Dreams I Might Have Had

Ah yes, the nightmare. It's the kind of dream we don't want to have. It's the kind of dream your mother warned you about. It's the kind of dream that's so bad, you actually want to wake up in the middle of it screaming, just so it ends before you die. It's the horror show the plays out in your mind, in those deep, dark crevices where nothing lives but your anxieties.

Charles Dickens wrote about nightmares-it's how Ebenezer Scrooge was born. Alice Cooper sang about them, happily, while wearing ghoulish make-up and wielding a fake guillotine. Many artists have actually been inspired by that horror of horrors which only plays out in our subconscious.

Most of the dreams that I can remember are actually nightmares. I can once recall an especially vivid dream in which my house was on fire and I had to jump-to plummet to the ground from my second story bedroom window-just to save myself. I landed in one of the big bushes that grew by my house, under my bedroom window, but it was burning too. A fatal leap, a burning bush, these are references of Biblical proportions-all hidden away in my very own dreamland. I'm still afraid to find out what they really mean-I don't want to go back to that place again, it's way too dark and I don't want to languish there.

Makes me almost happy I don't remember my dreams. Well, I did say almost.