Fur
By Casey Douglass
as part of #fridayflash.
One image bleeds into
the next, a hazy scene forming once the seeping impressions become
more solid. An outdoor car-park, pretty full but with the odd space
here and there. Groups of people chatter and laugh, the event or
happening that drew them here either finished or about to start.
There is a suggestion of folding tables and bric-a-brac so it might
just be a car-boot sale.
A babbling man with a
bushy beard is gesturing to a small gathering behind a red hatchback,
his right hand continually shooting up to his nose to scratch at the
hair just beneath. I recognise him as Slavoj Žižek, the Slovene
philosopher from The Pervert's Guide to Ideology,
a film that I had watched weeks ago. I like philosophy. I also would
be intrigued by any guide written with perverts in mind, wondering
how that might make it any different to a regular guide. What I got
was an interesting look at some of the things that we treat as
factual and don’t question. Where perverts come into it I still do
not know.
The
people are enraptured with the furry man’s talk but his words fail
to reach me with enough volume to decipher. I pass by and continue to
look around me, hemmed in on all sides by hot metal and baking
concrete.
I
don’t know how or why the shift occurs but things begin to change.
Maybe a fleeting anxiety crosses my mind or it just happened without
my intervention. What was a sunny day begins to dim into a very dark
twilight, the cars around me falling into a deep shadow and only
staying visible where some unknown light source glints from their
contours.
A
deep rumbling howl erects the hairs along my arms and neck. I hear a
woman scream and sense the people around me scrabbling for somewhere
to hide. I am grinning, a strange hot sensation in my chest, like the
fire in the core of a furnace.
A
loping thing rounds the side of the car ahead of me. I walk towards
it, my right arm partly across my chest, the fist clenched. I know it
is going to happen. Everything about it angles the events into one
narrow funnel which can only lead to one outcome. The black shaggy
dog launches at me with an almost sub-audible roar, its teeth
latching onto my right forearm as I bring it meet it. I feel no pain,
no real sensation besides the pressure around my forearm. I am
surrounded by darkness now, the only feeling my pounding heart and
the strain from smiling so forcefully. Then I wake up.
--THE
END--
This
is the tail end of a dream I had a few days ago. I have the feeling
it was a dream which was getting a few things straight in my mind. My
anxiety and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder has continued to be
problematic for weeks. The therapies and methods I have been using to
try to improve my emotional response all rely on a certain level of
acceptance, which at times I have struggled to get to.
This dream seems like a more visceral way of my mind getting the message. If I had to guess, I would say that the cars could be my obsessions, the philosopher the ways I try to get a handle on things/techniques I use and the black dog the anxiety that launches itself at me. In the dream, even not knowing it was a dream, I marched straight towards the dog knowing what would happen, accepting it. It’s quite funny that I can do something like that, yet the prospect of possibly having left a tap running reduces me to palpitations. Either way, a cool dream and one as I said, that feels like it had a use.
This dream seems like a more visceral way of my mind getting the message. If I had to guess, I would say that the cars could be my obsessions, the philosopher the ways I try to get a handle on things/techniques I use and the black dog the anxiety that launches itself at me. In the dream, even not knowing it was a dream, I marched straight towards the dog knowing what would happen, accepting it. It’s quite funny that I can do something like that, yet the prospect of possibly having left a tap running reduces me to palpitations. Either way, a cool dream and one as I said, that feels like it had a use.
