Polaroid Paragraphs #3 - "... and when your eyelids betray you ..."

That moment when happy kids jump from the merry-go-round at the park:  that’s what the end of the dream is always like.  You’re in full motion, whether actual motion or just ensconced in whatever’s going on in the dream, and then suddenly nothing is happening and you’re in bed, staring up at the ceiling or across at the wall.

Often it's the cabin, but other times, somewhere in the woods, deep in the underbrush, and you knew that safety was out there – somewhere – but you don’t know which direction or how much undergrowth you're going to have to work your way through, as silently as possible.  You start the dream with your heart pounding and your breath ragged, like you’d been chased there, but there was no other place you could remember.  Only this place.  It wasn’t that it wasn’t safe to go back to where you’d started, but that there was no starting point to go back to, like you’d always been right there, and you’d always been fleeing, running, running, running in place with nothing to show for your efforts.

You start working your way through the brush, getting snagged almost immediately in thorns. They aren’t big flesh-ripping thorns, just little nubbins, really.  Just enough to bog you down.  Just enough to make the bushes rustle, highlighting your location.  Slowly you’d have to turn and unhook yourself from each one, with the least amount of effort and the least amount of noise.

Your pulse pounds in your head, like the same semi truck sailing by you overandoverandover on a wet freeway, the loud rush and and blast of pressure that pass then come again, like when you have headphones on and there’s nothing in your audible universe but the blood in your body, crying again and again to be heard.

But you know it’s almost there, because the ground shakes from the leftrightfrontrear and it’s close.  You’re just one branch, one thorn, one snag from being free when you feel an arm’s worth of air rush by your shoulder and you know the next will land, claws first, dirty yellow claws julienning your back from collar to cleft and the world twists.

And flings you out of the dream. You’re safe now, but not and not ever.  Today or tomorrow, you’ll nod off again, and then where will you be?