XENITH

On Dreams
by Hillary Tully

They begin with that dimension between wakefulness and sleep that dances with the nonsensical firings of groggy neurons. For me, this is a giant donut rolling down the street, oblong and sticky and crushing the city folk milling about beneath it with each gargantuan, glazed rotation; sometimes it is the pursuit of a strange animal, falling out of a tree, or the precipitation of unnatural things like hair brushes or spaghetti. These fantasies then slip into dreams, and suddenly the spaghetti rain is part of an intricate communist plot to woo the hoi polloi and thus facilitate a coup. When they succeed, I am assigned by the government’s central planning board to reproduce. Sometimes I wake up with the sensation that I really have just birthed a squirming little socialist fetus; I wouldn’t really know what this feels like, but the dream is vivid, at any rate. Very often, too, my dreams involve the gradual loss of attire – I begin fully clothed and by the time I wake up I’ve just been skinny dipping with Bill Clinton or partaking of some other such elaborate avenue to nudity.

It is a strange junction at which one wonders whether she is of questionable moral fiber, or a prophet.