Company in My Dreams [Glimpses of Faith - Journal]
Company in my dreams
(January 22, 1998)
Had the dream again last night. Only this time it was different.
It begins the way it always does: in the field, in the dark. I’m running again, being chased, and there’s the breathing sound behind me, as usual. But all of a sudden, halfway across the field, I realize that I’m holding tight onto someone’s hand, and I look down and see that there’s a little girl running next to me, maybe six or seven years old with dark hair and olive skin, wearing a nightgown or a sheet or something. She starts to slow down and I say, “Come on, move faster,” and she screams back, “I’m trying,” but she’s not running fast enough so I bend down and scoop her up, keep on going. She’s got her arms around my neck and it’s hard to breathe with the extra weight, but I know I’ve got to get a move on, so I struggle along, holding her close to me.
We get to the gate of bones, and I lean down to open it, but instead of struggling with the latch which is what usually happens, the girl reaches out and opens it herself. The gate swings open and we stumble through, closing it behind us just as the heavy thing hits it on the other side, shaking the gate and the high-reaching wall of skulls on either side of it. I put the girl down and fall to my knees, exhausted, then sit back, lean against the wall, take a moment to catch my breath. I close my eyes, and then when I open them again the girl’s walked off a few feet, her back to me, and her shoulders are kind of hunched over, and I can see she’s shaking a little. “Hey, everything’s going to be okay,” I say to her, and she looks at me over her shoulder and nods, but I can see she’s crying. “Come here,” I say, and she runs over to me, and throws her arms around me, and I hold her as she cries. “It’s going to be fine. Everything’s going to be fine. I promise.”
“You came back for me,” she says then in between her tears. “I missed you so much.”
“Yeah, I missed you too,” I answer, because I don’t know what else to say.
And then I woke up. But I didn’t catch myself screaming or anything, hadn’t soaked the sheets in sweat like I usually do when I have the nightmare. Instead, I felt completely calm, like I hadn’t felt in as long as I can remember, like I’d found something I’d lost, the most important thing to me in the world. I went back to sleep, and had this totally reassuring feeling that everything is going to work out for me.
©Go Ask Malice.