Nightmare Journal

Two nights in a row, the same dream. Masses of people on catwalks, moving about in that vague inoffensive manner of those watched over by shopping malls. The story is long but unmemorable; lots of meeting and talking with others, but nothing dreamlike, nothing in fact of any consequence whatsoever. I'm left wandering alone, a grey fog of useless ennui about me, unrelieved even by the bittersweetness of melancholy.

It all happens so fast, as if the dreamworld has taken on a life of its own. Somewhere in my peripheral vision a girl runs to catch up with a friend on a lower level. I can't tell if it's accident or some horrible miscalculation; suddenly she has vaulted over the railing and plummets four or five stories to the floor below. Even before she impacts her friend is screaming, a keening that tears through the dream like a knife through an artist's canvas. She runs to the crumpled form of her friend, screaming "WHY DID YOU DO THAT, WHY DID YOU DO THAT?!" Shaken, I turn and attempt to push away through the crowd, but the screaming follows me, taken the form of some kind of predator. I shake myself awake sometime in the early hours of dawn, staring at the latter volumes of Encyclopedia America and trying to banish the images.