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.

Shadows

This dream is not my own. It is the dream of the man who sleeps next to me at night. It is a dream caressed and carved from the flesh of my own Dreaming. And this is it.

There is a dark shadow. It waits in the dark shadows. Behind the wall and behind the door waiting for its chance. Its chance to sit upon me. Like a dog upon a cat. Like a god upon a man. Powerful. Possessive. Persecuting.

Each time the man drifts to dream, the shadow runs. It runs from behind the door and behind the wall to get what it had been waiting for. Me. To oppress and to overwhelm. Me. To engulf into the dark and the shadow of itself. Me.

He snaps his eyes wide open to scare it away. To scare away the shadow and to save his love. Me. It runs back to the door and to the wall. Back to the dark shadows within which it is a dark shadow. It is a game they play for a while. All night to be exact. He is tired the morning after.

Dedicated to Testament, who saves me from the dark and the shadows, even in my dreams...

House of Dog

I am in a neighbourhood. A neighbourhood with a school to which I go. In this neighbourhood there is a great beast. A black beast. A dog, tall as telephone poles, huge as houses, terrifying as the sleeping dark. He snacks on the rooms of houses. And he is looking for me to snack on me too. To chew on me. To chomp on me. To devour me. To gobble me up whole. As he gobbles the rooms of houses up whole in his relentless search for my flesh, and for my femurs. I strap myself to the underbelly of a blue forde truck, the license plate starting with X marks the spot. The owners of the truck, aware of my presence within and beneath, have to drive me past the house of dog, as is my directive in the dreaming. We watch the loyal glare of the house dog's own eyes, the scent of my fear much more than a mere whiff wafting through the air, and under its nose and palette. It lets me escape.

Thing

I am in the dreaming. There is a beast here. It is as an ogre or troll. It is as the Grendel. Only in deep and final sleep can it be found. Only in the sleep within sleep can it be seen. It is to this sleep I sink, within the dark of the Dreaming.

It follows me. It chases me. I sense it but I cannot see it. I see its shadow but I cannot know its why, not until I sleep that deep and final sleep. I run throughout the dreaming, I race against the powerlessness of my dreams, throughout white icy caverns, throughout blackened, charred pits until I sink deep within the dark of slumber.

I see its face. It is hideous. Grotesque. I hear its name, but the conscious cannot conceive the sepulchral utterance of its curse. I smell the sharp sulfur of its existence within the deep and dark of me and taste my recurring fears. I feel its movements within the dreaming, beneath the unconscious, before my eyes flutter and I simply awake into a room as bright as day compared to the darkness of the where and thing I’ve just left behind .... if only for tonight.