BY DAPHNE MAYSONET
Dream Me
In my dreams, when an emotion jabs low, my nerves ripple from that single bruise of joy or fear. The intensity—how the story feels—triggers my mind, punching a hole through the fiction. This is how Dream Me is born into consciousness. She is moonstruck and comes alive, like a werewolf under cryptic orders. But instead of losing her humanity, she gains it. Dream Me is not lupine, but lucid, interrogating the dream’s logic with an agency that somehow fought sleep’s little death to arrive.
* * *
I think it happens because I’m too neurotic to give my mind away to synapse-firing fantasy. It’s partly why I don’t do drugs. My imagination is unpredictably hostile. It’s not one through which to take a playful stroll with reckless abandon. Being in my brain necessitates the armor of the faculties to swat dark recollections and wrenching feelings. Having survived a trying childhood, it’s not lost on me that this mind patrol caretaker may be working around the clock to keep me from true life stories for my own good.
I once went to a trauma counselor who described how his patients acted out their memories with each other in elaborate psychodramas to uncover erased details. I pictured sitting around with other troubled adults in feathered wigs and fake Dominican accents, helping me recast dysfunction and fuzzy abuse in new technicolor horror. I can never imagine knowing more about the casual violence in my family history than I do until the next time my mother or sisters drop another tragic story on me in broad daylight. As far back as I can recall, I’ve wanted to know less. People have asked if I think I’ve suppressed memories. If so, I’m grateful to the superego wolfmadré who’s protected me all these years. Someone should. Might as well be me.
* * *
When I am asleep and Dream Me is summoned, one of two things happen:
1. If the dream is good, I leverage my newfound autonomy to do what I want. And with this wondrous freedom—to fly, to travel to the world’s ends, to swim without breathing—all I ever want is love. Plain, everyday love. There is no greater supernatural force, no more mysterious treasure. The bounty of a dream kiss is always the most I can achieve. Dream Me could write my next billion hours of sleep with romantic endings, and it would never fill the bottomless hole from which all fire to do anything at all burns Dream Me with greed.
But the second option is when Dream Me really shines.
2. It goes like this: I’m the bad guy. I have committed some heinous crime—sometimes murder, preposterously bloody ones—and I’m caught. The monster of my own nightmare. Sometimes it happens while I’m already on trial, and other times the transgression has only just begun. It doesn’t matter. My overwhelming fear of what I’ve done is too much. Dream Me awakens in her way, bringing the relief that reality so rarely provides: absolution. The revelation is powerful enough to bring me to full consciousness, and I wake, sweaty in a cradle of bedsheets, birthed into the dumb gratitude of someone experiencing a miracle. A guilty woman walking free.
* * *
Dream Me rejects the church of sleep and has my baby photo on her altar surrounded by white rose petals. Dream Me prays for me to me. Dream Me stretches an impossibly large wing over my entire body so that night cannot see me, and I cannot see myself.
Daphne Maysonet is a Caribbean-American writer whose poetry has appeared in Southern Indiana Review, Chautauqua and The Acentos Review, and whose prose has appeared in alternative newsweekly The Memphis Flyer. She received her MFA from the University of Memphis, where she served as lead poetry editor for The Pinch. She is currently working on a collection of poetry, leading community workshop Memphis Writers and teaching college.