The itch you can't scratch

I usually say I have no nightmares, and I stand by that. Lately my dreams have been about different things, and many times I've still ran around adventure style - saving fairies, teaching kids about gardening, kissing brave, rash heroes and... burying my father. None of it has offended anyone. Or gotten them mad, or sad. Not even me. In fact, these have been the least emotional dreams of my life. I've chased off soldiers who were going to kill my friends using a bright green pump action water gun, I've infiltrated a family of cannibals by pretending to be a babysitter, and I watched a witch hoist a cat in a box up a telephone line as bait to catch the handsome prince. My friends sort of nodded in approval, the family watched me with mild amusement, and the witch just giggled at me.

But there is something. "Like the essence of evil soaked into the walls, the ground, the people, just like the sweat of many different people soaked into a changing room after dozens and dozens of years." Everything is just a little too perfect. A little too silent. Like I'm hearing through water, like I'm not really there at all, like I'm living on top of a live volcano. And it's knowing that the volcano simile is just silly, because there is something out there that's so much worse than anything I could ever possibly come up with.

That's the thing. No nightmares. Just an insane, maddening, bewildering slight discomfort. It's worse than any nightmare I've ever had or ever imagined.

An invasion of my last sacred haven, and yet another reason to not want to sleep... but I don't want to stop dreaming. Maybe that's the worst thing that could happen. To never dream again.