Night Terrors

I'm dreaming again.  I haven't dreamed, or at least dreamed to remember them, in a long time. While I missed the fanciful world my brain always spins, I  think I might be happier right now if they would quietly slide back into whatever dark back alley in which they've been lurking.

My cousin always said that he could make a million dollars if he could just find a way to hook some kind of recording device up to my head as I slept.  I suspect he's right.  Only, lately, I don't think anybody would want to look at what my subconscious is dredging up.  They wake me up.  I sit up and stare over at the alarm clock sitting innocuously on my bedside table, look around my room, get glares from all the assorted cats draped over me who have been disturbed by my sudden jerk into wakefulness.

The dreams start out with characters from any sort of thing, people I know, places I've been, things I've read or watched, and spin off into wildness.  There are golden people with silver wings.  Sometimes I am one of them.  There are institutional buildings with endless gray block halls and no windows that I wander and wander until the hellish occurs.  I go back to Japan, but there is no sweetness in it.  Instead, I am lost in train stations, sitting in formal gardens behind temples but aware there is something bad there, visiting there and asked suddenly to change my whole life and live there once again.  I'm in hospitals, outside one of those too-large silently-hung doors, heart in my throat, unwilling to push it open for fear of what is on the other side.  And even though there may be people I know to start with, I always wind up alone at the moment it comes to face the monster, to open the door, to decide whether to flee or stay.

I wish I knew what it was that is making me dream these things so I could change it.  I have a couple of ideas about one of two of these things, and I know that I can't really do anything to alter those situations.  I wish, too, that there were somebody here when I wake up other than my grumpy cats, somebody who could tell me that there was no silent figure sliding through the darkness toward me with malicious intent, somebody who could pull me back to myself when I dream that my feet have left the ground and I can't get back to the earth no matter how hard I try. 

Until the moon changes phase, until I can get so tired that I sleep so deep I don't remember these things anymore, or until some sweetness of dreaming returns, I guess I will do in sleep what I do in life.  I will find some way to rescue myself in the dark watches of the night.  It just gets a little tiring sometimes to have to be on-duty for it twenty-four-seven.