Don't Worry I'll soon Tire of old journals, but in the meantime . . .

A Dream, A Thought, A Concept, A Story

May 1st, 2001

I dreamed about him again last night. Maybe I shouldn't say again, it gives the impression I do it all the time. It's not all the time, anymore. But it's not the first time either.

Of course he was killing me. In the dream, I mean.

There was a pill, a single capsule, that when swallowed by an ordinary person not requiring the medication, would kill them. Oh, he's tried to kill me before in dreams. He's shot me, stabbed me, strangled me with ropes, scarfs, wound-up sheets, his own hands, he's kicked me to death, punched me, thrown me about a room in a superhuman tirade, he held my head under water once until I drowned.

Logically, you might imagine these dreams to be more frightening than death by a tiny capsule. They were horrible nightmares. They always involved some sort of long chase. Through large houses, open fields, down long winding dirt roads, through forest thickets in the middle of the night.

He always caught me. He always killed me.

But last night's dream was different and the most frightening of all. We were just in the same place at the same time, and other people were there as well. We were in the same group, at the same party. A campground, an excursion in nature. And for the first time he looked me in the eye and told me his intentions, warned me what would come. Calmly, he picked up the prescription bottle and in front of everyone he explained that he knew of this particular medication. That while Marilyn required a daily dosage just to maintain, if one capsule strayed and found itself in any of our mouths, that person would die within minutes.

He didn't say he intended to poison me. Yet he threatened me. Only he and I knew exactly how much he threatened me. I spent the remainder of the dream proceeding in caution, watching what I ingested, waiting for the inevitable, wondering what the onset would feel like. A pounding ache in my chest or head? A choking of my breath? No one explained how death would manifest.

Morning arrived before he made his move.

I awoke with an odd sense of doom. This was the worse yet of The Killing Dreams, because I see now that's how he intended it to play out in real life. He tried to kill me with such malice and deliberate thought, more than any of the horror dreams. And he nearly succeeded. I almost let him do it. No, I did let him do it. When the time came I was obedient, I swallowed the pills and chased them with the wine and beer and laid down ready. I went to sleep expecting to see God or the devil or at the very least my grandfather, but instead there was only blackness and silence and then morning light and him disappointed he hadn't had more drugs, more alcohol. He underestimated my body's immunity to such things. Didn't realise how much I ingested on a regular basis.

I marvel now at his deliberateness and the caution he took, how everything depended on delivery rather than words, protecting himself, deflecting blame. Using harmless words and phrases nobody could suspect when repeated out of context. No one could see the calculated hits. Only if you were present and very observant might you notice his stone eyes and hear the cruel mocking lilt of his voice.

Perhaps this is the final Killing Dream because I've finally seen how it happened. The chases, the shootings and all the others were too dramatic, too far-fetched. He never laid a finger on me in real life, and yet I was always afraid. Now, I understand. He was trying to kill me. It was some sort of sick experiment. I was the lab rat and nothing more.

He told me once, long ago, that he had held someone's life in his hands and for a moment he considered extinguishing it. But he couldn't do it, he said, even though he believed it was the perfect situation to allow him to escape without consequences, to never get caught. I always wondered if he had done it but wouldn't confess. Or maybe he regretted this lost opportunity. Perhaps I offered him a second chance.