heavy exhibition catalogue?

Since I never found a burglar or a ghost in person, they remain in my apartment forever. The spell wasn’t broken. I live with my imaginary perpetrators in a co-dependent relationship. 

Eventually I fall asleep. 

You always miss the moment when you fall asleep. 

You literally sleep through it. I

t's a logical problem—because even if you consciously work toward that moment, falling asleep itself is something you can't consciously perceive. That is in its nature—because it is precisely the other side of consciousness that you are looking for—and which is sometimes difficult to reach. 

I dream that I push my boyfriend out of my fifth-floor-window in a burst of strong,

aggressive anger. As his 90 kilo heavy body sails into the backyard, I immediately deeply regret my short-sighted decision to kill him. 

I imagine his skull shattering on the floor. 

His body spins once in the air; he seems to fall as if in slow motion.

I have a long time to regret what I did.

(…)

Then he lands on both feet, like a cat on velvety paws, looks up at me, waves

and, out of sheer pleasure, does a somersault. 

He walks away. 

A short time later, he enters the door and continues the process I had interrupted

in my blind rage. He chops vegetables.

It takes seven lives to be with me, like a cat.

I wake up, confused. 

My boyfriend, that I just tried to kill, is lying next to me, sleeping peacefully.

I wake him up to apologize to him for what I did to him in my dream.

Unexpectedly, he starts to sing:
I dreamt about killing you again last night and it felt alright to me.

It becomes my lullaby.

Slowly I fall asleep again. At least I am trying to.

I count to three as I inhale—then to six.

We know this technique from Navy soldiers who use it to try to calm their nervous system in stressful situations.

My eyelids are closed, my eyes beneath them wide open, on alert.

I count.

One—two—three.
One—two—three—four—five—six.

I fall asleep again.

Of course, I miss the moment.

In the morning, my boyfriend wakes me again by singing a song again.

This time, he sings directly into my ear: 

Guten Morgen, liebe Sorgen, seid ihr auch schon wieder da? Habt ihr auch so gut geschlafen, na, dann ist ja alles klar.

All day long, I’m accompanied by a sense of guilt for having had such a terrible dream. He doesn’t seem to notice. 

All day long, I have a catchy tune of the song he sang in the middle of the night:

I dreamt about killing you again last night and it felt alright to me.

And I think of something I once learned: you can't die in a dream. Because before that happens, you always wake up—that's the nature of dreams. If you die in a dream, you have also died in reality. “Reality”—that means the other reality. 

“In my dreams, I'm always in a flight mode,” says a friend.

Sometimes even on a white horse. 

For me, it's always the action of falling that recurs. 

Falling out of a window, for example. 

Before I hit the ground, I wake up, of course.

It was the first time that I made someone else fall instead of falling myself.

“The dream is the guardian of sleep,” says my friend, the psychoanalyst. „It conveys our secret wishes and fears in a way that makes it possible for us to process them—to endure them.“

I still feel guilty for having tried to kill my boyfriend in my dream. 

I am deeply ashamed.

“How your night is, is a result of your day,” I learn. 

And: The dream is a doubling of the non-dream, the dark twin sister of the day.

And Deleuze writes: Hell means to be trapped in someone else’s dream.

I never understood what he means with that. 

(…)

When I come home the next evening, still deeply ashamed, I notice scratch marks around the lock of my front door, as if someone had tried to force their way into my apartment. 

I can’t remember whether they were always there. I see them as if for the first time.

I still haven’t encountered a real burglar. All the greater, then, remains my fear of them. A fear often disappears once they come true.

So, I keep living with my imaginary perpetrator in a co-dependent relationship. They might just be a version of myself.