The Wheel of Death

There is a period between sleeping and no longer sleeping where your dreams continue and you live in a different state.

Nightmare dreams become situations dangerously out of control, you fear. You fear for life, for limb, for comfort for safety. Most of all the wish is for the ride to stop and to allow you to descend and laugh about the fear later somewhere, in a safe retreat. This loss of control is central in anyone's fear of the unknown, of fate. The wheel of life contains an implied death. The wheel of death is a crushing prospect, like those kept in mediaeval images from woodcuts in olden books. And what we want above all else, for arms to wrap around the dreamer and whisper sweet nothings in the ear and feel the steady heartbeat of one who knows your fear is silly, passing, immaterial, would be eternal happiness itself. The heartbeat of another as you lay your ear against their chest is the sweetest hymn, like the giggling of children, like water in a drought, like being chosen for that thing you thought you'd never make.  Nightmares are real enough and none should assume that fiction read in books or heard about in tales is based on anything bar fact and experience.

But there does exist something worse than nightmare.  The trickster dream.  Some children, sleeping in an abandoned factory after the wave washed away their town and left them scavengers in an alien world of grasping instincts and inhuman horrors, dream of their mothers and fathers, their day to day going to school, playing with friends, eating their meals and having cosy beds at day's end.  Upon awakening, they remain, for a few short moments only, disconnected from reality, living their past lives, not party to the sight of the missing roof or acknowledging the bare pitted concrete beneath their frozen, emaciated limbs.  The trickster has taken away the hardness of spirit one must develop in these regions of earthly pain and taken them back to a time when they felt safe, felt loved, felt as if they belonged somewhere.

Nothing belongs anywhere. Nothing is safe. Love changes in the blink of an error, the harshness of Nature, the whim of the Other.  The child is unprotected as the wave tears them apart again, this time without there being even a wave there.  The force of water and shit and shards of glass has left the corporeal world and inveigled... no, broken itself into the very psyche of the unprotected mind where it eats away for the remainder of the natural life of that child, will grow with him or her, will tear down any recovery it seems to the awake there might be.  With luck the child will prosper, will grow in property, in friends, will buld themselves a new life and rebuild a family, it happens all the time.  The cruelty of experience dwells within them like a malarial protozoan ready ever to strike at moments of weakness, inattention or relaxation.  

Dreams are cruel for they exist to taunt us. To make plain what is not.  And, though we can escape with drugs, whores, self-immolation of every kind, they just dam the pain till it can burst our defences once more. The wheel of death is an insufferable crusher of spirit and some mistake it for living.