DREAM: Chimera

DREAM SEQUENCE: "Chimera"

There was a house down the street that was being haunted by a shadow monster, a creature that the owners felt more than saw. Two of my past bishops were called in to exorcise the house and bless it. It was strange, when I spoke to them, their memory of the event transferred to me and I saw the monster.

It was a female, almost human looking with talons for fingers and long spikey hair from her head to her hips. Her face was an angular wolf's face with a short snout, skin nose and human mouth with long canines. Her eyes were a golden-brown color, her half human, half wolf eyes.

The two former bishops were missing digits-parts of their fingers where she had cut them off with her sharp talons. They did their best to hide them from me but I saw as they gestured the series of events that took place that night.

Some time had passed in my dream and I was driving somewhere with a friend. We made it into a wooded area and I saw two large wolf-like creatures running beside the car. When I looked over, I realized what they were. They were the same sort of creature that the bishops had removed from the house. One of them leapt at the car and swiped at me but I managed to roll the window up enough.

I wanted to kill it but I knew that I couldn't, not by just running it over. As the scene unraveled I learned that the chimera were the physical forms of strong negative emotions. Everyone had the ability to form a chimera, whether sub-consciously or consciously. There were people who were weak and their chimeras were formed subconsciously, to protect their fragile state of being.

Being able to handle stressful situations and darker emotions, I had no chimera, but like the shadow-monster in the house down the street, the chimera that tried to kill me was attached to me. It was a powerful, new beast but it was weak, still frail and still able to be healed and it had the face of my friend Brenda. This was Brenda's chimera and it had come after me. What had I done?

Through the window I asked the chimera why it wanted to kill me. My friend was still driving down the highway and the beasts still ran aside us. It told me, "Because I hate you." Its voice chilled me, it sounded like Brenda with hints of the boogeyman's voice from The Real Ghostbusters cartoon of the 80s.

"Why do you hate me?"

The chimera's anger faded and was replaced by a deep sadness, it's voice was soft. "You left me. You left me alone and I was so scared. You said you would watch over me but you never came; you said you were my friend!"

These things it said, these were all emotions from Brenda, the friend that had moved down the street from me who I rarely see in real life. I knew I hadn't been a good friend to her, I knew that she was so close and yet I never reached out to her. I hoped that the damage could be undone.

"Please. I'm so sorry that I left you alone. Can you forgive me? Can we try again?"

Tears formed in the beast's eyes and she nodded. We pulled over and I tried to form a relationship with Brenda's chimera but it was hard. There were few people who could see chimeras during the day without dreaming. They usually only appeared to people who were in deep sleep, which is what made them so scary in the first place. My friend who was driving didn't know what was going on. She just thought that I was talking to myself and freaked out when she saw the scratch marks on my arm.

People who were constantly hooked up to that deeper part of the brain where dreams existed (or daydreamers) were able to see the chimeras at all times of the day but as I had learned through experience, it was just as scary seeing them during the day.

I woke up.