You know…the ones that are so vivid and terrifying that you waste the rest of the night’s precious sleeping hours binge-watching mindless sitcoms to calm your nerves? You turn off your alarm early because you’re already wide awake. You rise and do the zombie shuffle because your joints ache from the dream’s physical effects. You’re in too much of a sleep-deprived stupor to do anything productive, so your whole day is just a haze of half-assed conversations and a distinct productivity downturn. You suck down caffeine as if the Ghost of Christmas Present just passed you a 40 of the milk of human kindness.
I had one of those the other night. Eighteen hours after the “incident”, I wrote it down. It was a short account, but still vivid in my head. I read it back. It scared the hell out of me. It still scares the hell out of me now. In this story, I was the star. I didn’t like that.
So now, I’ve got two crisp pages of words. Individually, these words are all fairly benign. But when I string them together in this order and read it back, my goosebumps stand at attention and I feel a twinge of adrenaline. It’s amazing how a couple hundred words slung together can invoke the fight or flight reaction.
So what do I with it now? Maybe someday, I’ll let someone else read it and tell me if it’s worth putting out there. But not yet. I am definitely not ready for that discussion. For now, I’ll keep it stashed away, where it can’t harm anyone…