Dreams are dangerous things. A fantasy is harmless until it leaps out of your imagination and into your life. And yet we create these creatures of thought to comfort us, forgetting they remember us and gain form from our desire.
Fifteen years is too long to wait. Too many nights spent imagining, praying for the will to stay awake so those images would stay burned on the inside of your lids. They aren’t even real, just conjured fantasies, but so far they’re the best you can come up with. Every day spent hunched over books, heavier than you previously thought possible, the weight of knowledge and that pressure of the future combined. Sleep is the only drug you consider, and it’s the most precious commodity you have. But oh, how you squander it away for five more blissful minutes staring at a fantastical world where there is someone who understands, who doesn’t need to be explained to, and who is willing to come second to things that will determine the course of your future. Sometimes his eyes flow into your dreams, never quite letting you go. Is this love? No, its desperation and total lack of time manifesting in pretty psychological shapes. A man boy who doesn’t need to be maintained or stressed over because he already knows it all. It has been all explained to him in those two A.M. rants, where there’s nothing but seventeen more problems on paper and one problem hanging above your bed waiting to be answered. There it hangs, looking like every eye contact that has ever been broken, every touch that you haven’t let linger, and every smile that’s faded a half second after it arrived. The cloud above your bed has eyes, and they judge you like the angels will the day you drag your sorry butt up to the gates.
Sometimes the cloud speaks to you. Not in a crazy person way, just in a way that keeps you awake for one more moment than you should be. It speaks in that fragile moment just before your brain embraces sleep. It make you startle for a moment and in that moment you doubt. You ask in an imperceptibly frightened voice: “Am I wrong?” and then you fall asleep to wake up and continue that pattern.
The cloud has eyes. Big, understanding, piercing eyes that watch over you at night. The eyes judge your choices, so its kind of judging itself. The eyes are bright but subdued, sulking in the background while you get to shave away the stress and forget the problems for just five hours of gracious rest. But those eyes, they don’t let you go all night. If you look at them closely, you can see a depth to them., they have seen the ages, following you from the dawn of your family blood. An inherited guardian, reluctant but forever faithful to you. Those eyes get to meet yours once a day right before sleep. But they never get to hold them. So they follow through your family, waiting for a day when someone will look deeper and see an entire soul sitting up in that guardian cloud, silently begging you to acknowledge him. He is tailor made for you, because he is you. He is every moment of the best you, the one who hears the voice ask “Am I wrong?” and answers “I am right”.
The cloud is made up of moments of certainly, and that’s why it reassures you like nothing and no one else can. If not for the certainty, you’d never be able to fall asleep at night. The cloud sucks up that confidence and that’s how it survives. The cloud has a name but you don’t know it. It has a form, but you would never admit to seeing it. You have only ever pictured it formless, floating, shackled to your bedside, laboring on your behalf. But the cloud is no slave. The cloud has a past, and that past determines the future. And isn’t that the definition of a creature? How can you ignore your creature? How can you pretend you don’t care? When all it has ever done is absorb your fear and anger and provide you the opportunity to believe in yourself. That cloud has become an ignored necessity. How long dare you take it for granted?
“Will you ever ask its name?” is not a question that can be reasonably asked. Asking its name would be acknowledging that there has been a previously nameless creature watching you, lulling you to sleep for every night of your life. So you don’t ask—you live in ignorance and fear—until one night when seeing is believing and not seeing is a last desperate shot at maintaining your small world. That’s the night you stare up at the ceiling and don’t close your eyes until dawn creeps through the curtains. That’s the night you spend staring into the creature’s eyes. That’s the night you admit something’s never been quite right.
Whole legions of dreams crash down around you when the light peeks through at 6am the next morning. You are a changed person, and you are not alone. There is the creature in the room with you, silent as an unspoken prayer and as tangible as a wisp of cloud. The creature exists but doesn’t, it doesn’t breath, doesn’t really take up space. It is present only in theory. But its eyes make up for any indecision in the rest of the body. Blazing with depth, an age to them that suggests only the physical form is insubstantial. The mind could not take up more space. How long have those eyes watched you? How much of you have they seen? All your love, hate, fear, longing, jealousy, desperation, elation, gladness, madness, insanity and clarity. Is there anything these eyes have yet to observe? You pretend you can’t see them, act as if the creature doesn’t watch you climb into clothes, get ready for the day. Then you exploit its infancy, leave it crouched in your room, unable to follow you into a cold, foreign world. You leave the dream catcher confused by your bed, eyes awake but body still in limbo. You don’t know you need the creature, only the creature knows that.
So you go about your day in danger because of your refusal to remember that it exists in the light now. You don’t wonder why it does; just consider how you can get it to stop. So the bad things track your movements through the day, unencumbered by the infant protector you left at home.
When you hear the voices following you around that day, it isn’t because they only just arrived, its because no you know they will be there. That night watching the creature has shattered a shield you long held up to protect yourself, and you are walking through the shards of a way of life. When you get home that day you don’t enter your room. You get dressed in the bathroom, don’t get your work done because the stuff you need is in there. You are a girl shaken, frightened of the wrong thing. That night you sleep on the couch and wake up screaming, having just endured the first nightmare of your life. Pure fear and adrenaline. But it is a known quantity now. Better to understand and be sleep-deprived than rest in confusion. When the morning light comes you have endured seventeen nightmares, each worse than the last. Your eyes are bloodshot and your hands shake, your limbs feel like deadweight. This is the price you will pay for cowardice. That day you are useless. Every sound makes you startle, a touch on the arm is like a shot in the chest. This is no way to live and you know it. But you don’t enter your room again for three weeks.
Then one day you’re up late, finishing a paper, and you drift off. That’s when the nightmare sinks in her claws. You are drowning, breathing in water, and unable to swim. In fact, you are being held down, two hands on your shoulders and a knee on your chest. This is how you will die.
Then there’s a roar like thunder and you’ve suddenly always been awake, banging your head against a midterm essay that has you up past three. You’re not alone. In the corner, something flickers in and out of being, in and out of reality. You can only see it when you stare, long and hard, refusing to blink and resisting the excruciating desire to look away. But you resist, because that’s what you do when you’re stubborn. You know it as soon as you see the form. Its been in your dreams before. Its what chases you into wakefulness. Then you lose the battle, blink, and its gone. No flicker, just a wall.
Never before have you loved a wall. But you would die for this one. It has defeated you, stepped in and done what was right. You couldn’t admit the night staring at the creature was real. But that wall did. That wall gave the creature a place to exist and a place to protect you. That night you open your door and climb into your bed after you finish the term paper. Your sleep is uninterrupted. And the feeling that someone is watching you as you doesn’t disturb you. It makes you smile in your sleep.