Whereas an epiphany culminates in all available information creating a sudden moment of realization, an apophany’s sudden realization is made up of things that cannot connect logically but instead connect intuitively. It is also a column by Christopher Sloce. If you would like to read more of his work, he currently has a piece in Typebar about Kid Rock.

Two incidents involving my sleep, both from when I worked at the cold weather homeless shelter, a 12 hour gig from 6 to 6 where I barely made rent.

Incident one: I sleepwalked for the first and only time I’m aware of, and awoke to a bowl with a single tortilla on the floor of my bedroom, a large chunk turning the tortilla into a flour crescent.

Incident two. The shelter was in Richmond’s public safety building, which had two court rooms, one of which we couldn’t keep people in because tiles kept falling out of the ceiling. Could the city have picked a different location, one that actually was livable? Of course it could. But everyone knew that Virginia Commonwealth University had bought the building and there was no point in renovation.

This building had nothing inside but rooms with nothing inside, hallways leading to offices, long abandoned by social services. In the lobby past where we let everyone in, there were elevators, all which went to a basement where goods would have been stored. We didn’t serve snacks or have water bottles or hygienic supplies or anything. There was only the expanse, screaming nothing through the halls and a basement where hollow nothings were stored.

I took the elevator down one night knowing nobody would notice it unless I disappeared. There was a long hallway with a concrete floor. To draw a very specific parallel, if this was one of the creepypastas that was read on that podcast I listened to (boredom will find you odd bedfellows), it would be called something like The Facility.

Not long later, probably in the middle of the week in the middle of the evening, I fell asleep in my room. The room was black: I shoved sheets and one of those metallic thermal blankets under my curtains to keep the light out.

I dreamed I was in the elevator on a trip to the basement that took forever. When the door opened in my dream, I didn’t see anything coming down the hall but I knew I knew something would. And then it did: a black will-o-wisp.

When I awoke, I found the dream had not ended. But it also had. In this confusion, I couldn’t move. Whatever will I had was nothing compared to the fact I was in some interregnum between sleep and wakefulness. I could only see.

The will-o-wisp in my room was now in the form of a crouching woman. Her features were non-descript. There was enough body to crouch. Her head was down, nestled into her being, like she had made herself a cannonball. Then she lept, landing on my chest. That’s when the dream ended.

***

Sleep has always been a refuge for me. I picked up the habit in college, when I had large gaps between where I needed to be. I developed the ability to sleep in strange places. Under desks in the library, on the couches in the library basement, various lounges and armchairs. I would awake, sometimes, to flashing cameras of people probably ready to put me on r/VCU or “seen at VCU” facebook pages or whatever shit was popular then.

My demon had found a way to penetrate the place of refuge I had created and returned to. I haven’t had another experience with sleep paralysis. I also don’t work nights anymore or in human services.

***

I wrote this a few weeks before I was fired last year. I worked in a building that was turned into another Facility, a holding pen for human misery. In light of this, my labor organizing was towards the goal to defacilitize our building, a library, which would have ultimately pointed towards our need for more assistance from Richmond social services, rather than requiring librarians to work as untrained social workers. When we brought up issues of safety, all the administrators could say is it was just the way it is. Whatever mistakes I made do not strike me as shameful as an admin that sits on its hands when its employees get harassed by patrons, all while they have money for classic cars and sailboats.

After my expulsion from that Facility, I worried I might find myself the victim of another. I laid on the couch, rehearsing dying in my head. I listened to the same podcast episode for about a month straight, because at some point in the flow of listening I could disengage and go to sleep, where for a few minutes I wasn’t wracked with regret and rage. My partner heard me lament this as the worst thing that ever happened to me. There was only one other thing I could put above it, which was surviving the Unite the Right protests. I was not in the Dodge Charger. It was just driven in my direction. That was easier than what I saw it as a failure. There were structural failures, but also my own. I wished I was a samurai so it would be as easy as me walking into a field and slicing open my stomach. I began taking large doses of hydroxyzine, so much so 100 mgs didn’t immediately put me into a coma. It only calmed me down long enough to play Balatro on my phone until I could sleep, that refuge I sought many times over those months. I went there, many times: on a busted couch that sank into the floor, in our bed, in the driver’s seat of my girlfriend’s car as I slept off a round of difficult canvassing. I felt like I was always short of breath.

One of these days or nights, I had a dream. It was the opposite of my old dream, where I went somewhere and that crouched woman tried to take my air from me. Even then, the dream was just a snatch of images, passing in front of my eyes. This time, I kept asking a woman to leave a building. I don’t remember much about how she was dressed other than some kind of white gown: the rest of her was a smeared blank. I would make sure she left and then she would come back, inside some hallway or other bedroom of the thousand rooms inside I was responsible for. I searched and searched to find her.

Now I know the meaning of the dream: there is a Facility inside me, and some spirit wants to call it home.

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