Visceral Dreams
Deliberately designed to disturb.
Another 'short, short'. This one deliberately designed to disturb.
My dreams are visceral.
I do not glide across the serene waters of a personal pensieve, blue sky above golden fields where the unicorns graze, bordered with green woods brushed by warm, fair breezes. I see no smiling family standing on a river bank, a rainbow rising from them, arching towards our future's horizon.
No. For me there are cold, cloudy waters with hidden, unspoken dangers; opportunities tantalisingly out of reach; whispers I cannot quite hear; speech I cannot vocalise. Once more I grasp wildly, blindly, searching for someone — something — I've lost. Only to breach the surface, lungs bursting as I wake, my face wet with tears, to a blank bedroom wall and a tightly closed door.
Another night, another dream: the fog-choked maze of crumbling buildings, alive with moving boulders and hidden traps; the thrashings of abominable chimaera in locked rooms; friends or strangers - I cannot tell which - who I scrabble to find, persuade, just for them to ignore me. Then I'm running, always running. Until I tumble, falling into an endless chasm, to be shattered awake, desperate once more. All in vain, once again.
I whisper in my head, 'tomorrow will be better', even as I fall today into more despair from and within my dreams.