Nightmare

2:49 a.m.

I have to write this nightmare as it's still fresh in my mind.

I'm in the park, I'm very young - I don't know how old, and my parents aren't there. I don't know if family friends are supposed to be watching over me or if I ran off, but I'm by myself in a corner of the park. It's a very familiar area so I know I've played here before.

The man that approaches me is quite clean and wearing a suit and he has a briefcase like he just got out of work and he's going home. He says something to me and he puts down his briefcase and I've gone to see what's in it.

I don't know if it's the nature of the dream or what, but it's like something skips a beat, and he's got that knife, and I can feel it about my neck, I mean, I can really, really feel it. It's not cold, it's not hot, it's just sharp but not breaking skin and I'm too terrified to actually scream. I'm limp like a rag doll because I don't know what to do and he keeps talking but I don't know what he's saying because there's the knife and I can't see anything else. It's all in that knife - but I can feel the wetness on my head that could either be sweat or his tears, I don't know which and I don't care.

There's another skip, and it's like I woke up, and I'm finally trying to get out of his grasp. That knife slips and I feel it cut me and I'm crawling and stumbling and I feel with my hand and there's blood, and he's already caught up with me and I'm on the ground and I see him fall over me.

His hand is over my eye and he's pushing the back of my head into the ground this way and his fingers separate and the knife is there again and I can see it above my eye pointing down at me - it's so close that I think my eyelashes could touch it if I could blink. And then it's over.

It's over because I woke up. That wasn't more than ten minutes ago.

I've woken up quite startled from a nightmare before, but I think this may be the first time that I woke up with such abject terror. I wasn't even in my own bed. When I woke up I was on my knees in front of my closet door because I had banged my head against it. I can only assume that I ran right into it from my bed where I had fallen asleep reading on top of the covers.

The pain in my right eye was incredible but it faded very quickly as I became more conscious of what was happening. I looked at it already in the bathroom mirror - there's nothing wrong with it. But looking in the mirror brought something more to my attention that I can honestly say I haven't given thought to since God knows when.

I have a scar on my chin that I've had for as long as I can remember, it seems. I don't give it much thought because it's fairly small and for the most part unnoticeable unless you get very close. The goatee I sport most of the time completely covers it up.

I've never bothered to inquire too much about where it came from because it's never interested me. When you're a kid you have accidents, you get scars. It's really not important. It just means you were out being a kid. Now I'm not so sure. I'm uneasy. I know how many times I've said that I don't believe in dreams having any kind of real interpretive nature to them, but I've never been so scared from one before.

The silence in this apartment is ridiculous, even though I've turned my music up.

I'm sorry if I wrote something incoherent up there. I don't want to read it again right now. I'd rather talk about the aftereffects of this thing than the thing itself.

I think I may call my parents tomorrow and see if they can't tell me something about the scar on my chin. I find it hard to believe that if something that traumatizing happened to me that they'd keep it from me, but honestly it wouldn't be the first time that they've neglected to tell me something because they've been afraid of how I'll react to it. My parents sometimes still treat me like the kid that was so depressed and introverted through most of his childhood for seemingly no reason.

It's possible that they don't know anything anyway. Kids show up with cuts sometimes, and sometimes those cuts turn into scars later just because of how fast a kid heals. The mark on my chin could just as easily have been from falling off a jungle gym.

All the same, I think going back to sleep tonight isn't going to be a very simple affair. I'm not really frightened anymore by simple way that my logic convinces me that there's nothing to really be afraid of right now - I can reason myself out of a great many emotional contrivances if I try. But I'm not terribly anxious to have a repeat of that moment. Never before have I had such a raw sort of fear put into me like that. It may have passed now but that doesn't mean it still isn't fresh in my mind.

There's little more I can say about this now. It's odd enough that my first impulse was to write about this in a forum that's publically read. I'm going to watch television until I've put this out of my head.

previous / next