In the Way of Dreams

I throw the dream catcher that had once hung above my bed across the room like a Frisbee. The web of sinew catches on the corner of my desk, and a few strands of the intricate netting snap off the leather hoop.

 My new dorm room is small, and there would be no place for such childish trinkets. 

That night, as I drift off to sleep, a distant part of me realizes that this will be the last night I’ll spend in my childhood bedroom, surrounded by those things that have defined my youth. 

In the dream, terror gushes through my body and brain like sour adrenaline. I’m in my grandmother’s cabin, crouching beneath the living room window. It is dark outside, but the forest seems to be infused with a dirty yellow light that makes everything look sick with rot. My stomach is a nest of crawling, stinging things. My intestines buzz. 

A moment before, I had glimpsed the back of the witch’s cloak as she passed by the window. It was quick, just a flash of brown tattered fabric, but it was her shade of brown. 

I raise myself up to peer outside. A feeling of exposure encircles my neck like I’m waiting for the kiss of a guillotine. The sensation creeps down my spine, wraps around my body and seeps in to my buzzing guts. I open my eyes as wide as they will go, willing them to absorb the light that isn’t there. 

Though I cannot see the witch outside, I feel exactly where she is, as if she holds one end of a long rope that is noosed around my neck. 

In the way of dreams, I’m suddenly cowering beneath a different window at the back door at the back of the cabin. The noose slackens around my neck as the witch approaches. I feel her pause outside the door; she knows exactly where I am. The air sitting on the top of my skin vibrates loud enough for her to hear my terror. 

My back is flattened against the peeling white paint of the door; the entire world is reduced to a tarnished doorknob as it turns. Slowly, deliberately, inescapably.

 I scramble back from the door frame, that feeble threshold between the safety of my grandmother’s cabin and the witch’s wooded realm. I’m staring out of the open door into the sickly yellow light of the forest

 She is waiting outside, her shrouded figure silhouetted against the sickly yellow light of the forest. Moving at the speed of erosion, the witch steps through the door, shattering my illusion of its liminal safety. 

Her eyes are polished obsidian and they stare straight through to my bones. She cocks her head to one side, examining me, fixing me in place and time. There is an intelligence behind her gaze that is razor-sharp but slightly twisted, like a schizophrenic bird of prey. 

She grins with lips the color of bruised fruit, revealing her small sharp teeth, then turns and steps back into the forest. As she disappears pale light that had surrounded her dims until I am left staring into a vast and absolute darkness. Black obscurity envelops me, creeping up my arms and into my mouth, filling my lungs and permeating my body until there is nothing left but the dark.

I shatter through the surface of consciousness. My nerves are flash-fried, my mind charred as I gulp huge steadying breaths of reality.

“It’s only a dream,” I tell myself, repeating it over and over like a mantra until the words detached themselves from meaning. I hold Lucky close to my chest, crooning to him as if he were the frightened child. Outside my window, I can hear the white-noise hum of my parent’s window unit.

The nightmare refuses to fade from my mind. The image of the witch’s shiny eyes stir memories that hadn’t been disturbed for twelve years. 

I was six years old when she first appeared in my dreams. Sick with the chicken pox, my fever had spiked to over 104^Õ during the night. By the time my mom came to check on me, the boundary between dream and reality had dissolved into delirium and the witch rode my dreams, carried by fever and sickness.

I recovered from the chicken pox, but not from the nightmares. The witch became the keeper of my dreams and I was her captive. I came to hate my mind for succumbing to sleep.  The moment unconsciousness took me, I was trapped, tortured and terrified. Her domain was devoid of daylight colors. Every dream was seeped in sepia tones, but no less vivid for that. Her presence bound me in a fear so paralyzing that I was powerless to do anything as I watched her annihilate all that was good and beautiful. 

She carved out my baby sister’s eyes; skinned the wings off a butterfly; soaked my kitten in bleach. All of this she did with my mother’s gentle smile covering her sharp clacking teeth.

I would wake each morning so exhausted by sleep that circles dark as bruises colored the skin beneath my eyes. Food tasted like dust; my world was cheerless and traumatized; all its color reduced to the faded brown fabric of the witches’ cloak.

