Nightmares

I love to dream. Recently I've been plagued with nightmares...

Keely, Paulie and I were somehow associated with at Barn. We were alone in it one night, miles from help and it caught on fire. The rest of the dream was trying to put it out and make sure no one got hurt. No one did get hurt but we lost everything we owned.

Last night I had a dream I was walking through my house and I came to the living room. Keely was watching television. I was standing across the room from her watching television next to me on the couch. I looked at me from across the room and then in a very creepy movie moment he and I met eyes. It would have been really scary or creepy but I was saying to myself in my head while we uncontrollably smiled at one another "This is a dream, now we can have fun." I tried to fly and the whole scene melted away.

Groggily I opened my eyes. The hazy darkness of our bedroom was only slightly more visible in the ambient light from our alarm clocks and electronics. I thought I saw movement near the foot of the bed, not that it wouldn't be normally Max comes and goes from our bed all night. My impaired vision focused as much as it could without my glasses and there seemed to be nothing there to see.

Even when my eyes were acclimated to the darkness it was too hard to focus on sharp edges. The bassinet, the dressers, the television and the edge of the bed all where they should be and nothing was moving. Over by the closet it was darker and seemed lumpy, but probably just my imagination. Then it moved.

I jumped out of bed and began running towards it. I got close enough to strike it when I thought I would begin screaming at it. Then I could see behind a blanket in a chair it was Shelly. She was crying. She'd been there with us since high school and was a big part of Paulie's birth. My voice was gone; I could barely breathe let alone speak. She motioned towards the bed.

Moving quickly to Keely's side I asked if she was alright. She was whimpering too. Between wet sobs and shivering she told me to go the bath room and read the highlighted portion of the instructions on the medicine I'd been giving her throughout the pregnancy.

Frustrated that she couldn't just explain it to me I went into our bathroom believing that she was more or less physically okay. Inside our cramped bathroom it was dark. Water dripped into a full tub and I could not remember which light switches went to the lights versus which ones when to the noisy exhaust fan.

I tried all the switches and could only muster up the amount of light available in a photographers dark room. The red glow coming from no discernible direction did not properly illuminate the pill bottles or any highlighting on them. I still didn't have my glasses and this task was getting very tedious.

After several bottles, I found the one that I had been having no luck cutting in half evenly for Keely. Then I held the plastic bottle close to the only bulb that seemed to be lit and read the instructions. A slightly different colored line of text read..."Any dose over 700mg will lead to the increased chances of Dogdenzes Disease in Infants."

I reached for the door but it swung open pinching my fingers. I screamed in pain and the door shut almost super naturally. Reaching in vain for the lights my hand ran into a wall mounted hand dryer like one might find in a public restroom. The fan whirred into action but it seemed to have been filled with tiny bits of toilet paper or paper towel. The force of the air shot them out sporadically into the air where they floated down like feathers into the bathtub.

In pain and fearing the chronic situation of my child and the impact of that on my wife, I threw my towel into the full tub. As it whipped past the counter the momentum pulled a stack of rubber nipples in its wake to join the towel and bits of paper in the bath tub.

I dropped the remote control to the bedroom television in the tub on accident. It floated for a moment on the towel but both quickly began to sink. Struggling between the weight of importance between the many traumatic things that were happening to me, I dove my throbbing hand into the water to rescue the remote control.

Turning around to leave the bathroom and console my wife I sat the remote on the counter to dry. Behind the closed door next to the sink was Keely and again I wanted to scream comforting assurances to ease her worries but the breath escaped me and I couldn't say a word. Had she seen my buffoonery while waiting for me to catch up to the fact that our son was dying? I didn't know.

I woke up from that in a daze of what is real and what is not. Daylight seeped into our room and I was spooning Keely. I asked her if she was okay. He reply was "Sleeping." It was obviously time for me to get up and comes to terms with how blessed I was that the nightmare was not reality. If I remember I think I will be more hesitant before I trust a sinister doppelganger to take me on an adventurous dream scape fantasy.