Dream Logic

A recurring nightmare I used to have which was often spurred on by the silliest of things.

I’m in a room.

My living room; although, at first, it doesn’t seem like that. Somehow, it’s different. The walls are not quite cream enough and the carpet not quite soft enough and the air doesn’t smell right. The windows are on the wrong side of the wall, the longest side, facing the street, rather than the shortest side, facing my garden - my garden that somehow I can still see. Somehow it’s still my living room. Dream logic, I guess.

There are other people in the room, as well. Again, I don’t notice that at first. I don’t notice that they are, in fact, my friends. Except they don’t really have faces and they’re all wearing the same nondescript blue uniform and they’re all the same height (which really isn’t right, because Maira is absolutely tiny and Pheobe is a giant, but that’s dream logic, I suppose).

We’re looking out of the windows - the windows which are wrong but don’t feel wrong - onto the street - the street I shouldn’t be able to see.

There is a man on that street.

He is walking past the window.

He kind of looks like the Terminator except he’s bald. He’s looking dead ahead, doesn’t see all those peering eyes through the window less than a meter away from him (dream logic) and he doesn’t react to the cars whizzing past him. He is expressionless. There’s nothing especially sinister about him yet somehow I am quaking. I am terrified.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I know it’s a dream. I’ve figured out how it’s going to end because I’ve had it before. I remember... and now everything is speeding up because…

He’s reached the edge of the window and he keeps walking past so that we can no longer see him from our window. I know - because it’s my house although this isn’t actually my real house and in my real house this is not the case - that there is a room next door with another window. I can spy on him there.

I say so. No one hears despite me being in amongst the crowd and despite no one else speaking. I know what that means. I’ve been here before. Somehow - dream logic - I still react the same.

I go to the door.

He’s there.

I was expecting it, I’m not surprised, and yet the feel of his slipping a blade underneath my collarbone and straight into my lungs (and the dream continues) is still cold and still frightening and still- there are no words anymore. There is just the cold of a knife and the sound of my friends-who-aren’t-really-my-friends (because this is just a dream!) screaming and there is this silence. In the back of my head there is nothing. No thoughts.

I wake up.

I’ve got heart burn. Again.