The Creation of Shadows

 

“Good night, Jonathan,” his mother said from the doorway. “Remember to sleep on your side.”

              “Yes, mom,” he answered, “like always. You tell me that every night. I know.”

              “It’s just super important,” she answered. “As you get older, you’ll come to see why.”

              Every night at bedtime it was the same comment from his mother until Jonathan grew up and moved out to his own apartment. Lying down for bed each night, even though his mother was not there, he still heard her admonition. But it was one particular evening when his girlfriend spent the night that he laid on his back and she was curled up on him. Her head on his chest, one leg bent on top of his and her arm across his stomach. He initially felt odd lying there looking up at the ceiling, but the bliss of her warm embrace overruled everything else.

              When he woke the next morning, he was still on his back and his girlfriend could be heard in the kitchen, preparing him breakfast, he assumed. Sitting up, the sheet was stuck to his back and came up with him. Reaching behind him, he peeled the sheet away and turned to see a large black spot in the dead center of where he had been laying.

              Hurrying into the bathroom, he angled the mirror and looked to find a small open orifice directly between his shoulder blades crusted with a black substance. “Oh man, that is not good,” he thought. Pulling the sheets from the bed, he started a load of laundry and then took a shower.

              Hearing the bathroom door open, he heard his name called. “John, are you in the shower already?” his girlfriend asked. “I would have joined you. Anyway, breakfast is ready.”

              Kissing her as she left for the day. He sat at his laptop and tried to find something on the internet about what had happened to him the night before. Calling in sick for the day, he spent the next several hours researching but came up with nothing.

              Sleeping alone the next night, he slept on his side, as usual but experienced nothing like he had the night before. The next night, he slept alone again but flat on his back to again find the same orifice and black secretion. “This is crazy,” he thought. “Something is seriously wrong, and I cannot be doing laundry every day.”

              As Saturday approached, he had an idea. Staying up extra late that Friday night, when Saturday afternoon approached, he spread an old sheet on the bed and laid down for a nap. Setting up his cellphone to video record himself sleeping, he tossed and turned for a while but eventually fell asleep. Waking up two hours later, he felt the black stickiness on his back again and saved the video recording to his online account. Pulling it up on his laptop, he skimmed through the video as he watched himself struggle to fall asleep. Finally reaching his point of sleep, he watched each second for the next two hours and made a strange discovery.

              As he drifted into sleep and finally into REM, he could see small wisps of darkness swirl around him like smoke, coming from all directions and sink into his chest. Recording himself that evening, as he deliberately slept on his side, he watched the video the next morning but saw no darkness.

              Repeating the video process multiple times, he saw the same thing each night that he slept on his back. Sitting on the bus the next day, he overheard two older women speaking of chakras and the color of auras. Immediately struck by the familiarity of it all, he spent the next evening studying what they had spoken about.

              Making an appointment the next day with a local natural healer, he scheduled an aura reading with her. “I have to admit, Jonathan,” she said after the reading. “I have never seen colors like yours before. It’s as if your normal colors are polluted by threads of darkness, blacks and browns. I don’t know what to make of it.”

              “Well, that doesn’t sound good,” he answered.

              “I don’t know what it means,” she said, “but I would like you to try something for a week and then come back in for another reading.”

              That evening, as he prepared for bed, he laid on the tile floor in the kitchen and watched a cycle of colors play across his laptop screen from the kitchen counter. As he drifted toward sleep, he held onto the semi-sleep state and changed his thoughts to only of darkness and gathering it like fireflies in a swarm around him. Envisioning himself standing on the sidewalk in the midday sun, he poured the darkness out into the shadow that lay behind him.

              This was a process he repeated each night for the rest of the week. Walking that next Monday to the bus stop for his appointment, he looked at the shadows of those around him and comparatively speaking, his own was far, far darker than all others.

              Relaying his experiences to the healer, including the shadow observation at the bus stop, she suggested that try creating a second shadow that was independent of his natural one. Eventually succeeding in his shadow work, he began to notice that people began avoiding him on the sidewalk and in stores. He noticed strange looks and greater than normal distances between himself and others.

              Spending more time at home and more time sleeping, he noticed that the more he focused his darkness into shadows around him, the better he slept, but at the same time, the further people moved away from him.

              “Something is different about you, Jonathan,” they would say. The further they moved away, the more he saw the need to deal with his darkness. Soon his girlfriend left him, his co-workers stopped talking to him and the neighbors became strangers. Immersed in his introspection and self-work, he could feel a new sort of reality swirling around him.

              The last time he left his house, his shadow, once an elongated version of himself, became a yawning void that completely surrounded him. Like walking into the mouth of a cave, he alone could see the colors but everyone else only saw darkness. His sleep became sweet, and his personal observations became true but he came to realize that he was completely alone and surrounded by darkness. He had become himself, but he had lost everything and everyone.