April 14th, 2004 CE

I dreamed that a girl and I - who I believe to have been my sister in the dream, though she didn’t actually resemble my real-life sister - were being held captive in some ancient ramshackle house out in the woods. In some ways, it reminded me of the house my father was living in at the end of his life, though structurally, it didn’t resemble it in any real way. It was wooden and unpainted, and everywhere it was covered in slime of one sort or another; algae, moss, mold, and human waste were embedded in every nook and cranny. It was a three-story structure, with boards and chickenwire mesh securely placed over every door and window, effectively preventing any escape.

Though neither of us were children, we were both very childlike in demeanor and bearing. It was my sense that the two of us had been held there for a very, very long time. Our jailor was someone who was quite old, I sensed, though I can’t really remember anything else about them. I think (and shall assume, for the sake of this narrative) that it was a woman. The main events of the dream began when - for whatever reason - our captor let her guard down. Perhaps she had died or something. All I remember clearly was that she was gone for the first time in a long time, and we had a chance to put into effect a plan for escape which we’d had in mind for some time; a window on the second floor had become so rotten that we were able to smash the windowframe loose and thus prize open a small opening in our prison. I was able to squeeze out, and exited onto an overhanging roof, which I then had to jump down from onto the ground.

When I got there, I tried to get the girl I was with to come with me, but she refused. I think she was too scared to. I felt terribly betrayed by the fact that she was unwilling to come with me, and was going to leave me to face the task of finding my way back to civilization on my own. I was furious, in fact. But I was unwilling to hang around any longer than I had to, so I bolted.

The driveway leading from the house to the road was heavily overhung with dense foliage; there was little more than a car-sized tunnel, really, with tall plants on either side of the gravel path which leaned over to completely blot out the sky. I ran along it for a while, and in time, it opened up to a landscape which was very similar to that of my grandmother’s old house, which was on a property which she had called Golden Pond. Indeed, as I made my way to the end of the driveway, the highway it met up with looked and felt just like it. Given how I had always felt like I was trapped at my grandmother’s place when I was forced to stay there as a child, this connection does not surprise me.

I ran down the side of the highway for some considerable time, trying to put as much space between myself and my former prison as possible as quickly as possible. I eventually came to a gas station at the side of the road, and went over to it. I was aware of the fact that I was filthy and dressed in atrociously degraded clothes, so it was with some trepidation that I asked the gas station attendant if I could make use of the washroom there to clean myself up. He seemed indifferent, though, and I went right in.

When I got there, I looked in the mirror and was appalled at what I saw. I looked old. Old and fat. My cheeks were jowely and covered in thin stubble. My chin was lost in the fat of my neck. My beard and moustache, I was upset to see, were missing. My eyes seemed sunken. I studied myself in the mirror for a long while, with growing despair, wondering what it would take to make myself look presentable again. I twisted and turned, trying to find an angle I wasn’t disgusted by, a facial expression which struck me as in any way pleasant. I could find none. In retrospect, I looked a great deal like my father had in his final days, after he had suffered the brain damage which ended his cognitive life, and the nurses had shaved off the beard and moustache which he had had since long before I was born, and which made him a stranger in my eyes when I went to visit his still-breathing corpse in the hospital.

And then I woke up.