The Somnambulists Cute Meet.

This story contains mention of sexual violence.

It all started when I was about thirteen, rising to some kind of peak on that silent, moony night when she and I finally bumped into each other, after years of living in the same neighbourhood, and sharing a penchant for wandering the empty streets during the bewitching hours. We both suffered from somnambulism, commonly known as sleepwalking. Despite undertaking a gaggle of therapies, my night terrors and nocturnal walkies continued for most of my childhood, dragging into my teens and beyond. Now, as we sit snuggling on our porch, cups of tea in hand and merged into the starry depths, it all seems like a bizarre, mostly wonderful dream.

But first, a juicy slice of backstory to flesh things out a tad.

This tale should really begin with my mother. My poor old mum was stalked throughout her life by the 'women's curse'...no, not that! It was a blight that females on both sides of our family were prone to - and so much so, one of my more memorable nightmares involved my mother and six aunties, crawling and slithering about a molten landscape, wailing and chewing the bark from this isolated, twisty, haunt of a family tree.

Mental illness.

I see it now in a wider, historical context, like for how long woman have suffered an unspoken enslavement to the rule of the patriarchies fickle, quasi benevolence...summed up in the delightful, nineteen fifties dictum as "FATHER KNOWS BEST."

And here, I want to make a distinction between men and the patriarchy! My father was a gentle, wonderful man, and did his utmost to assist my mother in any way he could. The patriarchy, however, in its existence as a systemic assumption of power over the social, economic, political and religious spheres of a women's life, is f.u.b.a.r at the very least.

In short my dear, sensitive mother was as a young girl - abused, raped and, for most of her childhood, forced to hunker down terrified within a damp, dark silence. This grim experience later gave birth to little shadow babies that gleefully hosted wild hootananies of thought, where she imagined all sorts of creative, sometimes accusatory fictions. Several times my siblings and I ran screaming outside, as she brandished a carving knife and sobbed uncontrollably - her tears flavouring the roast like the most ripe, succulent mint. Dad would rush in and hold her, collapsed onto her knees, the carving knife held aloft and buzzing quietly amidst her misery and confusion.

The trip to the Asylum was the worst. Mum kept up with her weeping as dad tried to console her while he drove - us three kids huddled, bewildered and frightened in the back seat. The "Mental Hospital" or "Asylum" as it was then known, was oddly poised by a wide river mouth that hosted a swath of sail boats of all shapes and sizes. It was built on a large hilltop amidst huge morten bay figs and pine trees, and with beds of bright flowers displayed here and there. In the seventies, they locked people like my mother up in secure, metallic wards where the cries of tormented, babbling souls rang out twenty-four-seven. These, mad house penitentiaries hadn't progressed much from the leaches and straight jacket mentality of the early, twentieth century. Shock treatment was the darling of the psychiatric intelligentsia, and it made mum ever more docile and deleted of soul as the years crept slowly by. The point of all this is to illustrate how mum's illness was passed down, along with her passivity and kindness, to her children. From the womb onwards our environment was sculpted from the clay of her trauma, eventually finding a home within me - sixteen years old and suffering from a delayed puberty, and the wrath of bullies who found solace in running me down and joyfully slapping my tiny, downcast head.

Fuckers!!

My night terrors really kicked in somewhere around then. I'd wake up staring out my bedroom widow and screaming for all I was worth. Or I dreamed in that hazy, liminal zone between wakefulness and sleep, of boots crunching on twigs outside my room. Or that one where you are climbing up a twisty staircase in a deserted mansion, and the feeling is one of impending dread and terror. The higher I climbed, the more dark and menacing became the atmosphere. Something, some dank and rotten evil awaited me at the staircases landing - yet, I inexplicably trod ever higher, watching myself ascend from a detached, elevated vantage point a metre or so above.

Classic dissociation...with a little twist of demonic lemon!

So that was that. Scroll forward to my mid twenties, and the unnerving fact that I lived alone in an apartment close to this abode of childhood horrors. The fruit never drops far from the tree, so they say! And in this case a big, dry, spindly, mo fo-ing, haunted house, kinda tree. I mindfully avoided 83 Floppyjoe street, like it were the veritable plague. I worked, drank, ate, fucked...well, you know the story! Yet the night terrors and street walking continued, as if the past waited for sleep to overcome me so, within the ensuing darkness, it could parte' like it was 1699.

But now for the good bit!

It wasn't unusual for me to wake up staring out the window, perhaps with a full moon shining its quiet, pearlescent light through the pane and into my eyes. Sometimes, as I awoke out of the soporific mist, and gazing out into the dense solitude of night...it felt like I'd been summoned by some mysterious force, like a curious alien entity, or the night itself, so more radiant and self aware than we give it credit for. But this night I went to the door, nude as a baby, and strolled mumbling out into the warm, spring air. Mostly - but not always - I didn't get that far, to the door I mean; having come to with a stubbed toe, or with my forehead pressed against the moist, cold glass, or my wrists elastic tether snapping me to an abrupt halt.

I walked for a time down the long, downhill roll of Floppyjoe street, lined with rows of beautiful, lavander and japanese elm trees. I giggled and shook my head as I walked, peering up into the luminous dark, as if it were a magical, phosphorescent projection on my bedroom ceiling. All of this was recorded as I floated along, a disembodied consciousness calmly watching events unfold. As my ass rounded Sunnyjane Pde, my willy jiggling about its bearded enclave, I spied a door opening in a house nearby. I stopped outside the house, or my body did, or we both did, or whatever the fuck was going on - and a young woman walked serenely out, nude as a baby.

She had short, auburn hair and was about my height with a fluid, shapely body. My starkers form giggled and made lilting, whistling sounds like wind flowing through an old growth forest. This sweet, Fairy Garden melody lured the woman towards where I stood - the wild, vibrating moon looming above us like a cosmic letch.

"The moon has dropped its clothes in the streets," observed the woman; "its spells are like fishies with tides for eyes." She was so obviously sleep walking and, well, babbling from out of the deep recesses of her feminine psyche.

Yet to me, it translated as the most beautiful poetry ever spoken! Its syncopated, non sequiturs rolled out musical and brimming with meaning. I looked to where my body was swaying and regarding the moon with a look of transported reverence.

"I'm happy now," it mumbled in reply to the girl's, fantastic soliloquy. "I am called to go with you and organise some te-te. It will have lemons and some frolic of daisy flowers - all good juices now that you are here." My flesh, deeply immersed in its nocturnal rapture, walked gently towards the woman, who was absorbed with the wriggles of moon-bugs expiring within the lush, sprawl of lawn. It then took the woman's hand in his, as I watched with a detached, yet sublime peacefulness of mind and soul.

Then she appeared, right in front of me, like a ghost in the throes of some wild, terrifying haunt. I made an instinctive lurch away, but was quickly drawn back into her glittering hologram of ethereal light.

"You do this too!" she announced, her smiling, emerald eyes sparkling with a vast and impregnable joy.

"Yes, It seems so - whatever the hell this is!"

"Oh, you'll get used to it."

I pointed to our bodies strolling hand in hand away from us, the moonlight cloaking their nakedness with a modest, surreal glow.

"What about them?" I asked, feeling neutral but still a little curious about the outcome.

She smiled and cupped my hand in hers. Then she leaned in and gave me the most delicate, delectable kiss, like her lips were made of glowing, strawberry flesh.

Oh my!

And then it all came flooding back. She and I had known one another for ever, chasing each other through the multiverse as we sought to be born together once more...same place, same time, same indescribable passion and joy.

"Don't worry about them," she laughed, snuggling her soft, moony light into mine, "they always come back."