Disquieting Muse

I am dreaming of you again.  You show up…everywhere.  Inevitably the nightmares come, but just when things are at their most bizarre, I look up and you have stepped in.  Sometimes you even stop the strangeness, lay your hands on my shoulders and turn me in another direction, wave your hands in a dismissal and I wake up.  Sometimes it's just a flash of perception as I flee or fight whatever demon is on the nightly marquee, and the world of my unconscious spins on.

There are the dreams where you talk and the dreams where you are a silent part of the background.  There are the dreams in which I have no idea why you would be there at all, nothing in them relating to you in any way.  You are the perpetual dress extra, the Hitchcockian cameo that defines the genre.   It’s enough to make me wonder half-seriously if you are something from a sci-fi novel, someone who can walk in the sleeping mind of another.

It’s not uncomfortable, but it is strange.  Why would I dream you sitting in a blue and buff melamine desk, pen twiddling in your hand, occupied with whatever is in front of you but still bored?  You do not fit there.  Why would I dream of a house I’ve never seen in which you show up in the hallways and corridors just to say hello and disappear like mist in the sun?  Sometimes we actually talk; sometimes you greet me and we are swept away into other things.  When I wake up, though, I always remember that you were there, playing "Where's Waldo" with the fragments and detritus of the day.

Please understand.  It’s not that I’m not glad to see you.  It’s just that you’re becoming more and more like de Chirico’s Disquieting Muses, something that gets more and more unnerving every time it is contemplated.  You are the shadow that no angle of light should be able to cast, the thing standing just out of frame that can be sensed but not quite caught. If there is to be any face on the subconscious that drags me through the world of dreams every night, I think we would both prefer it not to be yours.