Thank you to my friend Jesie for the following inspiring prompt! “Every so often a dream catcher must be “emptied” of the nightmares it has caught. Who does this and what do they see?”
As always, unedited and unrefined.
Most nightmares were harmless manifestations of ordinary peoples worries and neurosis. From cliched dreams of falling and drowning, to the deeply personal dreams of abandonment and abuse, they’d become a relatively mundane landscape that I’d learned to navigate with little anxiety or fear.
When I’d begun my Cleaning career, my own Dream Catcher had been overfull by the end of every work week. Thankfully, like all professional Cleaners, I saw a counselor and could confide in them all the troubles that had followed me home from work to infest my own generally peaceful dreamscape with borrowed terrors. Now, so many years later, and my Handler barely had to have my Catcher cleaned once a quarter.
With the normality that had begun to encroach upon my work, viewing others darkest dreams had ceased to fascinate or repulse me, and I’d become blase about the entire process. Now it was just my job; a well compensated but desensitizing kind of boring job.
Calloused attitude firmly in place that day I found it even more deeply disturbing what happened when the next Dream Catcher I began to Cleanse caused all of my calm and collected to crumble and disintegrate into ashes inside my heart. The nightmares that assaulted me from this Catcher, as I began the replay through my own awake and aware consciousness, weren’t all that disturbing in content (being murdered in your dreams wasn’t unheard of after all) but rather they were hideous and overwhelming in their intent.
These dreams, belonging to a very young woman and full of brutal butchery, hadn’t been generated by her own uneasy unconscious mind. They had been sent. Sent with purpose to disturb and destroy her mind, and worse, sent as a promise of real harm to come.
Wrenching myself out of the light trance I’d entered to begin the Cleansing I hurled the Catcher away from me violently and screamed with the fearful knowledge that these weren’t dreams I’d witnessed, but the very real and imminent threats of a killer sent to taunt and terrorize their next unsuspecting victim.
Not Safe For Words 