Nightmares

Often, I'm a lucid dreamer. Lately, however, I've had dreams where I've been aware of the dream nature, but unable to influence the dream or to wake up from it.

The recurring motif is a black cat - more of a very small, very thin (almost emaciated) panther - that is slowly gnawing off my right hand. In some dreams, I'm surrounded by people - in the first, we were playing Trivial Pursuit. In others, I'm alone, headed somewhere. Sometimes I can shake it off for a moment; other times, it has its claws too deeply in my arm.

It starts at the space between the thumb and pointer. Though I swear that it pauses to savor those first bites, it eventually picks up speed, tearing and gulping, almost unhinged and careless. It does not make a sound. Nor do I. I only try to shake it off, for as long as I'm able, before my arm gets heavy, before it stops to look at me, coldly, as if it could stare me into acceptance.

Or worse, as if to let me know acceptance or struggle matter not a bit.

Charlie Brown's Teacher

I have been tongue-tied today. Even simple sentences and words have required some little struggle. This post is a small act of will: me yelling at a storm.

The first lecture of the day was an ordeal, and I'm certain no one got anything useful out of it. This is mostly because I felt like every time I approached something nuanced - not even profound or particularly difficult - things got difficult. It started well enough, even allowing me perhaps eight minutes of comfort before my speech got muddy. It was a bit like a waking dream in that regard: I could look out and, as I spoke, watch the wave of confusion flow out from me, feeling students even as it induced yawns and checks of the clock.

I've really had dreams like this: where I'm in front of the class, and every word out of my mouth is some incomprehensible speech even I couldn't understand. In the dreams, there's an element of horror to it, like being trapped in a body-cast as the world goes to hell around you or having your voice stolen from you just when you need it most. These have always been the most horrifying dreams to me - the ones where I've no control but no one around can see that something has been taken from me.

That's what today felt like. And even when it wasn't that bad, the thread of what I wanted to say was hard to grasp and seemed to dance just out of reach.

The thread of this post is doing it now, in fact.

But, like the lectures, I am through it. And very little seems worse for it.