I’m dreaming.

  I don’t know how I know it, but I do. I’ve never been a lucid dreamer, even in dreams where I am more “awake”. Knowing that I’m dreaming doesn’t actually let me know that I’m dreaming, if that makes sense.

  I suppose it doesn’t really have to. That’s how dreams work, isn’t it? You don’t have to understand. Understanding is… somewhat antithetical to dreaming. Understanding is something done with a mind acting in concert, an act that can only happen when the circuitry of awareness is functioning in a certain alignment. Dreams are, by their very nature, something that happens when that alignment has shifted, and the gears of consciousness turn to processing, to the subconscious, to the renewal and integration of the disparate pieces of who you are.

  I don’t know how I know anything, right now. Knowing should be a thing that comes in cycles, the connections between synapses flaring up for brief bursts of context and memory, otherwise drowned in the act of unconsciousness.

  But I know I am dreaming.

  And because I know, I am afraid.

  I am in the place where I live when I am awake. It is not a house, for a house would be more than this, and it is not a home, because I am not at home here. It is the place where I live, and now, here, it is the place where I am.

  I am filled with the terrifying, agonizing certainty of those facts. I am dreaming. I am aware that I am dreaming. I am here.

  There is something here with me.

  I seem to drift from place to place, moving without realizing I have moved, and always, always, I am sitting down in a wooden chair that is not mine, and is too soft. I become aware, and I am seated, and in a new room.

  I think I am hiding.

  I know there is something here because I can hear them. Skittering steps, quiet and sharp, like sand falling across wood. Sometimes there are thuds, as if something has fallen, and the skittering is louder as it scrabbles and picks itself back up.

  There are so many of them. So many little bodies, skittering, all through the place where I live. I do not see them in the halls, or on the floor, or even in the corners of my eyes- but I know that they are here.

  I think they’re in the walls.

  I know they’re getting closer.

  They are always approaching, but when I hear the scratching get so close, so loud, that it fills the walls and the air and my mind… I come aware someplace else. Someplace new.

  I am in the building that I live in, but it is different here, now that I am dreaming. I know where I am, in that dream-logic that pronounces more than explains, but it is not the same now. I come aware again, and I am in a room that I recognize. I come aware again, and I am in a room that I do not. And yet still, I know where I am, and I know that this is the place where I live.

  But there are so many rooms. And in every one of them, there are walls, where things can hide, and skitter, and scratch.

  I am in the place where I live. I am hiding. There is something in here with me. There are too many rooms.

  Some of the rooms have windows. There is a place outside, behind the glass. It is not where I am, but it is real.

  I know these things. I feel that I can’t not know them.

  The last thing I remember…

  It is hard. It is so hard to think. It slips away like fog, because my mind, here and now, is not made for thinking.

  I am afraid. I am aware. There is something in the walls.

  What is the last thing I remember?

  Why am I dreaming?

  My hand hurts.

  It doesn’t feel like an actual thought, per se. It simply is. Before, my hand was not important to the dream, and now, it is- and so I know it. I know more than understand that I have a hand, and it hurts.

  I try to look down at it.

  I have a neck. I have eyes. These become known as I bend and blink, trying to see.

  The sound of the things in the walls is getting louder.

  I have a hand, and it hurts. It looks red. That is the first color in the dream. Beyond my hand, the world is less than even monochrome- it exists, and it has form and structure and I know it, because it is the place where I live and where I am, but it has no color. The color is not a part of the dream- except in my hand, which is the color carmine, the color scarlet, the color maroon-black and wine-purple.

  It hurts.

  But I can feel it. It is the first thing, beyond fear, that I can feel in the dream. It hurts but it is mine, just like the fear. It hurts, but by that pain I know it. By that pain, I experience it. It is separate from the dream, in a way: the alignment of dream, and the alignment of thought, both matter less to the machinery of being alive than the alignment of pain. Survival, tied in through the lizard-mind, cuts through what I do and do not know, what the dream can and cannot tell me.

  The sound in the walls is getting closer.

  I think they are under the floor now too.

  My hand hurts, and the pain is real. Do you feel pain in dreams? Can you hurt in dreams?

  I’ve died many times in my dreams. I don’t remember if I’ve ever felt pain from it.

  I can’t know. I am not built to know. I am dreaming.

  I move the hand.

  It hurts worse when I move it, but it can move. It is mine, because it hurts, and because it is alive, I am alive, I am dreaming and I am here, and I can curl the fingers closed.

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  It feels wrong. Thick and heavy, like part of it is numb, like I’ve got rocks or pillows inside my fingers, in the palms of my hands. But it moves when I tell it to, and it’s alive and real, and I lift it, and the scarlet-crimson wine drips and drools out from between the seams and fibers of my hand, until it drenches me.

  It feels warm. I don’t believe I’ve ever felt warm before in my dreams. I experience things as fact- these things happened, they exist, they are as they are, and I am the vector in which their existence travels. But now I hurt, and I am afraid, and I am warm where the blood drips onto me.

