The Enemy

A little brush with the most terrifying dream in the world.

I woke up in shivers, my head under the blanket -and didn't dare open my eyes or move. I knew 'it' or he, whatever it is, was in the room. I knew what was happening: about to unfold, the final encounter between me, another iteration of me who also was in the room but who I couldn't see or sense, just knew he -or me, was there, and the Enemy, so inconceivably bigger and also smaller, so difficult to imagine even, without a face although 'he' could choose to appear with any face he wanted. Perhaps a Demon, or the very master of the demons, whatever they truly were… 'demon' is only a word, has a lot of connotations of theism and religion. What I was dealing with was similar but different -if it was indeed different, as I couldn't get to know what it truly was; a being that was the sum total of terror and evil, larger and smaller than anything in the world and the world itself. In my dreams I've recurrently brushed with the story many many times. I can never remember the whole story once awake, it is a little bit as if something inside my mind was trying to protect me from remembering too much about it. I know I have, purposefully or unintendedly, challenged this being, who sometimes I battle with and defeat momentarily, sometimes at the cost of the destruction of my old house in Catia or my whole home city, but it is a temporary respite; we escape or hide but we know it is going to happen again and in the end of time we will lose. That is what I know about the story, of which I get glimpses, different iterations with different developments, each time I dream. More often we're on the run trying to escape from it, or hiding in what remains of my old house, or there is a temporary respite when I have found a way to conceal my hiding place or my presence from the Evil Being. This, alas, can be done only for a little while.

The Enemy has just half-woken me up, a brush of cold void to make me wake up in terror, just for fun perhaps or maybe with some purpose that is beyond what I can comprehend. It is not 'me', this iteration of me that he is about to fight and, given the overwhelming odds, probably defeat and destroy today. But all the same I know it is me in a deeper sense who is out there and unaware of me under the blankets not daring to open my eyes. Tension and terror rise and I finally wake up in cold sweat, my cat pounding the mattress next to my face and making little noises indicating she's completely spooked. I daren't open my eyes: I know I'm still dreaming and there may be many more layers of dream to get through before I truly wake up -my poor little kitty has been dead for many years.