Another telehealth appointment, six months after the ghastly diagnosis: Parkinson’s. Not fun at all. But on we go. I’m at the kitchen table, phone on speaker, notepad and pen to hand.

Do you have vivid dreams? The doctor has a quiet, rather sad voice.

No, I say. The thing is, I hardly sleep. I’m exhausted. Is there anything—

But you do! my husband Richard shouts from the new home office.

I’d assumed he was out, so I’m doubly startled when he appears atop the short flight of stairs leading to the kitchen where I sit.

You really do—every night. You talk, mutter, yell. Thrash around. He runs his fingers through his hair. Sorry, he mouths at me.

I turn back to the phone. So apparently I do.

The doctor sighs. Well, we’re normally paralyzed during REM sleep and that prevents us from acting out our dreams. But quite often, with this condition—

Condition? I think. It’s not a pregnancy! What century are we in? 

—your REM sleep is disordered, so paralysis doesn’t always occur. You act out your dreams. These dreams tend to be aggressive and can be dangerous. Are you injuring yourself or anyone else?

I glance back over my shoulder. Richard has vanished. Not so far as I know.

There are treatments, apparently, but they’re quite problematic. The doctor advises me to stay on the same dose of medication for now. Let’s add this to the watch list: Rapid Eye Movement Sleep Behaviour Disorder.

Richard is outside, stacking firewood.

But why didn’t you tell me?

I don’t know. I forget, and then I don’t want to bother you with it … And sometimes, yes, you’re sort of running or struggling, even yelling, but most of the time you’re just muttering away to yourself. Now and then you scream.

Scream?

Or laugh. Sometimes I can make out a sentence.

So even though I am oblivious to them, my dreams are waking him!

Not really, he says. Only briefly. Doesn’t bother him. The cat is far more of a problem. He smothers a yawn.

I offer to sleep in the spare room and I mean it but I’m relieved when he says, quite vehemently, no. I would miss him dreadfully. When I’m awake, I can tell if he is alert too. Sleeping, he lies on his left side, and if there’s any light, I am reassured by the shape he makes next to me, head to shoulder, waist to toe.

Some writers and artists claim to have been inspired by dreams, but my dream recall has always been sparse. Periodically I discover an extra room in my house (a different one each time); occasionally I recall more complex scenarios.

As a fiction writer, I had excellent daytime access to my subconscious. Symbols, questions, storylines, dialogue, interaction between invented characters—all of that popped up while I was fully conscious. Because I spent a lot of my waking hours imagining things, some of them very bizarre—waking dreams, effectively—perhaps I did not need access to the sleeping kind?

Since I became ill, I haven’t been able to work imaginatively. It’s enough of a challenge describing what’s right in front of me. But I miss the invented characters, locations, events—especially the surreal and extraordinary. The alleged drama of my current sleepscape, the sheer energy of it all, makes me very curious. It’s infuriating to be providing so much entertainment and yet be excluded from the party. 

I could record my nocturnal shouts with my phone. Instead I select a notebook with a wavy design on the cover and good hand-feel, one that opens easily; I add a new soft pencil and arrange this equipment on my nightstand as an invitation. I remind myself nightly to pay attention. Every morning, I wake exhausted and recall precisely nothing.

Later, I ask my husband for his report.

‘How dare you!’ I think that was it.

You were humming. You sounded happy. 

You said, ‘Would you like one of these?’

One of what? Miniature falafel? Olives? Heated facecloths held out with tongs?

You yelled, ‘You bastard! You’ve always been like this!’ I hope it wasn’t me.

I remember nothing. Nothing! Nothing. None of it.

Perhaps it would help to invent some dreams incorporating these fragments of dialogue? But they don’t inspire. What I really want is an actual dream, in colour, with strange characters, weird fruit, extra-terrestrial visitors, sex …

‘Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.’ Apparently I said this in a bored voice.

You said no thanks, it really wasn’t your thing.

Bondage? Country music? Fermented seal meat?

You were making some kind of complicated arrangements.

If it was taking a group of kids to the swimming pool, I almost remember that. Can’t be sure. 

You spoke very clearly and confidently in a foreign language. Finnish, maybe? 

Interesting! I once worked in Finland for a few months, but only learned about six words.

Shortly after three o’clock one night I scream loudly enough to wake everyone, including myself. Our adult son blunders into our bedroom. Mom! Are you okay?

Tsunami? Knife attack? Ghost?

Bloodcurdling, my son says.

Sorry … can’t help, Richard murmurs, turning onto his left side.

And then it happens. In my sleep I’m visited by a woman endowed with a single eye, large and exquisite, in the middle of her forehead. The iris is a complex composition of blue, brown and gold, the lid and socket sumptuously curved, the sole eyebrow long and arched. The rest of the face (which I assume to belong to a female, though that need not be the case) is harmoniously arranged around this central eye and subtly made up to accentuate its features: a wide, full mouth with lips the colour of plums, angled cheekbones, a strong jaw, gleaming golden-brown hair cut to echo her jawline.

Though located exactly mid-forehead, pupil dead centre, the eye’s little fleshy nodule containing the tear duct in the left corner renders the face asymmetrical. And yet the overall effect is one of balance. She’s strange and beautiful. Mysterious, powerful. Hers could be the face of a goddess, of an alien queen. An exquisite cyclops. Though can I call her that? Cyclopes are by reputation not only one-eyed but also gigantic, violent and slow-witted, none of which apply to this woman.

