Subconscious

I dreamt the other night that I was being hunted.

I don't know that I had done anything wrong, but I was being hunted nonetheless. Me. I mean, I was myself in my dream, which often isn't the case. There was a shady town covered in wood chips, and there was a boy with me. I don't remember seeing his face, but he held my hand as we ran over a network of rafters in big log cabins. When the rafters ran out, we darted into a library and sat around the librarian's desk as if it were the counter at the local cafe. The lights were off in most of the library, except for one bulb over her desk, but you could feel the walls and walls of books. It felt safe.

Then, there is a pause.

We escape the wooden town and are running through the streets of another town, or the same town 100 years later. The streets are paved and there are sidewalks and two story clapboard houses painted white with low black iron fences and black iron railing up the concrete front steps. You couldn't see trees, but there were the shadows of trees on the fronts of the houses.

He took me into an older woman's house. It was more like a room in a house, really. A bed and a few small pieces of furniture, covered with books and papers. Behind one small dresser is a sliding door that looks like the entrance to a closet, but it's really a shower with a bathtub. She tucks me into the bathtub, and I spend most of the dream crouched down with my cheek resting on the porcelain edge.

I can hear voices of the sheriff's department entering the old woman's room. She sits quietly on the bed. They check all around, opening drawers, but don't notice the closet. Or, they see it, but can't imagine it being used behind the dresser. They leave.

And I wake up.

But I am curious that I get to be the protected in this dream. I still have to run, like always, but I am the one being saved, and there is someone to help me. This is new. I have been waiting for these dreams.