All of my nightmares, in the end, are about water.
[amanda]
This afternoon, I took a nap and immediately descended into the grip of night terrors the likes of which I haven't had in a year or more. They were the slightly watered down afternoon version, but still formidable, wrapping me in a paralysis so complete I couldn't even part my lips to scream.
The series of nightmares I had bent and blurred together, underscored by a strange thread: I was walking down a street in an unfamiliar city with a woman I'd never seen before and didn't quite trust or like. Eventually we paused at a doorway, and she ushered me into an odd room, empty except for a few seemingly random objects on small tables.
There was a tiny framed poster of an Asleep at the Wheel concert that occurred decades ago, a small icon of the Virgin Mary in bright blues and reds, and something else that caught my eye: a tiny, handheld doorway fitted with an actual door that swung back and forth on hinges no larger than my smallest fingernail. I picked it up and gently turned the impossibly small doorknob with the tips of my fingers, and the door swung out to reveal something strange inside- an even tinier door, set askew in its foundation and weirdly shaped, its angles jutting out in an oddly triangular fashion.
It worked as well as the last one- I could see it was mechanistically perfect, down to the impossibly small deadlock bolt- but it looked as though it had been made of pieces of broken glass melted together. I moved to open it as well, but something stayed my hand. I heard a sharp inhalation from the woman, who had moved closer to gaze over my shoulder.
"You've found the three-posted door," she breathed. When I didn't respond, she went on. "It's the door to your perfect life, the life you dream of," she said, her manner suddenly sly as she pointed to the tiny inner door shining with refracted light. Her nails were very red. "Everyone has one, but not everyone finds the door." I stared at the small, shattered triangle, the glass so cracked and layered it was impossible to see through it with any clarity. I didn't think to even question how I would be able to pass through such a tiny entrance; it seemed entirely possible. I saw that the glow of the door was not reflected back from the room after all as I'd thought, but rather pulsed from the world beyond the glass.
When I next heard her voice, I realized she'd backed away to the entrance to the room. "You can choose to go in, but know that you can never come back out again." She laughed suddenly, showing all her teeth, and ducked out the door behind her. I pitched forward into another round of nightmares that I can't recall, except for this one, the memory of it crystal clear as I gasped awake in my hot, silent bedroom. My first instinct was to fling my arms around myself tightly, a long forgotten habit from my earliest childhood, when a bad dream terrified me awake but I was too afraid to cry out or run to the safety of my sister's bed.
On the surface, there is nothing nightmarish about this- finding the door to your dream life?- but it haunts me today more than far more frightening dreams have. I'm not sure why. It has something to do with the smallness of the room and the strangeness of the objects within it, the desire mingled with fear in the woman's voice, the frank impossibility of a three-posted door. I moved through the rest of the day with these things resurfacing in my thoughts again and again- the guide that left me, the choice I woke up never having made, the door that can't exist.
