Little Houses
We were young when we first heard about her. During elementary school recess one day the seed was planted within our brains by Natalie Erdman’s older sister. We listened intently as we ate our graham crackers and Monica told us just enough to get us hook line and sinker, yet we never imagined how real this sleep beast could be.
As the eager questions piled up Monica leaned over the bench and told the handful of us all about the dream monster.
Amid whispers we learned of the dream demon and that her origins can be traced back to when the first baby awoke and cried. While exchanging anxious looks we were told her name: Circadia the hunter and dream re-designer.
After you’ve gone to sleep Circadia goes through your room in search of your most revealing belongs. Once she is adequately prepared to prey on the details of your personal intimacies she sits beside you, and watches the movements beneath your eyelids. Sometimes she sits with a closed fist beneath her chin, others she watches while twiddling her thumbs, keeping time with the intervals.
When the pace is just right and the waves have subsided, Circadia sweeps a cold touch of her hand across her victim and she enters their dream.
She cannot see the dream right away as it is taking place within a little house, yet she marches up and begins by chipping away at the quality of your dream. She takes a rusty nail to the exterior as the flakes of your dream are sent flying. Once the flakes hit the air they are held, suspended like a snapshot, and your mind gets fuzzy as each suspended detail has no choice but to begin to loop: thus your dream becomes multiple looping exchanges. Once the exterior has been chipped, Circadia skips around merrily plucking each flake and placing it on her tongue. She twirls around as the good details of your dreams begin to dissolve into her. As this occurs a fear grows within your subconscious and with each flake the little fears become bigger and bigger. With each flake, Circadia consumes more of your fears and stores them in a satchel that she wears across her body. Once the exterior of your little house has been chipped away she removes her right boot and knocks it repeatedly into the surrounding structure sending the once solid house ingredients crumbling again in mid-air, but these she does not consume, these pieces stay where they are for later.
Once your house has been damaged she enters and sets to work. Within the house are long white sheets hanging from ceiling to floor, the elements of your dream play out on the sheets in different areas of the house. Circadia goes around from sheet to sheet once again viewing the details currently comprising your dream. She makes her rounds, tears a bit here, shreds a bit there to manipulate the sacred relationships of your thoughts so there is nothing left but the bad. A harsh wind then moves through the house and throws the fringed sheets about, stirring the trauma, that is how Circadia then knows it is time. She moves back outside the house and gathers the pieces of structure. With her arms full of materials she haphazardly pieces the house back together locking in the chaos she made.
Your dream self is now destined to live out the recurring traumatic dreams and heavy emotional elements because of Circadia’s destruction. Once this has occurred she will delicately haunt the sleeper for eternity in small yet notable ways. She’ll be there when you try to fall back to sleep after awaking from a nightmare, preventing the presence of thoughts unrelated to your nightmare. She’s the wool on the sheep, the burdensome anxieties, the worries and fears, but mostly she is there in the jolt of an awakening free fall, her way of saying, “I’m coming for you.”
