Caught Dreams

A Story by Essie W

What do dream catchers do with nightmares?

She loved to make dreamcatchers. She said that there was something about slowly lacing and knotting that helped clear her head. They sold mildly well on Etsy so I never said anything. Every now and then she would replace the dreamcatcher from above our bed and replace it with a new one. She said it was full and I would roll my eyes. I told her that all of her dreamcatchers were superstitious nonsense and she didn’t need to waste my money on more junk. It made her cry but she needed to hear it. Yeah, they look nice, but to actually believe in them is a sign you’ve gone too far. She rattled on about some Aunt in Wisconsin who was a real indian princess and a tribe with a name I could never remember and how it was her heritage and that it wasn’t any different than putting up a cross. She said that it really did work, that the good dreams passed through the eye of the bead, and bad dreams will get stuck in the knots. Some people just get these ideas in their heads and let them take over.

What was most infuriating is that she just let the old ones just pile up, she didn’t sell them, she didn’t throw them away. She seemed to be replacing them more rapidly. Suddenly the tiny pink one with the feather wasn’t good enough for her anymore, so she put up a big brown one with green beads, and then hardly a week passed when that was replaced by a black one with white threads and a yellow bead. Then she started putting them up all over the house. I don’t think she was even trying to sell them any more. It had become an obsession for her; she was there, always working on her dreamcatchers, always pulling on strings and threading thread and losing beads all over everywhere. She grew more distant from me, she hardly ever talked to me, just sitting, making her dreamcatchers.

And then one day she stopped making them. I asked her why, and she said she had enough. Our relationship didn’t get any better, but at least she wasn’t making the damn dreamcatchers all the time. She started taking them down, slowly, one by one. I asked her why she didn’t just take them all down at once, and she said that they were still catching dreams. She put them in her pile of ‘used’ dreamcatchers. I threatened to throw them away, so she hid the pile.

Then one day she was gone.

I wasn’t really surprised. I’m not a good man. I don’t pretend to be. I am who I am and sometimes I express myself in ways others don’t like, especially those who can’t handle the occasional well deserved punch in the face. While I wasn’t surprised, I was angry, and I had half a mind to go track her down and give her a piece of my mind about just running off like that instead of trying to work things out.

What did surprise me was the strings thrown all around our bedroom. She had taken each one of those dreamcatchers in that pile and undid the knots, one by one. There were hoops scattered all over the floor, some as big as a hula hoop and some as small as a key ring. I thought she was trying to send me some sort of message or maybe just trying to piss me off by leaving her mess for me to deal with. She must have been crazy, spending hours untying knots just to try to send a message I couldn’t figure out. It was late, so I brushed off all the string and slid into bed.

As I fell asleep, I soon recognized the message she was trying to send.

Those bad dreams were real and they had been released. Some of them had been stewing for years, building up energy, just biding their time. I dreamed all of her bad dreams at once, I experienced them all from taking a test without pants to demons to fire and most of all experiencing myself as I was in her nightmares. I was stuck inside my own head, unable to escape until I had endured the wrath of a thousand angry dreams that had been just released from their prisons.

I had become my own nightmare.