Surreal dream wakes, shakes me; which is reality, which is dream?

By David McElroy · October 31, 2018

I’m suddenly awake just after 4 a.m. and I don’t know why. I’m half asleep but I have a desperate need to remember what I’m feeling and what just happened.

Wait. Did something happen? Did it really? I guess not — not entirely — but something seems so real. Maybe surreal is the word. My brain is half asleep, but my heart — spirit? soul? — has something to say.

No, that’s not quite right. It has something to feel. To share. What is the feeling? Quick, before it’s gone. Find the words. What is this? What happened?

I woke up confused. I was turned around on my bed the wrong way. I was confused about where I was. I thought I was somewhere else, but where?

Everything around was dark but there was diffused light. The kind when there’s fog everywhere and the air is heavy. I sensed danger. I was afraid. I felt shame for being afraid. I was in danger, but I was worried about her. She was the one in mortal danger. She wasn’t going to die, but her heart was being consumed. The beast was consuming her — and then she would be gone.

Even though I’m awake now, I’m still falling back to sleep. I don’t know what I need to say, but something needs to come out. I have no idea why.

When I became re-oriented enough to know where I was, I picked up my iPhone — from the far corner of the bed where it charges every night and serves as my nighttime clock — to see what time it is. But when I touched the button to light the screen, I found an email.

In my sleep — in my dream? in half-waking state? I don’t know — I had typed a short email to her. I was relieved that I hadn’t sent it. I don’t talk to her anymore. I can’t. It hurts too much. But there was the note. How can I type full sentences — complete with punctuation and proper capitalization and AP style — while I’m asleep?

I’ve been writing in my waking state — and maybe in my sleep — for so many years that it’s the only way I know. And now I’m wondering why I was warning her.

I suddenly recognized this place. That creature lived in the tunnel up ahead. He scared me. He hated me and he wanted to kill me. He didn’t want to kill her, but what he wanted for her was worse than death.

He wanted to consume her. He wanted to take her soul. He wanted to take the last parts of her that hadn’t been eaten and he wanted to erase them from existence, leaving a changeling which looked like her and acted like her, but had no soul or joy or even the ability to feel pain. Much less love. He wanted to consume everything that made her real. He wanted to replace her heart with stone. He was evil.

I don’t know why I feel so shaken. I feel out of control. If I’m honest with myself, that’s one of the things I fear most. I fear being out of control and looking foolish. Yet here I am floating through raging emotions as I fight drifting back to sleep and I feel utterly carried away by something I can’t control.

I don’t want to look at this. I don’t want to feel this. I want the fear and need and love to be gone. But why did I say “love”? I have no idea, but that’s what the feeling said. What is this I’m feeling? And why is my heart pounding as I drift between wakefulness and sleep?

The beast knows I’m here!

He sees me, but he’s not coming after me. He’s laughing at me. He wants me dead, but he wants me alive right now. He wants me to hurt first. He wants me to know he’s consumed all of her and taken away everything pure that she was. That gives him satisfaction in a dark and evil way.

It’s cold and the fog is thick and humid. Her heart is fading. If it stops, she will be nothing but stone. All will be lost. Then the beast will try to kill me, after I know she’s taken — consumed and replaced by something which can’t feel or love.

Love? Wait. What does love have to do with this? What good is that against the beast? I don’t know. I do something stupid and ridiculous.

I step out of the fog and into the flickering light at the mouth of the entrance to where the beast is. She’s inside, beyond him. She’s fading. He sees me step forward, but he only watches.

“I love you,” I say with a shaky voice.

I feel something shift in the ground beneath, but it’s nothing much.

“I love you!” I shout it this time, my voice stronger. “Do you hear me? I love you and I’m not giving you up!”

The ground was shaking now. Everything around me was changing. The stone of this place — mountain? castle? whatever — was changing. It was glass now. It was brittle. It was shaking.

“Do you hear me?” I’m shouting. The beast looks panicked. His world is starting to crumble. I’m talking to her, but I have no idea whether her heart is too far gone to hear me. Maybe she’s consumed already. Maybe it’s too late.

“I love you! Don’t let him consume you! Please, hear me!”

The glass is breaking. The entire place is falling apart. What was an impregnable stone fortress a moment ago is brittle and breaking. The beast is afraid. He’s trying to fly off, but he’s leaving her behind.

The ground is breaking underneath me now, too. Everything is clear glass. I can see through everything — like a magnificent crystal palace breaking apart — but it’s falling apart too quickly. We’re falling, but I have no idea where I will land — or if there’s anything left of her heart.

I don’t know what happened to me. I don’t know why I’m awake. I don’t know why I want so desperately to remember these feelings. Part of me wants to go to sleep and forget. Even though it’s a bit cool in here, I’m sweating on the sheets.

