Recently I’ve become obsessed with the eerie, sideways space between dreaming and waking. Those moments that make me feel less like a linearly assembled person. Probably there’s a technical term for this. Perhaps you’ve experienced it, too.

Here’s an example. I had a dream that I rubbed my eye so hard, it fell out and lay on the bathroom floor, a little jelly marble. In the bathroom mirror, all I could see was the blank eyehole, filled with blood and water.

It had the mundane, ticking vividness of real life, that quality that’s not supposed to exist in dreams. The sense that you know you’re awake, because time moves at its ordinary pace, because the small details of the world are rendered so clearly to you. The thin fur of dust under the cupboard. The cool solidity of the porcelain sink. The ways you might remind yourself that the space you’re inhabiting is three-dimensional, tactile, plausible, that you haven’t wandered by accident into a dream.

And there was my eye, lying on the tile.

It was all so unpleasant that I woke up. I didn’t want to return to sleep, where I might slip into the same dream again. It was the middle of the night, so I got up and fumbled my way to the bathroom. I looked at my face in the mirror, at my eyes.

There it was. The cool solidity of the sink beneath my hands. The ordinary ticking of time. Those plausible reminders of the waking world.

And I had the tilting, uncertain feeling that I didn’t know if I was still dreaming or not.

This is what I might whimsically describe as a sideways space: that half-step between consciousness and everything else. At times it’s drifting and horrible, like the frayed edge of a sleep paralysis dream, when you’re trying to wake or move and you can’t, and so unwillingly, you’re swallowed back down the long throat of the dream, and it might feel a bit like drowning.

What I’m most interested in isn’t the science or psychology of this sideways place, but the experience of murkiness itself. Because it has pleasanter variations. As a child, I used to lie in bed in the drowsy minutes after waking, and—I imagine this happens to many of us—think of stories I wanted to write and probably never would. Maybe they weren’t exactly stories but situations. Snippets.

It always felt like I had to look at the snippet indirectly. The person, the scene, whatever it was. If I exerted any pressure—if I imposed a sense of cause-and-effect, for example, with the intention of writing down what happened, if I turned and looked at it directly—the snippet would vanish. Often the stories had the sideways logic of dreams. That’s probably what made them appealing.

In those moments, the edge of the subconscious was a daydreamy, lateral space to dwell in, where nothing was final or resolved, and it was easy to float off on a tangent. Occasionally I’d coast all the way back to sleep.

I think of it as a cousin to reading an intoxicating book. There’s an abandoned house in Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez, a book I’ve made many agitated gestures of enthusiasm about to anyone who’ll listen. In the book, the house pulls some of the characters towards it. Then things happen.

Enriquez describes the abandoned house: the colour of the door, the neglected front yard, etc. I picture it as I’m reading. But if I take a step back and think about it—the house itself—the details shift, sort of like a mirage, so I can see that the house I’m picturing is actually a place from my hometown, repurposed and scrambled by my subconscious.

It’s a narrow bungalow with a small, untidy yard and a stone front path. There’s a storm door with an unnecessarily curlicued grill. I’m not sure if the house really exists, which feels unsettling, because it’s so specific in my mind. The curlicued storm door might be a remnant from my childhood home. I have a memory of running my fingers through the curls of metal, marvelling at how the metal thinned as it turned.

But if I take a step forward again, if I pick up Our Share of Night, the bungalow will melt back into the house that Enriquez describes.

I think it’s because there’s an imperfect telepathy to reading—and writing—where the gaps are filled by the soup of our brains. No matter how precisely a room is described, a person, a feeling, the contours of the thing will shift for every reader. It brings me some measure of relief as a writer, because it reminds me that meaning isn’t a static space but a mutual and perhaps murky experience created by both reader and author. Because when you read Our Share of Night, the house you picture will likely have its own small variances. Maybe it will be a house you recognize.

And this feels like a kind of sideways space as well.

The imperfect telepathy between reader and writer appeals to me because there’s a branching variation of it. Which is, whatever staticky communication happens between my alert mind and my subconscious when I write.

I don’t want to dress it up too much. Those happy, confounding accidents happen. You write a story; you find that some texture from your past has seeped in. A recent preoccupation. Lately I’ve been working on some scene from a novel, set in a town with the vaguest resemblance to where I grew up, and I’ll realize that the bungalow from my memory—real or imagined, with the curlicued storm door, the stone front path—has crept into the background, unremarked upon.

A psychologist could probably make something useful from it. What I take is this. The detritus of my mind is sandy and it slips through my fingers, but on occasion I can hold onto a few granules, the way you might catch the fast-disappearing tail of a dream and clutch it, and in doing so, recreate the details of the whole dream.

That sounds terribly vague. When I catch these pieces, they can re-open a story I’m writing at a moment that the story feels closed-off. When I’m revising, for example. The story has started to congeal into shape, not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s precariously easy to get stuck. To grow nervous of altering the composition of whatever’s there and working sufficiently, because doing so might send the entirety of the work sliding out of place.

You can spend days or months rearranging what’s on the table, without realizing the table itself should’ve been a rocking horse.

Here is where it’s useful to stray. To activate that humming, underwater operation of the subconscious. It works best when I can think about a story in the corner of my mind, not with the active concentration of solving a puzzle, but a peripheral movement towards it that feels dreamlike and not fully coherent. I’ll be reading. Doing the dishes. Trying to fall asleep, maybe. One hand stirring absently in the soup of my brain.

It’s a tricky thing, to let your mind drift sideways, to hope you can fish out the interesting pieces and plaster them down somewhere. Occasionally you might drift too far away.

I had a dream that I was searching for a pair of earrings, but I could only find one. It was a vintage earring, with one of those dangly fishhooks to hold it in place. I tried to slide the hook into my ear, almost like a long needle, and I could feel it. The sensation of metal going in.

It was like I was re-piercing the ear, except the hook, the needle, was lengthening as I slid it forward. The dream was silent except for the sound of the needle pushing and pushing through my ear, opening a hole inside of me.

When I wake up from these dreams, there should be relief, but mainly there is horror. The murkiness of it is this: I know it was a dream, but that doesn’t make it any less of an experience that I can recall, that my body can echo the memory of, and it doesn’t dim the clarity of the experience, even though the fact of it is no longer the same. To me, there’s some similarity in trying to recall the experience of pain, where the specificity of the physical ordeal recedes but the fear of recreating those circumstances lingers long afterwards.

Pain is one of those things I find difficult to replicate truthfully on the page: the acute perception of body, the blurring of the self, the monotony of that ringing discomfort which lasts for minutes or days. But curiously, in dreams it solidifies into a legible experience, reduced to its most distinct sensory components, its eeriest particularities, which can perhaps be written down.

And often these dreams are crisper in recollection than certain translucent moments of the waking world. Sometimes I’ll find myself there early in the morning, in one of those translucent moments. I’ll take the dog out for a walk, still swimming in the haze of sleep. We’ll transcribe the path we take every morning. She’ll pause and sniff all her favourite tufts of grass.

I’m there, technically. I must be. But our walk will seem like the partial excerpt of a dream. It’s the half-remembered vagueness, the skips in time—one moment, I’m stooping over the dog to clip her leash in the unlit quiet of the apartment; in the next, we’ve skipped ahead. We’re walking down the alley, gravel scratching beneath us.

It’s the familiarity of our actions, which we’ve performed so many times before this. Which amplifies the feeling that I’m moving through a memory, not standing in the real thing itself.

Wake up, I’ll tell myself, but I can’t. I never do. Wake up, wake up, wake up.

© 2025 Senaa Ahmad