Hot-Pink Hyena-Dogs

The Dreaming is attacking the dreamer. I am trapped between a wall of tall cliff and a wall of tall water. It slams into me, darkly, deathly. It bludgeons and bullies me, batters and beats me, until I am barely there. I am a mere whisper of who I once was. I am a meager echo of what I once could have been. I hold a life in my hand, young, innocent, fragile. Not unlike my own a very long time ago, and not unlike my own right now. The life is a kitten’s and I must breathe for it … even as I cannot breathe for myself, between the crushing, smashing weight of those walls. It presses me away. It presses me inland. It presses me home. It presses me to end.

I hang on.

We are inside. We are within. In the gullies of Dream. We are being chased by hot-pink hyena-dogs through the wood and through the trees. My babies are here. My kiddos. My charges. I don’t know how to teach this subject. We run. You cannot fall behind. It is as simple and as impossible as that. You learn it fast. You do it faster. We wade a river. We slip inside the back entrance of a hotel in the middle of the forest. We must find the man, who has the answer to a question, who has the key to a lock. The hyenas slip inside behind us, through the cracks in the windows and doors, through the wood of the rafter and the black of the basement. We must reach him, before they reach us.

We do.

Hotel safe, children safe, dark defeated for now, answers gotten and forgotten, keys kept only to be lost … I awaken.