My sleep is shifting, strange, and uneasy. I do not know the details, cannot see through a murky fog in this world behind which I sense things are moving. I think they are moving closer, drawing in to trap me somehow, but now - the world shifts again and changes. I feel different. I think I am moving somewhere. I need to wake up and get out of this unsettling world where things lurk and somehow move ever nearer. But my dreamworld claims me and will not let me go, and the world of the waking is around me but not in me, for I am sleeping still.
I think I am rising from the bed now. I can see myself now in a way, sometimes, as if watching someone else, and an image of me reaching for the lit taper that I know is there wavers in and out of my inner vision. Now I have light outside to fight the swirling dark inside, a nightgown to hide and protect me from the awful visions, and I am escaping from the bed where my dreams hold me prisoner. My body is moving to the closet where there is paper. The strange things I see in sleep are moving closer still, threateningly. I think they are moving faster. I think they are coming for me. I think there is something hidden in me that they want. I do not know what it is. I do. I must get it out of me, into the open of that other, waking world which I cannot seem to escape to, so the things will not be able to find it and take it from me, who knows what they would do with it?
Open the closet. There's the paper. Something solid and good in contrast to the sinister shadows around me, and it crinkles in my hands as I fold it. That's good. Noise is good, to fill the silence which I know must be broken awfully somehow, sometime. More sounds, scratchy, are me writing on it, letting the terrible secrets flow out, out onto the good real paper. Maybe now they cannot get it from me. What does it say? Read it. I don't want to. I know what it says.
No, I don't. I don't know what I did! I didn't do anything! Duncan, says the paper. Banquo. I made my husband kill Duncan, king of Scotland, and he made others kill Banquo.No, it is not true! Hide it! Trembling hands, be still, and fold this false and evil paper for me, seal it up tight. Now it's safe, hidden, gone. But no. It will not let me rest. It goes on, although I do not see the letters anymore, they speak aloud, indeed screaming into the night, and now the terrible quiet has been broken into somehow more terrible sound. Murderers! says the paper. You are murderers. Everyone knows...look at your hands. They bear the unmistakable sign of your guilt.The paper lies, of course. I know it does, so why am I looking at my hands? I am not guilty. I'm not. Best to wash them, all the same. "Yet here's a spot," I say aloud, so shocked am I to see the paper's truth before my eyes. There is a horrible spot of blood on my own hands. No one must see. I wash my hands again, and again, and again, but still it stays. "Out, damned spot! out, I say!" I cry, horrified at how it sticks with malevolent permanence to my skin. Duncan and Banquo are dead and gone, and I was never near...not very. "Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?" I wonder, despairing. Did they bleed so much that it reaches even me now? And it is not only the blood spot on my hand, "But here's the smell of blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh, oh, oh!" I wail, sure I will be found out, and if I am not I do not think I could bear it even then. The evil dark things are reaching out, reaching, reaching, right through my mind and they have found the terrible secret. They have found something else, too. The world swirls dark through me again, and a string of images from my childhood are wrenched screamingly through my mind: the gleaming horse I always wanted to ride, thundering off with my brother atop it, leaving me far behind; the small and cleverly disguised treat I persuaded the servant to add to his plate; my brother turning red, gasping, breaking out in spots upon tasting it; the servants bending over to tend him, ill in bed for days in reaction to the food; the scenery rushing by me as I finally got to ride the horse in my brother's absence; my brother, twice ill, once from my treat and again from some other disease whose name I never knew, the servants whispering among themselves about him dying, my parents with faces shadowed with terror and sorrow; me, terrified of being found out, being eaten away by guilt as each day passed and my brother worsened and I was not caught; me again, driven nearly mad by guilt, stealing into my brother's quarantined room when he was asleep, swallowing his water tainted with contagion (strangely enough it tasted good); and finally, me yet again, becoming within a day as ill as my brother, suffering everlasting nights of intense sweaty nightmares and vomiting in the dark, the servants half dead from overwork and lack of sleep as they tried to care for us both. And thus I punished myself.
I think I can hear people speaking. They might have been there all along, or perhaps they are the dream shadows again. It doesn't matter which it is. Both are bad, very bad, but it doesn't matter much anymore. I cannot bear anything anymore. I know now unmistakably, irrevocably, with a dead kind of certainty what the paper says, and that it is true. Macbeth and I will probably be caught by the others and sent to heaven knows what fate. Or else we will not be caught by the others. Either way I will have caught myself, and either way is still too horrible to bear. I cannot get away from that thought. Now I say, "To bed, to bed; there's knocking at the gate: come, come, come, come, give me your hand: what's done cannot be undone: to bed, to bed, to bed." So now I put that paper back in the closet, where it is hidden to others but they may still find it, where it is not hidden from me. Now I go back to bed, where I was trapped and tried to escape and could not and know now I never will. There is to be no salvation even if I try to touch the waking living world.
This was an assignment for English class, to choose a scene from Macbeth and rewrite it in prose from the perspective of one of the characters. This is Act V, Scene III, from Lady Macbeth's point of view.
By the way, I think everything in quotes is a quote from the play - that was required in the assignment. I suppose I ought to put a disclaimer even though this is and everyone knows the characters, circumstances, etc. don't belong to us. Anyway, Disclaimer: Macbeth does not belong to me, nor do Lady Macbeth, Macbeth, Duncan, Banquo, this scene (Act V, Scene III), or any other characters I might have mentioned except the nameless ones like Lady Macbeth's brother, parents, and servants. I'm not sure who the named characters do belong to (I know Shakespeare wrote it, of course, but I don't know about copyright stuff) but obviously it isn't me.
We finally got these back graded, but I'm still very curious to see what you all will make of it. Translation: Read and review. Pleasepleaseplease:-)
Peace