I don’t need to think this time. I just need to feel. I don’t need to plan. I just need to experience whatever is coming out.

What is this rushing through my heart and mind and soul like the blast of an emotional explosion? Why am I feeling this?

I know it will be gone in the morning. That’s why I’m struggling to say as much about it as I can now. I need to remember. I need to feel this. I need to know … something.

I look outside my window, but I see nothing. There are no stars or moon. It’s cloudy, so it’s pitch black. There’s no light to save me from my feelings. I could turn on a light switch and bring myself back to rational reality — one where I’m not forced to feel all this — but then I will lose something which I can’t bring back.

I will sleep now. When I wake, it will be light outside. The day will be just as usual and everything will return to normal. I might remember that I had a strange night, but the feelings will be gone.

It’s the feelings I need to hold onto. I don’t know why. Even as I say this, I have no idea what it means. I just know the feelings might save me. Might save her. That doesn’t even make sense. But I saw the glass shatter. The beast is afraid of love.

Sleep comes now. I hope peace comes with it. I close the curtain on this strange night. This strange experience.

But I know I have to hold onto something of it. I have to give it away. I have to express it. Even though I don’t understand it. In the power of this love, there is the hope of redemption. I have to guard that hope in my heart.

Now I sleep. I hope there’s peace.

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It hasn’t happened yet, but there’s a possibility that I might be taking in a fourth feline. A couple of months ago, a cat-loving neighbor asked whether I’d seen a “tuxedo cat” hanging out in the neighborhood. I hadn’t, but this guy eventually wandered past my house a few weeks later — and we haven’t been able to find evidence that he has a home. I’ve been giving him water and food for the last week and he finally let me pet him two nights ago. He’s purred for me two nights in a row and he let me take a low-quality selfie with him Thursday night. Tonight, though, he let me pick him up and bring him inside to look around. This went surprisingly well, as you can see from this photo. I don’t know whether he’ll be joining the family, but I’m certain that Alex, Oliver and Sam would vote no, at least until they get to know him. I’m trying to make certain he doesn’t have a home, but if he does join us, what do you suppose his name will be?

It turns out that the radical far left has been training “Antifa cats” to sabotage anything important to Donald Trump. Everything he did was perfect. Honest. It was all the cats’ fault. Arrest all the cats! This is the latest of my ridiculous satirical shorts. Please go watch it. Then “like” it and subscribe. Please. I’m begging you. (Too much?) Although a couple of the previous videos have had views in the hundreds, most have still been seen by fewer than 20 people. So I seem to be having trouble letting people know that page exists.

Here’s the latest of my ridiculous parody shorts. It crossed my mind Tuesday to wonder what a slick and fast-talking car dealer might do right now to try to turn the high price of gasoline to his advantage. So I conceived of a fat and lovable character who tried to sell cars that don’t use any fuel — and then I started wondering if it would be funnier if all the characters were felines. Designing the King Cashpaw character took about four hours, but the rest took only another four hours, so this was a relatively quick piece that virtually wrote itself. I know it’s almost impossible for these parody videos to find a larger audience, but at least they amuse me — and there are 19 of them on my YouTube page now. The first few were very limited, but they’re getting more complex.

The Republican Party is dead. It still exists in name, of course, but it’s nothing but a shell. All that’s left are idiots and stooges and con men of the MAGA party. When Donald Trump is gone — which won’t be long — those populist idiots and pragmatic fools will have no one to follow. Democrats will thrive. They will take more power than ever and they will push the federal government further to the radical far left than ever. When that happens, don’t just blame Trump if you’re a conservative. Blame every person who has claimed to be a conservative and has given up on principles, character and everything else that Republicans once claimed to stand for. As someone who worked as a GOP political consultant for many years, this is disgusting and disturbing to me. Those who have enabled Trump to have almost unchecked power are going to be shocked when they see what they will unleash in the long run. It’s been plain all along what this narcissistic con man is. It’s your fault that you chose to pretend not to see what he really is.

We are ruled by the dumbest and most incompetent people among us — and we have a system which allows stupid and irresponsible people to force the costs of their idiocy onto smarter and wiser people. Can we get away with that? Yes, for quite some time. But we eventually reach a point at which the dumbest of the dumb — who are habitual liars and mentally ill fools — lead us to the disasters and destruction that some of us have seen coming for years. We are approaching that point. And yet most of the idiots around us still wave their rhetorical banners of support for the evil people who are leading us to ruin — and all of them point their fingers at someone else, never noticing that their own enthusiastic support of evil is to blame. When things finally fall apart, blame yourself for your blindness to the evil, not whoever happens to be in power when it happens.

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