Bedtime reading

This is the first section of a new short story I wrote late this summer. Still needs some work, particularly towards the end (which is why you only get a taste here). As always, feedback is never a bad thing.

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5:59 a.m.
Evan sat up, reaching to turn off the alarm before it sounded and then glanced over at the camera, still running. It’s bright red LED cut through the early morning dark and he briefly imagined it a laser, fixing him between the eyes.
He lumbered to his feet, lurched toward the camera, hit the stop button, ejected the videocassette and set it on his dresser, atop three other cassettes.
He had fallen behind. That happened when new shows opened. The hours at the opera company increased steadily the final few days leading up to a new show’s opening. Today was a matinee performance, though. This evening he would have plenty of time to get caught up. He furtively scratched at his nuts, then wrote the day’s date on the video with a pen from his dresser.
It had begun three months ago. This watching himself sleep. A bout of insomnia that he couldn’t shake. Endless hours shifting and turning in bed. Watching infomercials for spot removers and ab crunchers at three in the morning. Sulking through days in a stupor. And something else - an unease, some feeling that began as a tickle on the back of his neck and then settled in, too, like the insomnia - some sort of mystery and wonder that burrowed into his consciousness and leached a general anxiety throughout his body.
His doctor had handed him several dozen sleeping aids - the latest pharmaceuticals rattling loose in a plastic bag adorned with butterflies and lambs. That bag, unopened, remained on his dresser.
He couldn’t get himself to try them. Evan had some experience with pharmaceuticals and he had learned from that experience, had vowed to avoid them the rest of his days - health willing. This insomnia, he had decided, was not a medical emergency, yet. He would skip the pills.
Instead, he read medical tomes, self-help books and even some horrible sci-fi fantasy books, anything he could find at the library that dealt with sleep and insomnia and then dreams. Because he had plenty of time. He wasn’t sleeping. More curiously, Evan realized, he wasn’t dreaming either.
When that thought had occurred to him, he quickly realized that the absence of dreams stretched back much further than the insomnia. When had he last dreamt?
Dreams had meaning. Dreams had purpose. Even the craziest, most incomprehensible dreams, were about something - anxieties, fears, passions, urges, something. They were eruptions from the subconscious that surged and snaked upward through the soul before briefly fissuring open in the consciousness and then evaporating into the air that surrounded your body.
Evan had stopped dreaming long before he had stopped sleeping.
And, the more Evan had read about dreams, the more this worried him.
Was his soul an empty vessel? Where were the dreams? Dreams may be the body’s indirect way of processing existence, of reliving events and feelings and determining how to classify them. They may be manifestations of one’s aspirations. They may simply be the release of stored energy at the cellular level. There were numerous interpretations, a variety of theories, but they all agreed that dreams had some significance.
And he wasn’t dreaming.

Comments

[Lisa]

I enjoy it, I like that he avoids the pharmaceuticals- I would too. The dreaming part is interesting, it is crazy when one realizes that they haven't had a dream in a long time. I look forward to reading more, I want to know why he doesn't dream!