Thalassophobic Dreams

Near the middle of my session with Jim, I noticed on my desk monitor the silent image of Lisa entering the front office. As usual, Jim was facing the window with his back to me. A position providing enough psychological comfort to discuss his inability to carry on face-to-face conversations. One of the several prominent symptoms of his diagnosed Social Anxiety Disorder.

Lisa was thirty minutes early, an unusual departure from her normal just-in-time arrival. She sat in the waiting room corner opposite the water cooler to avoid eye contact with the soft, glowing, blue five-gallon water bottle atop the cooler. She projected a nervousness that didn’t bode well for our upcoming conversation.

Thirty minutes later Jim finished his session and slipped out the back door of my office to avoid contact with my receptionist, Lil, or any unsuspecting clients who might be waiting. I pressed a button on the right corner of my desk, signaling Lil to let the next client in, and rearranged myself into one of the chairs around a low granite coffee table. Lisa plopped down in the chair across from me. Her face told a story of tension and consternation. She started in, dispensing with any preliminary pleasantries.

“It’s been a really shitty morning, Professor.”

I have always been unclear why she only refers to me as a ‘Professor’ since I studiously avoided any contact with academia after finishing my doctorate, and I’ve never taught a class in my life.

“On a scale of one to ten, how shitty?”

“Definitely a twelve. I don’t know how I’m going to recover from this.”

“A twelve, you say. What do you think that means on a scale of one to ten?”

“Yes, a twelve, and I don’t know what the fuck it means.”

“I would venture to say it means you have encountered something previously outside the realm of possibility.”

She nodded her head. “Yes, precisely, you’re good, Professor. I knew there was a reason why I still see you.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Of course I do. You saw me on that goofy little desk monitor. Why do you think I arrived thirty minutes early? I’ve got to talk to somebody, and you seem to be the only person around with some modicum of insight into my neurosis.”

“Ok, let it rip.”

“The news. You must have seen it in the news this morning. It was hard to miss.”

I filtered through the headlines from my morning cup of coffee. Bingo, there it was. “I think you might be misinterpreting the news. The fact that some surface water may eventually work its way downward to Earth’s core over billions of years doesn’t change the situation drastically from where it stood last night before you read the article.”

Her unblinking, motionless stare informed me I was wrong. “It changes everything. Water is descending to the core-mantle boundary, 2,900 kilometers below the surface. You might write this off as geological weirdness that is somehow separate from the planet’s normal water cycle, but that’s because you can’t see beyond your academic definition of thalassophobia. I have to live on the bleeding edge of my disorder every day, absent the luxury of considering it in the abstract. “

“So, tell me how this new knowledge affects you.”

“In my dreams, I am descending, Professor. Plunging below the ocean waves in a slow free fall. At 200 meters below the surface, where daylight dims to nothingness and panic sets in with the encroaching darkness, I drift from the epipelagic zone into the mesopelagic layer, the ocean’s twilight zone. The world above me is a fading memory. At 1,000 meters, I fall into the bathypelagic domain, where my senses are numbed by pervasive cold, silence, and shades of black deeper than the human imagination can envision. Monsterous phantoms glide past me, detectable only by swirling eddies, and only an occasional twinkle of bioluminescence breaks the endless night. Slowly, my descent continues, and at 4,000 meters, I slip into the abyssal zone. I keep sinking for what feels like an eternity and eventually pass into the hadal realm of my nightmare. Finally, more than 10,000 meters below the ocean’s surface, my body lands with a gentle thud in the silts and clays of the Mariana Trench. Fine clouds of rotting organics rise up around my torso, and I am laid to rest in a hellish grave — left to decompose beneath a constant rain of rotting marine detritus falling from above. You would think it couldn’t get any worse, but it does.”

“Go on.”

“Far in the back of my fading consciousness, I register a slow creaking and groaning as decades and centuries pass. Occasionally, sudden catastrophic jolts send me deeper into the planet as my oceanic bed subducts below the Philippine plate, smearing my molecules along the slip plane. My water mingles with the ocean, and together, we descend into the mantle, where the water hydrates new minerals. I’m nothing but ringwoodite. Deeper and deeper, I descend over the eons, and finally, at 1,900 miles below the surface, in the E prime layer, at the boundary between the silicate rocks of the mantle and Earth’s molten metal core, my water comes to rest, lubricating Earth’s inner mechanics. My torment becomes eternal.”

“Do you believe you will experience what you describe?”

“Come now, Professor. I’ll be dead and experience nothing at all. No neurons will be firing impulses through my disconnected molecules smeared across thousands of miles of molten rock. But that’s not the point of a phobia. Is it? It freaks the shit out of me now. Before, there was a limit to my fear of large bodies of water — the ocean floor. Now, the god-awful truth of my neurosis has fundamentally changed. The sea bottom is just the start of my pain, a gateway into another dark, bottomless pit.”

“How about a course of Xanax?”

“I’d prefer Valium, Professor.”

“Let’s talk a bit more.”