i dreamed a dream

a more bloggy post than usual

“Kriemhild sieht im Traum den toten Siegfried,” Henry Fuseli

I have a lot of nightmares—really, the majority of my dreams are probably nightmares. I’ve been told that unusually vivid dreams are a side effect of one of the medications I take, but why they’re mostly nightmares I could not tell you. Most of my nightmares are just unpleasant but shaken off when I wake up, but some leave an unpleasant smear over the subsequent day. What distinguishes the viscous dreams from the vaporous ones is—usually—the level of violence, but also the sense of a message. The dreams that linger unpleasantly touch on real fears or bring to surface emotions I did not know I had. To have dreams where I fail, over and over again, to understand non-Euclidean geometry while a murder cult runs amok—well, I already failed to understand non-Euclidean geometry in real life, and the murder cult is just weird. That’s a dream that just feels like unpleasant noise. When it’s over it’s over.

But a dream where somebody I …