.
It begins with me questioning a child about what that doll is.
Nothing.
What are you doing with those things? I ask
Nothing.
I draw back the bed covers and the child fights back with a guilty, protective resistance.
Let me look under the mattress. I peel the heavy thing back and see . . . an array of odd bits of teeth and hair surrounding a waxen figure. Voodoo.
The child swings its body over me, pinning me, now, savagely, beneath the sheets and quilts.
I struggle to free my hands caught-up under the weight of it all. Finally, I manage to get one hand out and forcefully pull back the child's eyelid and eyebrow, and as hard as I can, press its skull.
Wrestle free.
At that instant, I find myself flinging back real covers in my real bed. My cat, having been asleep on top, scoots -- or is thrown -- off the bed.
Awakened from sleep, from a nightmare, I stumble around the now-lit bedroom, as my cat nervously skulks around the bed, peering at something underneath it.
When I get on all fours, I peer, too.
Nothing.
.
Dreams are so strange, aren't they? Sometimes I get what I call a dream-hangover. Even as I awake the dream stays with me, haunting my thoughts. At some point I relegate it to a compartment in my brain and toss the key, hoping it will be gone forever. Once in a while though, it escapes, donning a new form and the process begins again. Sleep per chance to dream? Nay, I say!
ReplyDeleteDream-hangover! Ha! That's good. That must be what a therapist wants her patients to do when they collect dreams -- remember them.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure I dream, but I rarely remember, which may say something about the depth of horror in there and the 'macho efficiency' of my mental censor.