St. Anthony's Dreams

Fiction again, blah blah blah

Day 2

Coucher tomorrow, grand times.  How to explain this?  I'm not even sure where to begin.  Exhausted, constant.  I think.  Perhaps it's the lack of sleep, the hardwired early awakening battling the nights stretching later and later.  And the dreams.  No, the dreams dissipated.  Mundane, fantastical, purely ridiculous, but I'm always on the verge of dying, being torn apart, eaten, devoured or destroyed until a voice, no, my voice rips me from sleep and there I am in my bed, shocked back to reality and slowly realizing that the threat is gone.  And I dive back in, ready to fix my situation, to snatch life from that last hopeless moment.  Any reality, any plausibility, discarded in favor of feats of impossibility.  An army dead at the hands of a kitchen knife, an escape made with blinding speed, the rules of physics shattered by the appearance of magic.  Anything to save my life.

Those dreams of near-death, punctuated by their absurd moments, are never worrisome.  They prove controllable once their nature becomes clear.  It's the mundane, the dreams that seem real, that are the most terrifying.  The ones where I'm the monster.  Dreams of fighting with people I love, yelling and being unreasonable.  There is no voice from above shaking me from those dreams and I awake thinking that they were real.  I have to check to make sure I hadn't said the things I did in my dreams.  But the Coucher loves the absurd dreams, glosses over these.  There are symbols in absurdity.

But there are temptations in near-reality.  Sometimes... there are no monsters.  No demons.  The devil at his finest, temptation that cuts deep.  St. Anthony in the desert, facing a cave of demons, shredded, killed and returned--  There's easy faith in the face of monsters.  But in the face of beauty, comfort?  No need for the divine when the demons are a welcome facsimile.  No, no, this is simply sedated pondering.  Again.  Those Saints were schizophrenics, epileptics, madmen on the right side of God.  No divine, no demonic, just the haywire chemical world seen through overzealous eyes.

No dreams yet.  I wonder what will happen.  I guess it's working in fits.  A smile and nod, no rushed reaction and a kindly held door.  Fine, fine.  Slow speech, considerate and deliberate.  Nausea, maybe, maybe, and exhaustion, but that's been covered.  No tests yet, really.  Thursday, perhaps, and Saturday for certain.  No more tap-tap-tap and is this not-panic, not-worry, just c-c-calm?  "She swore, in faith 'twas strange, 'twas passing strange."  Faith indeed.