Per Chance to Dream

You were in my nightmare(s) last night. Although to be fair, this isn't your fault, and you would probably be just as horrified as I was, but there you were nonetheless. I also figure you would prefer that I refer to any sort of nighttime remembrances of you as 'dreams' rather than 'nightmares', but since the naming of them is the one thing I can control, I will continue to label them nightmares.

To be fair to you, though I don't know why the hell I bother to be fair to you, you were not some Hydra headed beast with revenge for past wrongs on your mind, or some Scylla like apparition trying to lop my head off, and feed it to the fishes.  Either of those would have been frightening, but at least those could have been passed off as twisted figments of my overly educated and over active imagination.  If you had shown up as Scylla, or even Charybdis (know that I cannot swim), I could have at least 'dreamed' myself some Homeric hero like Odysseus, or even Jason (sans Argonauts, I am not a team player as you know from experience), and perhaps given you a decent enough fight before being overwhelmed by your power.  I've also thought that in the battle between mortal man, and soul stealing life taking, muscle bound monster, it is always better to bet on the monster. Let's be realistic for a bit shall we, and realize that monsters like Hydra, and Scylla are pros. They exist in order to kill people, lots of people. In this scenario, I am an amateur, one that is going to his doom with only the faint hope to at least 'make a good showing.'


However, you weren't not some, outwardly at least, monster, you were just merely you. Or at least the version of you that I remember the last time I saw you. That was X amount of time ago, and it may have been a while, but I doubt it was long enough for you to sprout six or seven extra heads and start wrecking havoc on the villages around you.  In this nightmare you were merely human, or at least as human as you can be, at least in my memory. You weren't even boiling bunnies crazy either, you didn't have an axe (at least a real axe) or any other sort of sharp object that you were chasing me around the Bates Motel with in the attempt to sever parts of my body from other parts of my body.


There were no acts of physical violence in this nightmare that would jolt me awake, and have be thankful that I awoke before your knife severed my private parts from my public bits. Perhaps if that would have been the case, and I did jerk awake the nightmare would have been brief, violent yes, but brief, and if your nightmares are violent they should at least have the common decency to be brief.  You, not quite like in real life, did not resort to any sort of low brow physical violence to do your damage. You were always too smart, and too subtle for that, which in many ways stinks because a good solid slap or two might have made it easier of me to make a monster out of you.


Your jangling ringing and stinging attack upon me was not that simple, nor should I have expected it to be, you were one of the few people that I admitted to be as smart if not smarter than me. Of course, you took this nightmare to point that out, in minute detail, and with an amount of glee that was just a bit off putting.  That was the gist of the nightmare, you sitting there calmly, almost seductively telling me about your 'career' and comparing it with what passes for my 'career.' It was not a comparison that I was ever likely to win, but you made it clear as crystal that my 'career' did not measure up to yours in any shape, form, or fashion. It was in some weird nightmare only way seduction by destruction, and you achieved both with a remarkable degree of aplomb.

My defense to both your seduction, and your destruction was woefully inadequate, just as you planned it to be. No matter what I attempted to say or do, you were there already one step ahead both in the plan of destruction, and in the dance of seduction. My last, failed, attempt to mount a defense that even you couldn't breach was to wake up, and after some effort I managed to get about seventy five percent awake. Awake enough to know that I was having a nightmare, not quite awake enough to break the bonds of that nightmare. Awake enough to 'see' you standing across my own personal nightmare like River Styx waiting so very patiently me for me to row back across so that you could complete your dual tear down job, but not awake enough to stop myself from paying my coin to Charon to be rowed back across that murky river to let you finish what you had started.

That boat ride over a mythical river, powered by a boatman that doesn't really exist (though both certainly seemed real) was not a happy journey. To see you waiting so cheerfully for me to set foot back upon the 'solid' ground of my nightmare, is not a scene that I will forget anytime soon, nor do I wish to replay it for a very long time. The only small mercy to this mindfuck of a night spent in bed is that my alarm, that glorious beeping noise calling me back from the far side of nightmare town, sounded its, for once, sweet noise, and interrupted my journey back to you. I can only hope that you are still there on the Hades side of the river, waiting with growing frustration as I remain awake for as many hours as I can in order not to be subjected to the horror that you've become for me.