The Long Sleep
After healing Complex Trauma (C-PTSD), I woke to a life I’d never lived—a disorienting shock I call the Rip Van Winkle Effect, like stepping from a dream into the gray ash nightmare of The Road, a book written by Cormac McCarthy. There’s a meaningful life beyond it, a thread of light in a world gone dim—that’s why I’m sharing this.
First of all, people aren’t even aware C-PTSD symptoms—an insidious inner conspirator born of prolonged hurt—can be relieved, let alone healed. C-PTSD is an alarm that never never seems to be heard. I awoke to that truth after years of not knowing what questions to ask, or that answers waited out there, glinting like a thread in the dark.
I figured out how to heal it, but it took too long, years slipping through my fingers like dust. It left me in the aftermath—trauma’s neglect and vengeance orchestrating a wasteland I could’ve faced sooner, if I’d only known, a truth that dawned too late to spare the wreckage.
Waking to the Wasteland
I often wrestle with the ethics of sharing my knowledge with people who are older: their decades of buried hurt is a weight I carry too. Every decade that trauma taints, a silent rot, secretly shapes a dissociated reality, despair expanding with time, a dreamless void swallowing hope. It’s an apocalyptic world—broken relationships, circling carrion eaters, a brutalized body, and no trustworthy history to weave an identity.
As I recall it now, when forgotten emotions filled the cavity trauma had left, a sudden rush, raw and free, my instincts blew up the dissociative states—the holocaust of hurt—and I woke, a flash tearing through the haze, sharp and unyielding, my eyes momentarily blinded by the weakness of a long slumber, waking as a dreaming child into an old and worn body, exiled from a life that never was. I call this the Rip Van Winkle Effect, and it cut worse than a lifetime of replicating original traumas, a theft sharper than the wounds I’d borne.
A Necessary Coldness
The more time the Malignant Complex has, replicating its cancer, the worse the Rip Van Winkle Effect gets. The decades pile up like ash, an unliving shroud over lost years, too much time, too many heartaches, spreading one after the other, freezing what could have been, anesthetized until it is too late—a dystopian now.
To heal the trauma scarring my soul, I had to be ruthless in identifying and hunting down the life-stealing other within me, a Malignant Complex, a shadow I’ve named and faced. When I work with others, I’m cold and calculating with this semiautonomous force in their psyche, a precision born of care—you learn to track in the dark.
But it’s when the Malignant Complex’s darkness fades, when the scales of dissociation fall from their eyes, a glint breaking through, that I see the spark of wild terror—bewilderment, numbness, disorientation. I behold the ravaged wasteland they’ve woken to, and…I’m torn—I want to weep with them, but the road beyond demands strength, cunning, imagination, a call to rise from the ash, a gentle tug to rebuild. There is a necessary coldness.
The Approach to the House
Never arriving at the place within myself, a hollow I chase, where it feels like home—a residence no one’s ever lived in. It’s a desert where a mirage of my parents reparented themselves into what I needed, a shimmer of care that never held. The delusion fades—I go inward, child-like and broken, dust and thirst dragging me back. Everything was transactional—even compassion. I don’t think communication with them was bad; it was never there.
After decades adrift in sleep, I woke to a world mirroring The Road—a desolate expanse where ash smothers the air, silence reigns over a fractured earth, and each vista stands as a mockery of what humanity could be. In Cormac McCarthy’s dystopian vision, the future is a graveyard of civilization, where remnants of humanity scavenge among ruins, and the past lingers like a wound that won’t heal. It’s a place stripped bare, where hope is buried under desolation, setting the stage for the ghosts of memory to rise.
Here’s a scene from the book that captures this haunting reentry into the past:
They came upon the house almost by surprise. A white frame house set back from the road beyond a lawn gone to desert. He slowed and turned in at the drive.
