(In these dreams, I always have a daughter. When I carried my youngest son, he was a girl. Perhaps in an another reality that I can only see in my dreams, he is my only daughter.)
My husband is as useless in my dream as in real life, but, when I felt instinctively we needed to leave, he is prepared with the portal -- ready to go.
Where are we going, I ask.
Anywhere but here, he said. He didn't know.
We land in an open field. Like pioneers, I know we could make a home here, safe from the unknown terrors I fled moments before.
I repeat the scene of relief a few more time out of pleasure.
Before we begin constructing our home in the boggy mist of New England out of lumber we find laying nearby --
I have been watching a popular show about designing houses from scratch in Great Britain lately.
-- neighbors appeared out of nowhere, offering much needed assistance.
Stay in our home while you build, offers Dennis Quaid.
You'll want to stay inside when the monsters come, says his nondescript wife.
The monsters, I ask.
Nothing can be as bad as what we just left, though.
Except I don't remember what we we were fleeing.
Are we in a horror movie?
Next, I'm coming back from work. I wear the demure clothes of a low class married woman in a dystopian fiction. We are still in Dennis Quaid's home.
Arriving there, I don't find my husband or children or anyone but Dennis Quaid. He corners me in the kitchen, the women's sphere. We are suddenly in the master bedroom where I struggle against his assault. He remind me of the debt my family owes him, keeping us safe when the monsters attack.
What monsters, I scream.
Whether as a flashback or as a summoning, they arrive. Large, insected creatures -- the very peak of my nightmare fodder.
My children are there. I shoot the monsters with a shotgun, feeling the hit in my own shoulders and arm, and the many small gnat, flesh-eating insect bites at my arms.
I flee.
The back door leads to the lot we planned to build our pioneer home except there it is -- built. I enter and my husband is there. He has been working in a restaurant and has tons of leftovers in styrofoam containers. Things I normally would ditch, I gather knowing food is the difference in existence with the hell we live in now.
Suddenly the monster enters our cottage and I know something terrible has happened to everyone I love.
In despair, I
My alarm blares. It is 6:45.