  I am BLEEDING.

  The scratching is over me now. They are in the ceiling. I think the room is bending, like soft clay, under the weight and heat of moving, writhing bodies, as they get closer.

  Maybe they can smell me. Maybe they can smell the blood of my hand, dripping and drooling and moving to the pulse of-

  That is not my heart. But it beats. It beats to a rhythm, and it is in my hand, and up my arm, and-

  I come aware.

  I am in a room. I am in a chair that is too soft. I am in the place where I live. I am dreaming.

  There is a window in this room.

  There is something in the building with me. It is scratching-scrabbling hungry in the walls.

  I am dreaming.

  I am aware, and I am dreaming.

  I don’t know how I know it, but I do. I’ve never been a lucid dreamer, even in dreams where I am more “awake”. Knowing that I’m dreaming doesn’t actually let me know that I’m dreaming, if that makes sense.

  I suppose it doesn’t really have to. That’s how dreams work, isn’t it? You don’t have to understand. Understanding is… somewhat antithetical to dreaming. Understanding is something done with a mind acting in concert, an act that can only happen when the circuitry of awareness is functioning in a certain alignment. Dreams are, by their very nature, something that happens when that alignment has shifted, and the gears of consciousness turn to processing, to the subconscious, to the renewal and integration of the disparate pieces of who you are.

  I don’t know how I know anything, right now.

  I know that I have done this before.

  There is continuity. There is a before and an after. I have known this before, I have been this and here before.

  The scratching is getting closer again.

  What is the last thing I remember?

  My hand. It was here, with me. It was…

  It is BLEEDING.

  It hurts, and because it hurts, it is alive, and it helps me to feel rather than know. There are things I do not know, and I focus on the pain, focus on the way that I feel the thick red syrup inside my hand drip and drool out of me, warm and hot.

  It hurts, and my hand moves, lifting and curling.

  I run it over my face, and let the BLOOD drip and paint and warm me.

  I can feel my face. I can feel my head.

  I still can’t think- but now I know.

  The scratching is closer.

  My dream tells me, and makes me know.

  It is coming closer faster than last time.

  They are already in the walls behind me. In the walls beside me. Soon they will reach the other wall, where there is a window, and the floor beneath me, and the ceiling above me, and things will begin to melt and break and-

  I clench my hand into a fist, making the BLOOD bubble up and squirm and roil to the beat of a drum that I know is not my heart but is in me. I feel the pain and-

  I remember. Before the dream. Pain.

  I finished making the hand.

  No. No. The Glove.

  I put on the Glove, and it tore open my arm, my arm that was pulled apart and opened and held together by my Symbiont, by the impossible meat and blood and alien strangeness that has been every moment of my life recently.

  And then pain.

  And now…

  I am dreaming.

  How long have I been here? How long since I fell… fell unconscious?

  I feel fear.

  There is something where I live.

  There is something in the walls.

  It is getting closer.

  There is skittering and scratching and small bodies coming into the room but only where I cannot see them only where I cannot see them and there are shapes and strange flickerings at the corners of my sight, at the edges of my-

  They are at the far wall.

  They are skittering against the window frame.

  I see one of them. One of the scratching scrabbling moving things where I live-

  An eye.

  I cannot see it, cannot hear it, can only feel and know and I know what it is. It is an eye.

  It blinks at me, and there is a moment where I remember, where the fear echoes back through synapses shaped wrong for thought and places beads and braided hair in front of the eye.

  The pupils are all wrong. Like camera-lenses, zooming in and out with a whirring noise, even as their form speaks of nothing but meat.

  The room creaks and bends and cracks and the skittering and pulsing and whirring gets louder and there are more eyes, more rat-bodied mice where I live where I am in my walls in my life and they are ayes, I know what they are, I know what they are they’re eyes and-

  And they’re looking for me.

  They are looking for me.

  A pulse in my hand, where it Hurts. A pulse in my arm, where it Hurts. A pulse in my head, where I am afraid.

  They are following me. From room to room. Room to room in the place where I live, but I’m staying ahead of them and they’re following me somehow. What do I have here?

  Fear and pain. And BLOOD.

  They’re following the BLOOD.

  I need to wake up.

  The room cracks, and the room bends, and the bodies in the walls and the floor and the ceiling come crashing down, and instead of gnawing little rat teeth they are chittering and skittering because they are seeing and they are looking for me.

  I clench my fist, and I hurt, and I BLEED.

  I splatter it on the floor, splatter it in the room, leave it dripping in the strange room that is where I am until there is a pool of it on the ground, bright red and brighter than anything else in this place without color.

  And then…

  I come aware.

  I am in a new room.

  I am dreaming.

  I am still afraid, and I still hurt.

  But the skittering is further away now.

  I know, in the dream-way that tells you what you know, that I need to wake up.

  So I do.

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