I haven't been keeping up with my blog, but I've been writing a bit. So here's a random bit that I just wrote.
You can tell a lot about a person just by looking at him. You can tell the superficial facts – his hair color, his height – and from those deduce the less obvious – his age, his weight. Most of the time you catch glimpses into his memories, into whether life has treated him kindly or dragged him around in the mud. You can tell his temperament by his laugh lines – or absense of – and by how often he smiles. Sometimes, if you’re good, you can tell the more intimate details: whether he’s a liar or a player, or an honest man who will never get far in life by being honest, but continues to be so.
But the one thing you can never see, no matter how hard you search, are his dreams.
No one can guess the dreams that invade us when we’re fast asleep. Sometimes the secrets our minds tell in the dark are obscured even from us. Imagine how much more we’d know about ourselves if we could remember every dream that visited us over the span of a lifetime. A dream can tell you more about a person than anything you can see or smell or remember – because dreams are not lived, and they are not remembered. It’s different.
In my dreams, I am always the hunted.
In my dreams, someone is always chasing me, always trying to hunt me down and kill me.
Just like that.
There’s never a reason, just a man (and it’s always a man) and a weapon. The weapon varies – sometimes it’s a gun, sometimes a knife. Once it was a candlestick (“Mr. Blue killed Mr. Sapphire in the Kitchen with the Candlestick”).
He never catches me, but I never get away, either. I awake from the dreams as I enter them – in the constant and neverending state of being persecuted. Sometimes I find shelter. Other times I run straight out into the morning, where it takes me a moment to realize that I am no longer dreaming as I blink away reality, getting my eyes accustomed to it.
And I am never scared.
They are not tangible dreams, the kind where you know you’re dreaming. They are the real, you-are-here dreams, where every moment is as real as the bed you lay in. Yet I still feel no fear. I run up hills and down ravines, through empty and crowded streets, up and down spiraling and decrepid staircases – all the while being chased by a man and a weapon – and I feel no fear. While I know I should fear for my life, all I can think is “not again.”
When I awake, I forget the dreams until later in the day, when they come back to me slowly, bit by bit, at the most unusual times. At work I will glimpse a portion of the stairs where I had earlier been clambering on all fours. I will stop short in the middle of a sentence, prickling with the sudden feeling of being watched, and the equally sudden reflex to run away. In the midst of making love I will hear gunshots.
He never catches me, though.
Dreams can tell you so much about a person. You can’t tell a dream by seeing a person, but you can tell a person by seeing their dream.
In my dreams, I am always the hunted.
But in my dreams, I am never the victim.
