Dream a Little Dream

I thought all my dreams would feature the man in the gray suit, but then I had one that didn't. It was perhaps even weirder than the other dreams, though.

I was folding clothes straight from the dyer. They felt warm and soft. Then I heard the singing. It wasn't the song that the child song, no, this was a different song.

"He wear no shoeshine,
He got toe jam football,
He got monkey finger,
He shoot Coca Cola,
He say I know you,
You know me,
One thing I can tell you is you got to me free."

I walked into the kitchen. I felt slow, lethargic. The floor was a crisscrossed pattern of black and white.

In the kitchen, I saw the child again. He was smiling at me and I raised the gun again and I shot him, then I shot him again. I didn't even realize I was holding the gun. The bullets hit him in the chest and the shoulder and made splashes of blood. His smile didn't leave his face.

He started to shake and then dance.

"He rollercoaster,
He got early warning,
He one mojo filter,
He say one and one and one is three,
Got to be good lookin'
'Cause he's so hard to see."

I backed away just as he exploded. Blood splattered me in the faces and I closed my eyes. When I opened them, I wasn't in my kitchen anymore. I was in a circus tent. Lights flashed around me, illuminating the black and white stripes of the tent.

I was in the center and there were rows and rows of people watching me. I could see their blank faces shaking in laughter. I heard a voice behind me.

There was a man with a megaphone. He held a tophat in one hand and had a handlebar mustache. He wore a coat of red and yellow with golden epaulettes. He looked kind of like Cesar Romero, the actor who played the Joker in the old '60s Batman series. "Ladies and germs!" he spoke into the megaphone. "Witness! The cure for the common cold! The killer of children! Gaze upon her sad face, watch as she lays in bed and cries all day long, mock her all you want! Go on!"

He turned to me and lowered his megaphone. "How did it feel? Good? Did you enjoy shooting the boy?"

"Who are you?" I asked.

"She speaks!" the man shouted into the megaphone. "She cuts straight to the point! She wants to know who I am!" The crowd tittered. The man turned back to me. "I am just a dream, my dear. Your subconscious mind at work. A fanciful reverie, you might say."

"Then I'd like to wake up," I said.

"Too bad," he said. "You are just too dangerous, my dear. Better you stay asleep."

I still had the gun in my head, so I lifted it up and pointed it at him.

"Oh, my dear," he said, "that's not the real gun, it's all part of the dream." He snapped his finger and then I wasn't holding the gun at all, I was just pointing my finger at him. "You see?"

I looked at my hand. I opened it so I could see my palm and then closed it. I didn't know what I was doing. My body - my dream body, it wasn't even my real body - was acting on its own. My fist closed and suddenly I remembered all the dreams I had ever had, each and every one of them. Dreams about school, showing up naked to work, dreams about my mother and my father, every anxiety dream I ever had, ever dream I had ever remembered or forgotten.

Then I opened my hand and there was a bullet. It gleamed like nothing I had seen. It wasn't real.

It was a dream bullet.

The man with the megaphone looked at me with anger. "You shouldn't be able to do that," he said. "This is my world."

"But this is my dream," I said. The gun appeared in my other hand and I carefully loaded in the dream bullet.

The audience of the tent stood up all at the same time and attacked. I saw men with cutlasses and women with beards and men who breathed fire and they were all rushing forward towards me. They seemed to melt together into an amalgam of every nightmare, their faces twisting into different forms, their limbs becoming amorphous.

I didn't stop, however. I aimed and pulled the trigger and time slowed, like last time. The bullet twisted in the air and it seemed to pull the crowd behind it. Not just the crowd, not just the nightmare people, but the entire circus tent, too. The backdrop peeled away as the bullet flew forward and the man with the megaphone screamed and his mouth grew bigger until it was larger than his entire body and he consumed himself.

Everything fell away then, leaving a nothingness all around me. I closed my eyes and when I opened them I was awake.