"Tell me what''s wrong?" she asks.
I tell her what''s on my mind…
"I have had, ever since I was a little child, this power in my dream. But it was a power that I could only use if I was having a nightmare. It was a power over me…
I could fly.
My nightmares would come. Terrible dreams, full of anguish and horror… born out of disparate imaginings and disturbed memories. It was like being stuck in a coffin, a small shell of a space with now way out and no knowledge of how you got in there… only the misery at being inside.
It was these dreams, of claustrophobic epics where my whole world was reduced to me and my tormentor. Can you imagine a coffin holding two beings inside?
"But I have this power in my nightmares…
"When I lay in my bed, shaking in night sweats as if in fever and false sense of comfort, deep in my mind I struggled and fought, desperate to leave the world I was in. Giant snails would slither towards me, undead hands would stretch for me, monstrous creatures with teeth like kitchen knives would hunt me… and in every nightmare I had, there was never a sanctuary.
Most of the time, these dreams reflected the fear of my fellow man. I am afraid of mankind''s inability to come to grips with the chaotic and insane world we have built around ourselves. Where we imagine mutations and then make them true, where desperate heroes dismember us with revolutionary swords and where, little children who are starved and sick beyond any reasonable endurance look at me with eyes like golf balls and their hands reach for me in plead and I can do nothing…
The sky is always dark in these dreams; dark red or dark purple. And in it is in these dreams, which are so full of the perverse abortion of man''s commitment to one another, where the walls of reason crumble like burnt paper and where the promise of one is the curse of another.
"But I have this power in my nightmares…
"And so whenever I am stuck in this coffin, I find myself able to use that power. First I would be cornered, my tormentors drawing nearer and suddenly I would realize that I am on a cliff and behind me is the edge. I look over my shoulder and see the great height… it looks like I am above the clouds.
And then that secret realization would come to you, like a faint hint or suggestion, that I am in a dream, but it wouldn''t matter because I could not get out of it… and my tormentors were so close.
And then in a flash of knowledge, a bright kaleidoscope of visions such that only a dream can create- then I would I know what to do. Jump.
"And then I would hurl myself over the height- it may have been mountain or skyscraper- and in that moment that I begin to fall I begin to fly. My arms stretched, floating like a falcons and behind me, my nightmare, I have escaped and the sound of the wind is in my ears and the sun is bright in my face.
But then the land begins to loom underneath me as I draw nearer and then I know that I can not fly, but that I am falling.
"But that does not worry me; instead I feel a sheer elation at that truth. For it means the end of all nightmares. The sensation is pure ecstasy, the falling, the cool wind and the bright sun and the great knowledge that it will soon all end. For I know that once I hit the bottom, I shall die. But all this is good, because I have chosen to take the fall in place of bearing the suffering.
"And so the fall ends… but I never quite see it end… because I wake up, in the next world happy and content that I escaped my tormentor even if it meant dying."
She looked at me and frowned.
"What are you serious?" she asked," I only wanted to know why you came so quick."