Safe In Dreams

Safe In Dreams
By – Robert Goldsborough

      I was trying to stay dreaming, but the reality of it all would not let me.  I was safe in my dreams.  I walked through vast halls of imagined art and through countless rooms that never ended.  Fires burned secure in their hearths.  Friends from my entire life smiled and waved.  There were parties, dances, and merriment around every corner of that dream house.  The endless building stood high above the world balanced on the thinnest of sticks.  You had to climb thousands of narrow stairs just to reach the front door.  No one noticed the thinning of the timbers, the age of the stones.  The house had always been here, collecting all that was good from my life and all I had to do to visit was sleep.  I was safe in that rickety house.  I was beyond reach.

      My waking hours were not safe.  When I was a small boy everything towered over me, but I had not been afraid.  As I grew older and saw everyone at eye level I started to see them for what they were.  I saw how life cut its deep trenches across faces and minds.  I saw the bright eyes turn blind and hands gnarl in their labors.  I saw the evil that made them change.  People began to fold away from their own lives leaving something hideous in their place.  My coworkers were hunched over, mumbling things that shuffled on legs too short to run away.  My boss grinned a mouthful of spears and laughed a steady stream of stinking tears from lidless eyes.  The waitress where I bought my morning coffee bloated so that I could not even see her face.  People in the park ran in circles on bloody stumps and spewed an oily liquid.  Strangers became even stranger.  Friends became fiends.  I saw their wrongs displayed in nauseating substance and they never seemed to guess what I saw.  When my wife changed, I knew this was no longer just an illusion.  This was real.  This was my curse.  She had been napping on the couch when I saw the shadows unknit her body.  She split from groin to jaw and pushed this foul thing out of the wound.  I stared as her new form was birthed from her own flesh.
I left home that night.  I needed to be alone.  In a cross-town hotel I slept and dreamt of the endless house.  All my friends were whole and pure.  My wife smiled as the high ethereal winds rocked the building and I was safe.

      When I awoke I was still embraced by the warmth of my dreamland.  I went to brush my teeth.  The mirror gaped back at me.  I cannot express what looked back from that silver glass, but I knew that it could not be me.

      So tonight I am armed with a bottle of sleeping pills.  Nothing will keep me from my dreaming.