Adolescence: The End of Dreams

It began with a pig, and it ended with a horse. City born, he knew nothing of pigs, nor of any other barnyard animals. Back in grade school his class had ridden the bus to a farm one day. The farm had smelled and felt dirty. The very ground was dirty with mud, shit and straw. The animals had been dirty, even the white wool of the sheep had been matted with filth, so that he no longer cared to count them at night. The animals had all stared back at him from black, avaricious eyes, especially the squinting pigs. The pigs with their blank, hard, and unfeeling gaze. It was the pigs’ eyes that had left him the most fearful impression.

It was only a dream, but a realistic dream, and a haunting one. In it he was not yet old enough to drive, yet the dream was a of a car crash. It was a dream of speed that would not brake, and of a wheel that would not steer. The dream was of an impact with another car, a driverless one. It was strange that the car meeting him head-on was driverless, but it was his dream after all, and a nightmarish one.

In this dream he awoke in the midst of the cold and the twisted metal of the car to hear the sound of a tire spinning smooth and easy upon its broken axle. The hiss of a cracked radiator freed the poison-sweet smell of antifreeze to drift heavily upon the cold air. Snow blanketed the ground beyond the car, and sifted inside it through shards of broken glass. He was trapped, and hurt inside the wreckage, and resigned to whatever the dream would bring next, being powerless to stop it. Cold crept in from every direction, save one. His one hand was cold, the other warm. That hand, the stretched out one, was strangely, comfortably warm. He tried to pull that hand in close, but it would not move. The trying was painful. It would be easier to sleep, easier even to die than it was to try. If he could sleep the warmth in the hand might spread, it might become warm all over while everything else was so cold. He closed his eyes for a moment... a moment only. Just for a short rest.

There was a press against the flesh of the warm hand, a gentle pressure, a check for resistance that sent a chill down his spine, shocking life into his fading eyes. Those eyes followed his shoulder down to his elbow They noticed that the elbow was twisted at an awkward angle. The eyes kept moving down, past the twisted elbow, following the forearm out the window and through the shattered glass. At the end of the arm was a pig standing perfectly still, holding his warm hand in its warm mouth, it gently suckling.

The pig looked at him through piggish eyes, thick, dull, slow, hungry eyes. It did not bite down. It did not chew yet... but it would. It surely would, or this could not be Hell. When would it chew was the question? But then, he suspected that he already knew the answer, didn’t he? It would bite down when the hand tried to pull away from the mouth, of course. The pig waited as he did, wondering how the drama would play out, wondering which animal was in control here. Tired, hurt, and afraid, he fell back into sleep. Let the pig have what it would. He was trapped. He could not stop it, and it never really hurt in a dream anyway, did it? There was only imagined pain to fear.

Of all things, it was a horse that saved him from the pig, but a horse that exposed new fears and dangers. A bay horse. A great red stallion with white blazes upon its chest and feet. It was a tall horse, its auburn coat blazing heat ’neath the summer’s sun. He rode upon the horse’s back, a boy again, and as wild a boy as was the horse whose back he rode upon. The stallion ran break-neck across the beach, its hooves thrashing sand in strange directions while barely denting the crystalized dust. The boy, his heels spurring the raging animal forward, sped the horse through the firmer, damp sand before splashing fearlessly into an unkown, and unlivable, watery-world. The horse raged through the water, kicking wildy at the approaching waves, flailing ironed hooves at the breakers and screaming whinnies at an unfeeling ocean, an ocean with eyes as black as the pig, and equally fearsome, an ocean that would swallow him up just the same.

But the horse reared and kicked and screamed at the waves, unafraid. In fact it beckoned Poseidon, daring him out from his depths with angry snorts that sent ropes of mucus to meet the wavy froths. The boy sat upon the bay horse’s back, a witness only, but feeling the animal’s strength and fearlessness. In the dream he squeezed his thighs tightly below the water, gripping hard to the animal’s sides as the waves crashed against him and the rearing stallion. He finally pulled back on the reins, pulling his beautiful friend from the water, unwilling to see the great horse ended in the breakers, and flopping dead upon the ocean’s laps like flotsam. The horse was brave enough, and willing, but the steed was no God to stop Poseidon or his waves. The war horse reluctantly gave in to the boy’s direction upon the reins, letting go its anger.

He was in control. Not the pig. Not the horse. Not the dreams. He could make the dream do what he wanted it to do, if he did not lose himself to panic. With this knowledge the dreams stopped coming. Their work done, the dreams ended. Their lessons were no longer needed here, so they slunk off in search of another dark room, and another child lying wide-eyed in the night.