BLEED

Dreams

     All dreams start and end the same way, with you asleep. That whole world conjured, cast, and gone. All the while you sleep away. I've seen some of the grandest structures, immaculate castles of worlds not yet lived, towering pillars of light and shadow, the most amazing things I've seen and heard, have all been while I slept. Leagues away from my own body, my own mind, gallivanting through fields of limbs, their wild disproportionate digits of fingers and toes striking and gripping at my clothes. Miles away from any thought or prayer that would lead to a place of conjecture or understanding to the wild things I would lay witness to, a world of sleeping legends and giants and horrors and greater things we'd not dare put names to, a world we'd enter and make our own. A world where we'd deign an existence ours, take hold of the reigns and ride on through it as if we owned every syllable that comprises the words I use to make the description, total surrender to a new life, a new goal, a new world in which you would never have thought existed until you fell asleep, and then wondered if you'd be lucky to remember when you waked.
    That is where I was now, that is where everything became my dream, or rather where I started dreaming, because this certainly couldn't be happening, not the crash, or the eyes averting their gaze from it, or the second crash, or the teeth, the pointed canines of brown laced enamel that stuck in like needles to my neck. No only dreams had men with hooked noses and hyena laughs that came wearing mismatched socks under their faded converse, witha  pointless sun hat and medallion eyes that bored through yours and right into your soul. Only dreams could construct fanged hit and runs that ended in soliloquys about sleep and crashing cars, only dreams. But it was the dream I was having now. The nightmare that had been born to life by a simple bite. Little sumps of perfectly straight enamel waving their way into a series of genetics and perfectly understood biology by people far smarter than me, unwinding and unbinding it, turning each and every little cell into something altogether new, an infection that would commiserate by completion, anesthetized all that would've been me and stopped it dead. Dead as me. Dead as him. The stink clinging to his mouth, a hundred flies guzzling maggots kind of smell. And it would be my smell soon.
     It felt as though I had been lifted off the earth once more, I had been flying a lot recently, but it was here I realized how beside myself I truly was. A spectre hovering above this unwelcome nuzzling, thing drinking of my blood. Had I ever considered the realness of such a thing existing, a true to life vampire, I would've certainly ate more garlic in my life. Though I doubt an Adderall filled bloodstream would be all that advantageous to their diet. Would they get the jitters for a moment after drinking me dry, I'm sure his next assault would be far more planned than this one I'd say.
     Here above myself I realized one more unnecessary detail that would've sent my heart sinking deeper into my stomach could I still feel my body. I was not floating away, simply watching it all unfold. There was no grander light calling me on as I'd prayed for, no darkness consuming my ever present consciousness that just refused to let go of this waking world. Just an astrally projected sense of self hovering above this vile creature, this predator that I was too keen to believe in. The perfect prey. And as if to solidify my terror he raised his head from my neck, blood trailing down his chin, a hound basking in its meal I thought for just the moment. Until his silver dollar eyes saw me. Not the corpse, no. He saw me. Floating there in the air his medallions froze me in my panoramic camera view, what ever I could still feel in this form, fear was certainly one of them.
     "Hey champ, this next part is really going to suck." He said wiping the blood on his chin with a handkerchief from his back pocket. Looking away from me, he turned back to my body and placed his cherry stained fingers upon my temples. He started to chuckle to himself, my perception falling to the prone state my body was in, as though anchored by his boney fingers. Here I could see the hollows of his eyes. Here is where my body would change forever. Here is where I could feel the cold wrath that permeated from his unbeating heart. Here is where I would watch as he changed whatever pleasant future was beheld by my fates and whisked it from their caring hands unto his.
     His fingers slipped into my skull as if he were putting on fitted gloves. Those lengthy digits weaving their way through the webby mess in which my brain had become over the course of its agonizing existence. Though I'd not relish the idea of grasping at the scene and trying to make it more grand than it was and-it was scary. It was very fucking scary. The ease at which I saw the fingers pass into me, though a projected haunted wreck of a soul I could feel those fingers pronging through the heaps of grey matter which made me, me. They were making me something altogether different. It wasn't until I could feel his blood in my veins, intertwining with mine in some perversely raw and uncomfortable way. Each vein an avenue for his sickly corruption to web it's way through my skin, every cell assaulted by his disease, his malignant heart poisoning me with a curse he gave out like a gift, something I'd be carrying infinitely within my own heart. Within my own mind.
     Every facet of my mind becoming wracked with the reality that the dream were coming to an end. The dream that I had been enjoying so much wasn't any of those fantastical worlds in which I were a hero or wizard braving glory on some enigmatic quest, but my life. The dream that I had been having of a normal life. Of a life where I got a hot dog in between two sides of bun. A dream where I got a job from some mediocre interview, a life where I didn't get side swiped by a grievously ugly Prius. A dream in which my very existence didn't become altered through sheer other worldly experience and terror, a life that would've been worth all that living. All the hard living that made you wake from your dreams and wish you'd stayed asleep. That there is the true dream, and this fucker woke me from it.

And I woke up hungry.