She herd
Dreams in which I should be able to fly but can barely stay aloft, and that only by intense concentration, my feet dragging against the crowns of trees, protruding rocks and elevated patches of ground, or barely clearing the flat roofs of low buildings. Sometimes from outside it looks like soaring, I've escaped whatever trap or monster threatened me, but I always feel that I'm about to sink. Dreams in which I should be able to breathe water but instead I drown (only one of these, actually, in which I'm saved from drowning by a talking whale). Why am I always dreaming about not getting what I need?
* Dreams in which I wake up to路the sound of someone trying to force the locked bedroom door. I hear the knob clicking and turning, but I can't move, can't cry out "Who is it?" or "Go away" or "Help," or even open my eyes. Then I shudder awake to a familiar rhythmic hum, it's just the fan I run all night to block out noises and help me sleep. Betrayed by sound again. Dreams in which the doors won't lock or even close properly, the door suddenly shrinks so it's smaller than the frame, the dead bolt becomes a simple hook, and something dangerous is coming, a zombie, werewolf, vampire, or just a deathless serial killer. Sometimes it's something doors won't keep out anyway, some shapeless nameless evil-the featureless is always frightening. Dreams in which an unstoppable werewolf is coming for the young; he'll kill everyone in the house if we're not turned over. Before anyone can stop me I scoop up all the young (including my Robert) and put them in my pocket-! have a shrinking ray-and then I seal us all up in the panic room, totally self-enclosed and impenetrable, with its own supplies of food and air. We'll wait the werewolf out, and ignore everyone else's screams. Dreams in which I start seeing hard, unfamiliar faces at the porthole windows of the doors at my private high school, furtive men in black trench coats, black hats, and high black leather boots. My friends start disappearing one by one, and the white students start acting strangely toward us black students, distant and cold. Then we're invited on a field trip, just the black kids, a special opportunity they say. As we're walking to the bus I see a giant hose leading to it and I know they're planning to gas us. I run, but am trapped in a cement stairwell. A black janitor tells the commandant 42
FUGUE#29