Somewhere between waking and sleeping on our journey towards the unfathomable deep,
there comes a thin moment where we have one foot in the waking world and the other is in that other world where we relinquish conscious control.
Pausing here and straddled between two planets that drive one another like gears,
the attentive traveler will notice a narrow door only wide enough to sidle through.
This is the border of sleep, where imagination and reality are braided together,
a chasm in the crust of consciousness,
venting the hot pumice of imagery into the irresistible magma of narrative.
Welcome to episode 26 of Stories from the Borders of Sleep,
a weekly podcast of curious tales from bordersofsleep.com featuring original stories by your host,
Seymour Jacklin.
Visit bordersofsleep.com for more information or to leave some feedback.
Artwork is by Robin Traynor and production by Tim Wiles.
The music for this week's episode is by the inimitable Jellyroll Morton,
the self proclaimed inventor of jazz.
So if you're ready to journey with me, then I shall begin.
Michigan Water by Seymour Chapman the cold had set in from October onwards,
and by mid December Harlem was no place for a 50 year old man with weak lungs and a couple of barely healed knife wounds.
But here he was.
This city did its best to remind him of a tomb.
The staircases in particular loomed at him like the dark passages inside the pyramids of Egypt,