I experienced this scene through the recollection of my own fractured lens—my mind snagging on the image of that house, a skeletal relic of something lost. The Malignant Complex had whitewashed a tomb, threading a fantastic glamour through the years, a spell of safety that hid the rot beneath. It was a quiet deceit, building a dystopia I couldn’t name until memory tore the veil away.
If you’re touched with trauma, you know those rare moments—when you share a memory aloud, and your voice splinters the fantasies of a lost time, of warmth and family, shattered by your own words, rising as both a rebuke against the lie and a prayer for what was taken.
The House of Re-Membering
True remembering is a difficult threshold to cross—wanting to see things as they are, yet eyes blur from decades of sleep, a home trapped between repression and pain, its warmth stolen by the Malignant Complex. Here, memory slices through, a rare glint of fractured glass and shards of truth, which is captured in this scene from The Road, where a house lies rotted cold, a father’s voice breaking silence with a past he can't hold:
He went into the living room and stood there.
"This is where we used to have Christmas when I was a boy.” He turned and looked at the boy standing in the doorway watching him.
The room was cold and musty, the windows gone to shards, the wind stirring faintly at the curtains that hung in tatters. He walked over to the couch and sat down. It sagged under him, the springs long broken, the fabric worn to threads. He looked at the television set in the corner, its screen blank and gray, a dead eye staring back. He could see himself sitting there years ago, a boy himself, watching the world flicker on that screen, the voices and the pictures filling the room.
The boy came and stood beside him. “What are you doing?" he said.
"Nothing,” he said. “Just sitting here.”
“We should go, Papa.”
“I know.” He sat for a moment longer, then stood up. “Come on,” he said.
This is the wreckage I know—the physical rot of a house mirroring the dust and thirst I carry, my memory’s dependence interrupted by the boy’s mild protest to move into the future. The scene reframes the broken memory, clarity emerges.
Flicker and Falter
Our instincts pulse with the boy’s future—a wisdom glows in his reluctance, where naivety meets the brittle bones of age. Yet the familiarity of a ruined past feels safer than a fragile potential:
“I don’t want to go in there, Papa.”
“It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not. There’s nothing in there.”
That’s the Malignant Complex’s lure—a life-stealing entity weaving a false promise, masking trauma’s dystopia in a delusion of safety. There was never a hearth glowing warm, nor a mother’s laugh. The truth is in the flicker and falter of the illusion’s brittle ruin. Only when the cold reality of age has a conversation with the fragile tomorrow, represented by the boy, does the Malignant Complex’s insistence on the past stop feeding on the future.
Dialing a Dead-Line
We always hold on too long. Maybe it’s our loyalty to those who were supposed to care for us. Maybe it’s masochistic, our last vanity that we are worthy because of the torture we inflict upon ourselves when no one is looking. Or maybe it’s a sadistic act against those who have secretly wished for our happiness.
Never in the Same Room
We were never really in the same room as those we cared for. There was always a dark line that twisted communication:
He walked through the hallway, the boy’s hand tight in his. The smell of rot and damp plaster hung in the air, the floorboards creaking under their weight. He pushed open a door and stepped into the dining room. The table was still there, covered in dust, a chair tipped over like someone had left in a hurry.
He let go of the boy’s hand and crossed the room. On the sideboard was the telephone, black and heavy, its cord coiled like a snake. He picked up the phone and dialed the number of his father’s house in that long ago.
The boy watching him. “What are you doing? he said.”
He didn’t answer, just held the receiver to his ear, listening to the nothing on the other end, the silence deeper than any sound he remembered.
He set it back down gently, the click of it loud in the empty house.
The boy stood there, his eyes wide, waiting. “Come on,” he said. “We need to go.”
This futile act of dialing a dead line is a vestigial grasping at a connection that no longer exists. It’s a rote ritual—we reach for relics of the past, dialing old numbers to voices from another world. It is just a hollow gesture. The future demands that we engage with the living, with those who are present.
