Y’know, just the other day I was on about dreams—how they’re silly, how they’re rarely worth remembering. How there’s nothing quite so boring as listening to someone recount their dreams. And that’s all true (c’mon; fight me!), but last night…dude. I had one of those dreams, man, one of those ones where you’re positive you’re awake, and equally positive you’re about to die.
There wasn’t much to it: I was in bed (in real life and in the dream), looking out the window (entirely believable: I’d lain down facing that way). It was dark (check; true)…and my bedroom door was shut.
My bedroom door was shut.
Thing is, I never close that door. I like to see everything, at night. When there are noises—and there are noises—I want a clear line of sight. Instant identification, sort of thing. No sneaking about in the wee hours, hunting down every clunk and creak.
So I lay there a while, frozen with terror. Someone was in my flat, someone who’d perhaps shut the door so they could burgle me. I tried not to breathe: maybe they’d hear that, the change in my breathing, that fast, panicked hah-hah. Maybe they’d come in and murder me. I closed my eyes, but really, I opened them, because that was when I woke up. And I woke up to exactly my dream, only the door was open.
Maybe it wasn’t a dream. Maybe it was more of a…peek into a parallel universe where something terrible was happening. Maybe I wasn’t asleep at all, and just weaving some paranoid fantasy. I only moved here last December. How could this place have cemented itself in my mind so soon?—so I could picture it down to the tiniest detail, in my sleep? I mean, my bronze rats were there, and that wire thing I hang my necklaces on. Even my air plant was there, nestled in its corner: I was looking at that. At the wee brown bits on the ends of its…leaves, tendrils, whatever those things—whatever they’re made of. Feelers. Wibble-wibble.
Internet, man. I had a nightmare.
RG Double Ghost 