Träumer

I’ve started to hate dreaming.

I dream about dark rooms and cages made of rose vines. Where the air feels like syrup as I breathe and leaves the taste of poison on my tongue, heavy and bitter and dark. Where the tips of thorns graze my skin; feather-light but still enough to draw beads of blood. I am made of glass in those dreams. I am pulled in a dozen different directions. I am lost. I am broken. I am drowning in the dark and the scent of caramel and sweet, suffocating smoke.

I dream about bright lights and castles made of crystal. Where I am falling from impossibly high towers and balconies. Where there are courtiers and jesters and all manner of delightful monsters and I am not sure if I am one of them or something else entirely. I am trapped in mirrors in those dreams. I am forced to run just to stand still. I am confused. I am falling. I am losing myself in dances and impossible colours and beautiful, terrifying eyes.

I dream about glass walls and empty corridors. Where there are clocks surrounding me and time is moving too fast and too slowly all at once. Where I am chased by indistinct shapes with jewels for eyes and teeth and I have nowhere to run to. I am falling apart into pieces of clockwork and porcelain in those dreams. I am terrified. I am dying. I am feeling my legs start to fail me and forgetting how to breathe and I am unable to stop even for a moment.

So instead I lie awake and restless and too aware of the sound of my own breathing and the rise and fall of my chest. And then I am in a darkened room with a cage of rose vines, and I realise that it has started all over again.