Fever Dreams

It feels as if I am moving from dream to dream, it's like I'm in one place secure and happy with what is going on around me and then suddenly without any warning I'm hurling through time and space trying to catch my footing before I tumble into a volcano. It's the kind of dreaming that you have when a fever takes you. It's hard, fast and completely based in a language no one but the truly insane will ever understand. Life seems okay, I'm six years old smiling at my father from across the dinner table and then flash forward; now I am watching him cry at my funeral.

I can't make sense of these dreams. They haunt me like waking nightmares, even in the bright sunlight of midday there they are hiding just over my shoulder taunting me with every breath I dare not take. At this very moment I am being eaten in the tall grasses by a creature I cannot name screaming to every god that can't hear me begging for death, meanwhile my carcass is rotting in the ice caves of a dark city farther north. Is this the future hunting me? Am I to learn my fate? Or are these just fever dreams, led on by my welcoming insanity to embrace me. I will never know. If these are truly my futures, one of many choices I have left to make, I have too many roads to walk and too many places to go before I get there, it will be a surprise no matter how I try to move on. And now I am an old woman nothing more than flesh and rotting bones. A widow in a broken house with no one but ghosts left to comfort me.

I am fearful, in the same way that all of us fear what has not come to pass, but though all of this I know I am not to live this way. I am not the kind to cower and shake. I will look over my shoulder I will laugh take a deep breath and scream: "Come and get me if you dare!" I do not fear death for I am death and life and everything important and nothing that matters. I am both the present and the past, the living and the dead. I am not scared of what I am nor what I might become. Those who cannot learn to know me will leave, time will pass and I shall remain a nightmare, a figure in the dark and the light that shines to give you hope in your darkest of dreams. I will be the dream you cannot wake from. I will be the angel and the devil and I shall fear none but gods and goddesses who made me. None can judge me for only those who truly know me can see me for myself. I shall be the torment and I will help the victim. Never again will fear force me to be anyone I am not.

I will wake from this fever whole and unharmed and once these dreams have passed I will take my place in the hall of nightmares that scare you in the night. Never again will you see me in the daylight hours for now I am nothing, just a creature of the night.

Sweet Dreams,

Mayhem