I don't like horror movies. I don't dream horrifying dreams. But election night after the results were in, I had a horror-movie type dream.
As the dream started, I was in a run down house that I own only in my dreams. (Come to think of it, I do have horrifying dreams of a sort. The horror is in their futility. They are generally about vainly looking for a place to live or about wandering around a dismally run-down house and numbly trying to figure out how to make a liveable home out of it.)
In that nightmare home that I've lived in before, in my dreams, I was in the kitchen pantry, which I had finally gotten around to looking at closely and to try to fix up. In other dreams, I had looked through a doorway at the pantry, but had never gone in.
My dream started when I was standing near the counter in that pantry. I realized the floor that looked like wood turned out not to be. It was a layer of something flimsy like heavy cloth over splintered worn wood. Well, I thought to myself, that project is going to take a lot of work, and all I had been planning to do was clean out the sink there and organize the counters.
Then my son Liberty came through a basement door into the kitchen with a cat lunging ahead of him on a leash that was held on by straps around her body. The cat looked like Quicksilver, the family pet we'd had for 21 years, but she was huge for a cat, at least knee high.
She immediately dragged Liberty towards the kitchen windows, and she hissed and bristled with a supernatural intensity. Her grey fur rose in matted spikes around her face and around the straps of the leash. It looked like static sparks of rage were coming out from her tail, which stood out stiff behind her like a furry banner. She was in a fury. And no wonder.
Outside the windows, two big snarling dogs with spiked collars were leaping up to the glass. On the second leap, one of the dogs morphed through one of the panes. The glass stretched around him like a horror movie special effect until his snarling face with its fangs bared was inside the kitchen with the rest of his body following. And then the dream was over.
Except for the residual fear. The dogs of hell, I said to myself as I woke up.
