Schrödinger’s Epigenetic Nap

Acrylic paint on stretched canvas.
90″h “w 138″d
2025

When I was in high school, I came home for lunch and found my dad lying on the living room floor. I thought he was dead, but he was just taking a nap and didn’t want to get the couch dirty with his work clothes.

A few years after I’d dropped out of high school, I found myself struggling to make money and losing a battle with my mental health. I was having what I’d describe as durational panic attacks and suicidal ideation. There were several nights I would go to bed hungry because I couldn’t afford to buy food. I was living in a party house in Detroit, so sometimes in the mornings I’d rummage through my roommates’ trash, peeling cheese from thrown-out hamburger wrappers or drinking stale beer just to get some calories in my stomach.

I worked some random jobs here and there, thanks to my sister who helped me find work — like being a “shoe runner” at a shoe store, cutting lawns for a landscape company, and working at a Chrysler factory where I moved empty metal carts off of a semi-truck into an empty warehouse, then moved them back onto an empty truck. I remember going to get a sandwich after a shift at that warehouse at a place called the House of Reuben, where seating is arranged in such a way that the table delineates the room so all the customers sit facing the wall, away from each other. In that room full of tired men, I cried silently to myself while eating my sandwich.

In an effort to stay alive, I moved back in with my mom. The only available place for me to sleep was on a La-Z-Boy in the laundry room. I remember looking out the window into the backyard and seeing squirrels running around and thinking to myself, “I know that the world is beautiful, but I can’t feel it anymore.”
My mom got me a job at a 24-hour clinic where I’d clean the place during the night shift, waxing floors and scrubbing bathrooms. I was saving money so I could afford a move to Key West. That was my escape.

Then a peculiar thing happened. Every night while sleeping on that La-Z-Boy, I began to have vivid dreams that I was being murdered. It was relentless. I was afraid to go to sleep because I knew I’d have to wake up from a dream where I was being violently murdered. This went on for about a month, so I must have been killed about 30 different ways. It was terrible. I could feel everything, and the murders seemed to become more and more grotesque.

Until one night, when the man came to murder me in the dream, I somehow realized that I was dreaming. Because of the absurdity of being killed so many times in a row, the situation forced me into having a lucid dream. I looked at the man and told him to fuck off, and he did.

Now I suddenly had this ability to lucid dream. It was an escape from my daily life that was filled with loneliness, anxiety, and worry. In my dreams I could do anything I wanted to. I would fly, talk to ghosts, have lots of sex, and explore my own subconscious mind looking for clues or odd adventures.

I got so good at it that I could go to sleep and bring my dream world up around myself from the darkness, staying fully conscious all the way through. I got so comfortable there, in the dream space, that it was sometimes difficult for me to wake up.

Over time, the sense of calm in my dreams worked its way into my waking world. My perception of reality started to shift, and my waking life took on a quality of dream-like beauty. I felt a lot like I did when I was a little kid, when the world was completely filled with wonder and awe.

I saved enough money to move to Key West, where my dad had moved a few years earlier. He rented me a room while I found a job and started to go to community college. After about a year I was working three jobs, had my first real partner, and I could look out from myself and feel the beauty of the world.

I still sometimes lucid dream, but it was in Key West where I had my last real, fully lucid dream where I was totally in control.

In the dream I was getting frustrated with all the people because they weren’t real, they were just dream people, and I wanted them to leave me alone. They were all coming up to me, trying to talk or fight or interact, a whole crowd of them, so I just erased them with a wave of my hand.

Then, with another wave, I erased everything. The whole world went away and I was floating in a white void. In that space, in my dream, it occurred to me that in there I was a god. I could do anything at all — except one thing. I couldn’t talk to a real person.
While floating in that white void, I wondered if reality, our waking life, our shared existence, wasn’t just one big dream we all shared together, creating it as we went. I thought that if I was a god, the one thing I would want would be to have another god to talk to.

Over the years, as I healed, making art became my everything. It’s the dream world and the real world mixed together. It’s my way of connecting to everything and everyone. It’s how I discover truths, and it’s how I’ve come to meet and connect to other people.

My entire existence now is completely built of relationships with other people who dream similar dreams, hold similar wishes. We want to live in a world that isn’t so fucked up. Where people are cared for, loved.

I hardly even remember my dreams anymore. I feel like all that energy is going toward another direction now.

Day after day, year after year, it’s always been art, both others’ and my own, that I’ve turned to to find my emotions, gather my thoughts, and feel connected. Movies. Music. Poems. Stories.

On long drives I feel it the most, moving through space when that one song comes on, chills going up my spine, tears streaming. I think, “I feel so good right now. Infinitely whole and complete. The entire weight of everything in existence is weightless within me. Am I about to die right now or something?”

I’m thankful for every sad song, every pained poem, every person out there opening their heart for other hearts. I love everyone — especially the ones who do the best with what they have, the ones who make space for the perceptions of others, the ones who can hold opposing truths.

I’m the same age now that my dad was when I found him napping on that floor. The older I get, the more I understand what that moment held. The weight a person learns to carry. How sleep sometimes looks like death, and how love is the thing that makes us stay.