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And that was that. And you're not saying that what he said wasn't true. You don't like him and you don't trust him, but he knows his shit about this kind of stuff. You're just not sure he exactly grasps, from the inside, what it's like. When you sleep in a body, there's a sense of continuity you (you now realize) take for granted: you shut your eyes, you stay there for a while, you wake up. You, you, you, all the way through. See? Instead, when it happens, it's like this: you shut your eyes, a trapdoor opens, and you fall straight out of the world. If you exist, you exist somewhere black and thin, without time, without sensation. You die. Then another trapdoor opens and you're launched back in, and you have only the weirdest, vaguest notion of where your mind was. And where it was was: the beetles. You are fucking overtaken by whatever tiny cord of instinct runs through you, and for however many hours there is no You, and you are beetles, asleep, dreaming beetle dreams.
To clarify, these aren't even necessarily bad. Sometimes you wake up and you have a weird, vague notion of satisfaction, of satiation, of peace, and you have a leafy taste in your mouth, and you can put two and two together and guess the beetle dream was good. And if they were all good, maybe you'd throw up your hands and accept it. But sometimes you wake up tense, like you need to hide, or frantic, like you need to flee, or— way, way worse— confused. This is the part that fucks you up. You awaken confused about who you are, where you are, your body— your size, your fleshiness, your flightlessness. You awaken mute. It's been wearing off within a minute at most, most of the time, so it's not like you're in danger. You are trying to believe that. But there was one time where you woke up empty— you guess that's really what you're worried about. That one day. And it was early on, too, when you weren't out of the manse, when Lottie wasn't visiting that often. So that's probably why.
But you woke up from a death-sleep and when you woke up you didn't have thoughts. Not that you weren't You: you were one single guy, you're sure of it, not beetles. You filtered back into that body Lottie built. But in that body, in your mind, it was all quiet. No commentary at all. You can't remember if you didn't know you weren't thinking, or if you didn't care. You probably wouldn't've cared if you'd known. You just went around doing your usual stuff, happy as a clam, until Richard showed up and realized you were fucked. You think he tried talking to you, maybe, and you didn't get it. You mean that you didn't understand his speech. It was all noise. And he realized, and he futzed with you, and whatever he did fixed it. And you were alive again.