The boy’s question interrupts the reverie, grounding the man in their present survival. McCarthy’s sparse prose leaves the emotions implicit, but the weight of loss and memory is palpable.
What Has Always Been in the Basements
The Rip Van Winkle Effect forces us to occasionally let go of the boy’s hand—our vision for the future, just for a moment, just long enough to listen to what really was, to the rot and damp silence of what was never spoken to. The boy’s hand slips from mine, his small fingers cold.
I remember the yellow rotary phone hanging on the kitchen wall by the front door, heavy as a brick, its long and waxy spring-like cord hanging, always tangled. I lift the handset, made up of one piece with the two ends: a receiver and transmitter. Its weight pulls at my arm, another relic from a life I’d slept through.
I wedge my finger into the first hole—a 2—plastic smooth and cool, the dial’s edge biting my skin. I pull clockwise, slow, deliberate—the wheel resists, then gives, scraping past the dial stop. A soft click—the stop catches—and I release. The wheel spins back—whoosh, a low hum against the silence, gears beneath grinding a fluid zip zip zip zip, a Catherine’s Wheel whir—snapping to a rest. Two seconds tick by—each a skipped heartbeat.
I dial another 2—finger in, pull, click at the stop, release—whoosh … zip zip zip—back to zero, four seconds gone now. Then a 7—pull, click, whoosh … zip zip—eleven seconds—time drags like piling ash. The full number—seven digits—takes nearly half a minute.
I press the receiver—hard, cold plastic—to my ear…
The Sound of Something Falling
They’d not gone far when they heard a sound like something falling. They stopped and listened. The man looked at the boy but the boy was already watching him.
“What is it, Papa?”
“Shh. I dont know.”
They stood listening in the dark.
“Come on,” he said. “Come on.”
They ran down through the woods to the edge of the road and he pulled the boy down behind a log and they lay there listening with their heads ducked down.
The sound came again, a dull thudding from the direction of the house they’d just left.
“What is it, Papa?”
“Shh.”
This scene from “The Road” isn’t a repetition compulsion keeping us stuck in the past, it is the necessary re-membering of parts, our dismembered potential. We must listen to what the Malignant Complex was feeding on. It is the raw compost of what can be!
“What were they doing back there?”
“They’re cannibals.”
“They eat people?”
“Yes.”
The boy didn’t say anything.
“Come on,” he said. “We’ve got to go.”
They got up and he took the boy’s hand and they went on through the woods.
He stopped and they crouched in the dry leaves and they listened.
“They’re in the house,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“Shh. I could hear them banging around in there.”
“What are they doing?”
“They’ve got people locked up in there. In the basement.”
The boy stared at him.
“What do they do with them?”
“They eat them.”
The boy didn’t say anything for a long time. Then he said: “I don’t want to go back there.”
“We’re not going back there.”
“They went on.”
Human Meat Trees
This isn’t just dialing—it’s listening for my ghosts in the basement, a slaughterhouse of living decay, a trembling now. It’s bare feet of living carcasses shuffling on a filthy floor. As I write this, I hear the past—thud thud thud—that can never escape. The blood seeps into creeping roots moving like metastasized cancer still feeding on the present. It has become a reeking orchard linking past and present.
The Catherine’s Wheel
Fifty years of dissociated slaughter, I awoke to the nightmare of human livestock, empty houses, and shifting alliances. There was never any family, friends, or lovers as I had dreamed—of warmth, safety, and belonging. They were only the projected fantasies of my condemned soul. My past relationships were symptoms of the Complex’s psychic contagion. Their world remains a neurotic parody, masquerading as loving households, concerned friends, and kind lovers.
I slowly dial up the carnage—my mother’s blank eyes drip like sap, a friend’s grin splits the bark, my children’s lifeless bodies sway in the branches. This is the cannibalistic necessity of corralling others’ potential, my potential. It is the acting out of their own dead fugue. They have a neurotic need to cut off whole parts of who I am to satisfy their own base desires. My children and grandchildren are used as bait to lure me back. They prey on my loyalty, trying to hold me on the line. My children are slowly becoming psychic cannibals themselves—maybe—worse, parts of them will be eaten.
