Sleep of Treason

I yanked myself out of REM sleep yesterday morning, and was a walking husk the rest of the day…

I’d been dreaming I was in a SmartCar jammed with five other people. We were driving through a jungle swampland when I noticed a large inflatable dayglo green snake that seemed staged around tree limbs in the canopy above.

On another giant cypress tree there’s a 20 foot long orange-yellow banded crocodile with a snake body, ambulating on tiny cartoon legs, making its way down to the passenger side windows. It opens its maw revealing a toothless interior. The sharp tang of fear is redolent in the tiny car. We are all frozen.

Then in a small house filled with the same people from the SmartCar, there is a back slapping agreement and a tap on the belly of someone in cahoots that someone in the party needs to be educated about racist terms. A tacit agreement to tell him to stop calling people that.

Someone turns the lights out, because it’s imperative that we hide, but a spotlight is shining in from darkened jungle revealing where I’m standing in the room. I can’t see through the dark windows, and I’m unable to move far enough away out of the spot light. Im unable to conceal myself. I don’t want to be taken.

I will myself to wake up and move, but I can’t break through the layers of unconsciousness even though I’m aware this is a dream. I violently try to shake off the cloaks of sleep.

I awoke to early morning light streaming in through the blinds. The bed empty.

“O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a
king of infinite space — were it not that I have bad dreams.”

— William Shakespeare / Hamlet