Who are you? I shriek, waking myself. I lie in thick darkness remembering her over and over and promising to record her in my book. While Richard breathes evenly beside me, I deliberately imagine that he and I are sitting on a green plaid blanket laid out on sun-dappled ground beneath ancient Garry oaks. We’re sharing a picnic of berries and fruit when the exquisite cyclops reappears wearing—like us—a white tunic and wide-legged pants. I invite her to join us. She nods, sits.

Who are you? I ask.

Who do you want me to be? Her voice vibrates like a cello.

Awake in the semi-dark of our bedroom, I try to answer. I know I don’t want her to be anyone I can identify. I don’t care that the internet interprets dreams of a one-eyed person as a sign that I’m not seeing the whole picture, or that I’m being seduced by a demon. I’ve had a dream! One with no yelling or violence at all! I almost rouse Richard to tell him.

A by-product of Rapid Eye Movement Sleep Behaviour Disorder is (even more) exhaustion, but when COVID-19 restrictions ease and we’re invited to a party, I’m keen to go. At least thirty people—an intoxicating experience after months of isolation—spill into the overgrown garden, eating, drinking, catching up. After an hour or so I’m drawn to someone new: Phyllis, a graceful, brightly dressed older woman who has one leg. Her foot emerges from beneath a rustling silk skirt, encased in a fuchsia running shoe. She pats the cushion next to her and I sit. She hovers her hand an inch or so above my wrist, something I have seen her do to several others. Do I feel anything? She tells me my energy is low and uneven. Ragged.

Energy? What energy? I say, and suddenly I am explaining my recent diagnosis, the long wait to receive it and how, between the disease, the recommended exercise regime, and the various sleep interruptions, I don’t have a lot left in me.

I can’t cure you, she says, but maybe I can make things easier. I used to be a nurse. What I do now is therapeutic touch. She suggests I look it up online and get back to her if interested.

Touch that is not actually touch. It’s not something I would naturally seek out. I’m wary of the intangible, could never trust homeopathy. But I appreciate her kindness. And something nags at me: first one eye, now one leg …

Shrubs and flowers surround a yellow house with white trim half-buried in vegetation: hollyhocks, poppies, clematis, plum and fig trees. There’s a fairy tale quality; we’re near a main road, yet the garden is utterly quiet except for the constant singing and rustlings of birds. Enthroned in her wheelchair, wearing a purple shoe today, Phyllis directs me toward the path to the sun-dappled deck. She returns via the house to meet me there. We sit facing each other and, without touching, she hovers her hands above my chest.

Prior to her amputation, Phyllis explains, she and her husband farmed organically. She was a nurse and an artist. One of her clay sculptures, a near life-sized terracotta figure of a young woman, watches us from among some raspberry canes.

I turn as directed while Phyllis passes her hands over every part of me, making small noises of approval or curiosity. Do I feel the energy shift? A kind of warmth? No, but I’m enjoying this all the same. She tells me about her five grandchildren and then, when I ask, the story of how she lost her leg.

It began in a different part of her body; a doctor brushed aside her concerns about a breast lump which ultimately required a total mastectomy, involved a trip to the US and took three attempts to remove. Years later came a painful swelling in her right thigh. A hiking injury, the doctor thought. She iced, rested; the swelling grew until a Vancouver specialist discovered a hyper-malignant growth called pleomorphic liposarcoma and recommended immediate amputation of her entire leg.

I was lucky. People often resist but losing my breast made it way easier to lose a leg! Even so, it was frightening. On the ferry to Tsawwassen the morning of the surgery, the captain slowed the boat so passengers could watch a pod of orca whales. All Phyllis’s worries evaporated.

They took the whole leg, right to the hip. Shocking, but better than being dead! After, Phyllis and her husband moved to this house on the edge of town. He tends the garden, feeds the birds. She assists people—women especially—with their health. She uses crutches and a wheelchair. She swims for exercise and reads detective novels to relax.

When Phyllis leans forward, bending double in her chair to rest her hands on my feet, I think I almost feel something, but probably not. She invites me to follow her inside and lie on the sofa, tucks me under a cashmere blanket, orders me to rest, sets a timer for fifteen minutes and wheels away to another room.

Had I not first met the exquisite cyclops, I might not have accepted Phyllis’s offer. I could have missed filtered garden light on a warm afternoon. Missed her kindness and care, missed learning her story. All of which, frankly, feel more sustaining than telehealth.

I hover on the verge of sleep, then close my eyes and walk deep into familiar woods, into the golden light, the air lively with gnats, moths, dragonflies. At the edge of a pool, deep green and smooth as polished stone, I glimpse my reflection. I, too, have only the one enormous, central eye, its iris a blend of blues and greys, of turquoise. A breeze ripples the water and the eye scatters across the surface, becoming moving patterns of light.

I am in the eye of it—on the brink of finding some way to meet the erosion that lies ahead (slow, I hope, but cannot know) of my own physical and mental faculties. I may have a chance to learn new ways of seeing—of living, even—that I can’t yet imagine. I feel a kind of confidence—

The timer sounds, a faint, tinny tune. It’s followed by the soft, sticky squeak of the wheelchair’s approach. I open my eyes as Phyllis comes to a halt by the couch.

Do you feel a bit better? she asks.

For a long moment we each study the other. Artfully draped in a cream and lilac dress that complements the purple of her shoe, two-eyed, one-legged, wounded, whole. My new friend, both dream-like and astonishingly real.

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Image: Luke Painter, Blue Room (Dark Italics Dr Caligari), 2014, ink and brush on paper

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