My chicken pox scars had nearly faded completely the day my mom brought home a dream catcher and hung it over my bed. She’d picked it up from a vacation in Taos and told me that the leather-wrapped hoop with its beads and feathers would protect me while I slept. 

I remember thinking how naive my mother was to believe that this souvenir would be any match for the witch’s power. But I liked the way the feathers caught the breeze from the fan above my bed and thought that it would be something pretty to look at before the witch took me under.

As she tucked me in to my pillowed prison that night, my mom told me how dream catchers were meant to look like spider webs. 

“Spiders weave the intricate stories of life,” she said, reading from the small pamphlet that was attached to the gift. “Native Americans hang them above their children’s beds to ensure that only the good stories filter into dreams. These happy tales slip through the holes between the woven strands and glide down the feathers, fluttering into the minds of sleeping children. The bad dreams become ensnared in the webbing, and remain trapped there until the first light of day casts them out.”

It was a nice story, and I held on to it as long as possible before I lost the nightly battle against unconsciousness. 

That night, my dreams were of vibrant jewel-toned peacock feathers. I woke with the first light of day.

After a couple weeks of sleeping through the night, the color returned to my face and I was able to taste the full flavor of life once more. Evil faded from the night and in time the witch was reduced to the pale memory of a bad dream.

           Now, those memories had been resurrected and my mind recalled images so visceral that they seemed to materialize from the darkness of my room into swirling hazy patches of dirty yellow light.

           It was then that I realized that something utterly and fundamentally wrong was happening. Reality stretched and thinned around me. Certainty was sucked from the air. Thoughts twisted and twined in ether and were transformed into things. Nightmare bled through into reality. 

           I saw the shadow of a stooped and hooded figure pass in front of my living room window and my thoughts congealed against my skull. The witch had traveled through the forest to find me.

           Panic wells up inside of me until I think I must scream just to relieve the pressure in my brain, but fear slices my through my voice as it travels up my throat, and all I could do was try not to choke on it. 

           I watch from my bed as the doorknob turns.  The door is thrown open, and the witch steps out of the darkness and over the threshold into my room.

           It is a lie to say that there are only two ways to respond when your life is threatened- fight or flight. You can also just give in. 

           “Well, girl, I’ve found you at last.” Her voice sounds grainy and dry as the words scrape across her coarse tongue. Her small sharp teeth clack down on every syllable. Somewhere, a mind that I had no access to tries to recall whether I had ever heard her speak before.

           “Come here, child, and let me look at you,” she rasps.

           My legs, driven by a will that was not my own, carry me into the center of my room and I plant myself in front of her for inspection. I still clutch Lucky by his tail, like a child clinging to some small shred of comfort. She peers up at me, her face so close to my own that I can feel the malice and madness dripping from her skin. She smells like the soiled dressings wrapped around a decaying limb. 

           “You’re prettier in your dreams,” she pronounces. 

           I can only whimper at her in reply. 

           “Bah!” she clacks at me. “You’re no better than a stuck rabbit. Stop sniveling,” she demands, wringing Lucky from my hand and plucking out his remaining eye before throwing the stuffed animal across the room. 

           “Drink this, you’re no good to me if you die of fright,” she says, producing a glass tinkling blue glass bottle from the folds of her brown tattered cloak. Its contents glisten like sunlight caught in crystal.

“Distilled daydreams,” she explains, disgusted. “Extracted from lullabies of new mothers and the light in a lover’s eye. Tastes like rotten tripe, but it’ll unfreeze your tongue and slacken your brain.” 

           Once more, my body responds to external commands and I open my mouth to receive three drops of honey-colored liquid. It tastes like a first kiss and coats the inside of my mouth. I feel my body go slack and immediately collapse to the floor at the witch’s feet.

           “Now,” she says, teeth flashing like frozen razors in her mouth, “I believe we have a bit of catching up to do.”

           “I thought you were gone,” I bleat up at her.

           I had never heard a true cackle before, but she responds with one so maniacal and crazed that it sounds as if a murder of crows had burst forth from her mouth. I look at the tattered stuffed animal lying face down on the floor, and envy its inanimate condition.  