The Last Reverie
I know now they will never let go of the gray world of repressed terror. It is safe for them. It is home. They are the masters of the rotting aftermath. My childhood’s old yellow phone is a dead line to the jaundice parlor of sunless slaughter rooms. This is important: These are the last reveries into the past. It is an unpleasant necessity. This is where we escape, so we might live in the real world. This is the alchemy of sitting in “dry leaves and listening.”
The Alchemy of Leaving
The leaves beneath are mine—good rot, fertile mulch, a living potential their meat can’t touch. I walk—listening now, re-membering the hacked parts, not to mourn, but to seed a world unrooted in their gray, a way forward rising from the putrefied past.
We are simultaneously the past of psychopathic relationships and free to move on. We are the nameless cattle in the basement, and we are safe in the dry leaves. We are the parents of stolen children… of daughters and sons who’ll will never be. The boy’s dawning horror—"We’ve got to go"— cuts through—I can’t build here, not yet.
I am the son that never was… I can’t get that back… But I can carry the fire until my potential is strong enough to grow a world from the mulch of the past. The coldness in my bones must die with me, so the boy’s future only experiences the cold as an outer happening. His inner world is a fire, a thriving soul designed for meaningful relationships, competence, courage.
The people in my past were chosen by my Malignant Complex. They unconsciously share in the symbolism of cannibalistic depravity. They’re not just predators but keepers of a grotesque larder, imprisoning the living for sustenance. They live in a fog of severed memories lingering in the now.
It’s their humanity’s absence—reducing others to meat, even their own children—that defines them. The basement’s hidden rot parallels my older relationships’ unconscious ruination still feeding on the sounds of captivity and the future’s pulse.
I am listening now. I hear the boy’s urgent need to pull away.
The Way Forward
Above the Rot
It’s not just adapting—it’s dreaming a new life from the ashes. I step from the meat trees’ reeking orchard, their slaughter mulched beneath, and listen—alchemical putrefaction fires, cleansing the Complex’s ash into fertile humus. That pause, a hush after healing Complex Trauma, teaches stillness—crouching in dry leaves and listening, I hear burning soil siphon the gray shroud’s poison. It’s the cellar’s meat converting to compost, rustling leaves stirring a potential future unrooted from the toxic rot.
The Emerging Tapestry
In this gentle emergence, I see the couch that kept me transfixed on Saturday morning cartoons. The couch was destroyed in the junk yard furnace forty years ago. It still speaks, though the hulky oak shell of the console television demands my allegiance to her unwavering maternal care.
Mirror neurons from my mother’s gaze are a thin layer of phosphorus coating—a forever reflecting surface—red, green, blue. My mind turned into a high-voltage menace, a three-metal-gunned reptile stem—red, green, blue. My sight is an inner glass eye with vitrified strontium oxide of x-ray vision—past, present, future. I force the Flyback Transformer to supply high voltage to my memory.
I see the broadcast signal of the sand dollar white couch I sat on before the divorce, the same couch from three moves in kindergarten. I see my stepfather’s drunken stains on the upholstery’s avocado green stalk and stem pattern, with harvest gold blooms. I’m a teenager who gave up—stopped school, illiterate, with boils and pockmarks on my face, high on the couch, arms unmoving. I try to raise them, they won’t move. I panic. Through the gray plastic screen framed in metal, I see they’re asleep, resting atop the back.
The sagging couch was exiled to collect dust in the garage before it was thrown away. I don’t even know my adopted mom’s birthday. I feel the beige of the couch has bleached my bones into dusty chalk. I breath in the thick and rotting silence—there’s a musty cold, as the images of a Christmas long gone fade away from the dead TV. I am the tattered and tingling feelings coming back again to limbs that have fallen asleep.
