I’m sure I’m
I’m sure I’m dreaming at first, although it’s unlike any dream I’ve had before.
This one has the texture of my sheets and the sound of my hair rubbing on the pillow and it moves in real time without the wild swings that telescope and compress dream time usually.
And I can smell in this dream. Can you smell in dreams?
I smell smoke and sweat and someone else’s soap.
None of that is too distressing and I’m close to sleep again when suddenly there are hands on my limbs, holding me down, tight around my ankles pressing my heels into the bed, even tighter at my elbows crushing little bones there and sending pain twanging all the way to my fingertips.
I try to cry out but there’s something over my mouth, damp and sharply stinking, and just as I come to know for sure that this is real, I feel myself slip and I’m gone.
After that, it’s a muffled nonsense of half-heard words and a slipping down helter-skelter, sick making and endless, of movement and jostling.
I am sure at one point that I’m upside down.
There might be a car or perhaps it’s a little cart.
There was a cart once, low to the ground with enormous wheels, that rattled and juddered as it went.
Sometimes I pulled it along and sometimes I was pulled along in it and I remember laughing.
I am sobbing now, sore and scared, and wishing—as I feel myself rise out of the murk into consciousness—that I could stay down in the dark and keep believing that none of it is true.