Life Dreams

I woke up in a dream.

In the dream, I was a thirty-ish bank clerk. Balding and overweight, I hated my job but couldn’t figure a way out. I had no wife, or girlfriend. I had an education that was going to waste. I had no discernable skills, although I fancied myself an artist and writer. I lived a life of quiet desperation. I had many friends who were my one true joy. I lived my life to its end and was reported as a bad smell by my neighbours.

I woke up. The leprosy was still eating my flesh off of me. My wife still had AIDS and my children, their stomachs bloated from malnutrition, looked at me with dead eyes, hopelessness embedded on their faces. I watched my wife waste away, my children die of starvation, my fingers and toes, arms and legs and face, all rot away one by one. Blindness and madness claimed me. When I die it’s a relief.

I woke up. That bastard had done it again, raped me and beat me and raped me again. He was sitting in the living room watching COPS and drinking Jim Beam. He would work himself up and come in the bedroom and rape me again. I stood up, blood dribbling down my legs onto the floor. I didn’t care any more. I walked to the kitchen, leaving bloody footprints, and picked up the frying pan, and walked to the living room, and swung it once, and missed. He looked and me and took it from me and split open my skull and my brains stained the wall.

I woke up. There were things living under my skin, and I shrieked and shrieked, and the demons in white came and stabbed me with their needle fingers, trapping me inside my mind, disconnecting my mouth from my brain, and the food-demon shoved baby food into my mouth and she scratched her fat ass with the food shovel. The demons in white with their sharp pointy fingers disconnect my arms from my body and roll me back to my cage, and strap me to the torture rack and leave me in a puddle of my own urine. I feel my tongue slide back and back and back, filling my lungs and then the black came and took me.

I woke up. I packed the newspapers under the cardboard and tried to hide them behind the dumpster. Maybe they won’t be taken. Maybe they will. I finish my bottle of beer and stumble into the street. I pee on an SUV. Hah! Bastards. They’re all bastards. They did this to me. So I pee on them. I beg enough money to buy enough beer to let me forget. I go to sleep one night and become a statistic.

I wake up. My life is what it is, not a race, not a competition. A journey to be undertaken, a lesson to be learned. There is always joy to be found.