Little Dreamer

Every morning this past week, the birds were singing outside and I was coaxed awake by the sun blasting through the huge floor to ceiling windows at the cottage. They open straight out and up, and are then latched to a hook in the ceiling so that they hang horizontal and suspended, parallel to.

They are twenty or thirty years older than me.

Waking up there helped me cope with the hurt I am experiencing. It felt safe.

When I woke up at home this morning, I had fragmented memories of a dream I must have had sometime in the night.

It was pitch black, nighttime, in my dream, and I was asleep in a big old fashioned wooden bed with a down tick for a mattress and an ornately carved headboard. Old, like Victorian era old. And that’s how the room looked too, with tall ceilings and big bare floors. It was cold and I could hear my lover calling my name. He sounded hurt or frightened. Instinctually, I went to him.

I lit a torch or a candle and I was walking down what seemed like an endless hallway, with flaming sconces lining the walls. I could faintly hear a raging wind coming from somewhere.

It was not loud enough to drown out my lover’s urgent cries. It seemed as if they weren’t getting louder, no matter how far down the hallway I ventured, and my search became desperate.

I flung open door after big wooden door, all along the hallway, but each one I opened was as dark and empty as the last.

I felt more panic with each barren room when finally, after what seemed like a hundred doors, my lover’s voice became louder and clearer.

I could see light coming from under the final door I reached, and a searing heat could be felt through the wood panels. My lover was in the room and I could hear his frantic cries loudly now!

I opened the door to the loudest wind I had ever heard and things like paper and books were caught up in the current and hurling through the air.

And then our eyes met and there was my lover, hanging on for dear life, his fingers clawing the splintered boards of the floor he had fallen through. Underneath him was what looked like a six story drop into a raging inferno.

I looked over to see a frightened woman, her eyes wide with panic and disbelief. It didn’t take long to register that I was looking at his other lover. The one that wasn’t me.

That’s when I said to her, “Get him! Pull him up!”

To which she replied, “I can’t. I’m not strong enough.”

I said “You have to try!”

Then she shook her head and said, “No…He might pull me down with him and he’s not worth my own life.”

And then she fled out the same door I entered and I was alone with my traitor of a lover.

In his eyes I saw a flash of relief and I think I saw hope…hope that he might have a shot at surviving after all, and I caught a glimpse of confidence, too, for reflected in his eyes was the sure knowledge that I would not hesitate to risk falling down the hole to save him.

That’s it. That’s where it ended, the dream. Once I oriented myself to the fact that it WAS indeed a dream, I was almost bummed that there was no climactic ending…like a bad movie where in the credits roll and you throw your hands up and go “That was it??!”

I think what I do in the next few days will determine the ending to my dream.

Will I stand just far enough away that he cannot quite reach me and watch the look of betrayal on his face as he slips down the hole? Or will I reach for him without thinking of my own peril, like his eyes expected me to do?

How hard it would be, not to let the past determine his future. How sweet IS revenge? And what did he think he would find in her that he wouldn’t find in me? In my dream,it was she who turned her back on him with the fire licking at his ass. That was the consequence for his hurtful choice, and the woman who would risk life and limb stood there deciding his fate.

At that moment in time, he would have realized that his choices were about to cost him everything. Literally.

Be careful who you trust, lover.

Salt and sugar look the same.