Living Floral Prints
It’s not just adapting—it’s dreaming of a new world from the compost of ashen soil. Then came the qualia of emotional hues—red anger as I faced my truths, the green of a friend’s laugh pulling me back, the blue of the cold I finally felt. This is the tapestry of a golden flower—messy, bold, alive. It’s not survival—it is consciously weaving the floral patterns of the old couch into a life as it is, flaws and all, with strength to keep going. Life also weaves its patterns, as a labyrinth, driving us to the mystery of ourselves. Imagination doesn’t just adapt—it’s a future that writes our life in reverse.
Facing the Ever-Present Cold
Carrying the Fire
It’s time to finally lay down the past. I figured out how to integrate Complex Trauma (C-PTSD), but it pales beside the Rip Van Winkle Effect’s toll. I’d write more about the difficulties, but Cormac McCarthy says it infinitely better. I leave the following section in its entirety—it’s just too good:
He slept close to his father that night and held him but when he woke in the morning his father was cold and stiff. He sat there a long time weeping and then he got up and walked out through the woods to the road. When he got to the road he knelt there with the pistol and he looked down the road and up the road and he was crying and he got the tarp and dragged it over the road shoulder and went back and got his father and laid him down on it and wrapped him up in it and tied it with a length of rope he took from the cart and then he pulled it out through the trees and down to the road with the rope over his shoulder and then he sat there in the road with him in his arms for a long time. He kept saying no and he kept looking out to the road.
When it was growing dark he got up and he went back through the trees and he got the blanket and carried it over his shoulder and he walked to the edge of the woods and stood watching and then he walked on down to the road until it was full dark and he sat by the side of the road under the blanket and then he took some cold beans from a tin and ate them with the knife and he wrapped the blanket around him and slept and when he woke in the gray dawn he was shivering and he got up and walked on down the road.
He’d not been walking long when he heard someone coming. He stopped walking and stood watching down the road. It was a man and he carried a shotgun slung over his shoulder by a strap and he wore a billed cap and a coverall patched at the knees with gray cloth. The man stopped walking when he saw the boy and he called out to someone behind him on the road.
“Come here,” he said.
The other man came forward and a woman and a little boy and a little girl and they stood in the road.
The woman when she saw him put her arms around him and held him. “Oh,” she said, “I am so glad to see you.” She would have gone on holding him but he stepped around and he looked up at the man watching.
The man watched the road behind them.
“Are you carrying the fire?” he said.
The man looked down at him.
“Are you carrying the fire?”
“Yes,” he said.
The boy looked at them all standing there in the road and he said: “Okay then.”
“Come with me,” he said.
And he turned and they set out down the road together.
Healing Complex Trauma is possible, but the Rip Van Winkle Effect—waking to decades lost—is cold, because there is finally a “you” there to feel it.
Coda: Our Story is Upstream
There is something beautiful that happens next in the book. It is entitled the "Brook Trout Coda." It seems just as jarring and incomprehensible as dream imagery, but like dreams, there are no accidents:
Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.
Picture the back of that brook trout—a small, freshwater fish shimmering with a mottled, olive-green base, overlaid with a network of fine, irregular lines and spots.
Thin, worm-like trails—pale yellow and creamy white—twist and curl across its back, meandering like tiny rivers, organic and unpredictable, branching as capillaries through eroded channels.
Scattered among them, small reddish-orange dots, haloed with faint blue, gleam like stars or markers on an ancient map, vivid against the darker green, punctuating the maze with depth.
The wet surface—etched by time, a living fossil of the world’s becoming, a tapestry of order and chaos’ humming mystery—its back a swirling chart of a lost Eden too complex for science to remake. God is the fish within—swim against the ever-present cold. You’ve slept long enough. Come on, we need to go—face your cold, burn your ash. The fire’s yours now.
THE END
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