           “Gone?” she clacks. “Child, I am the creature that came to the Serpent as he slept and gave him dreams of apple trees. I am the mother of madness, the seed of every fear that grows into evil. I am the darkness before there was light. No, little rabbit, that maze of guts might have kept you safe in your bed while it lasted, but I was never gone.”

She grins an ancient, twisted grin, crow’s feet deep as hatchet wounds crinkling at the corners of cold black eyes. 

“Then how did you find me?” I ask.

The crone reaches down and dangles a leather bound hoop from her crooked fingers. My dream catcher. There’s a toxic yellow light leaking from the severed strands of sinew that had torn as I flung it across my room. The sickly glow oozes oozing and pools in a soupy trail that looks like the yellow brick road from hell. 

“You followed it from the forest,” I say her in an empty voice. “From my nightmare.”

“I did nothing. You allowed yourself to forget that the only things tying you to sanity were a few slender strands of sinew. You, who once knew the taste of true terror, have sipped nothing more bitter than a little heartbreak and hassle since you were a child. You got careless,” she cackles, her voice raspy and full of relish. 

“You escaped the web,” I said.

Her teeth clack in agreement

“Why are you here?”

She cocks her head to one side, examining me through eyes that are shiny beads of black stone, and this time she does not look like a bird, but like a monstrous prehistoric eel, slithering along the dark bottom of an ocean floor so deep that it has never been touched by the light of day.

“I spent years hand-crafting your terror,” she explains. “Cultivating your nightmares so that one day I could harvest the fruits of my labor. For the exquisite taste of your terror.” Evil emanates through rotten gums as she smacks her bruised lips. 

Outside, the predawn light had is just beginning to permeate the sky, weak and feeble as hope on a battlefield. I can feel my sanity slipping between the daydream tranquilizer and the thinned reality and the small, sharp, clacking teeth.

“The taste of what?”

The witch plucks Lucky up off the floor, turning him around in her hands before tearing off his head. She sighs, as if weary of explaining herself. Her exhale sounds like grains of desert sand blowing across bleached bones. 

“Human emotions can be so tricky to cultivate, but when they’re planted early, simmered in fever, aged to perfection, and sweetened by surprise, no nectar is sweeter.”

“I don’t—“

“Of course you don’t understand, child. Do you think that the grapes growing fat on the vine understand that they exist to be pulled from the earth, skinned and squashed and left to ruminate in their own guts, suffocated in barrels that gather dust in dark cellars, just waiting for the right time to be consumed?”

Time melts down from the clock on my wall like the yolk of a soft-boiled egg.

“You will be filled to the brim with terror. It will be filtered through your pores, gathered off the of sweat of your brow. I’m eager to taste my handiwork- intense flavors from early childhood that have been allowed to develop with age, rounded off by a nice strong finish. Yes, I’m quite looking forward to it.”

The witch smacks her dry lips together and clacks her teeth one final time. The dreamy quality evaporates from the air, and a wave of nausea hits me hard in the gut. 

The old witch seems to be examining me. With a nod of approval she reaches into her tattered brown cloak and pulls out another glass bottle, this one the color of blood-soaked amber.

A deeply familiar terror starts to envelop me, creeping up my arms and into my mouth, filling my lungs and pooling in fat drops of sweet sweat on my brow. 

As she reaches towards me, I take one final glance around the room I’d grown up in, my childhood toys scattered around the floor. The boxes marked “college” stacked neatly beside the door. Dreams of my future all packed and ready to go.

In that moment, something shifts inside of me.

As the witch raises the dark bottle, the tattered sleeve of her brown cloak falls back and for an instant I catch a glimpse of that tinkling blue light. For the first time in my life, I did not pull away from the evil woman. Instead, I lunge for that bottle. With steady hands, I uncorked the lid.

Something like uncertainty flashes in those malevolent eyes, and in one sure moment, I empty the sparkling contents of daydreams into the witch’s face. The liquid light fell like diamonds across the old woman’s brown leather skin. 

The moment stretches for a lifetime—a lifetime of laughter and happiness and infinite possibility.

Daylight breaks through my window as the witch fractures into a thousand pieces of light, and as the flashes of vibrant colors fall around me, I know that my dreams will forever be my own.