I don't trust my unconscious, if it can even be called mine. It tried to kill me every night last year, and even succeeded twice. Maybe that's normal for those of us who are not lucid dreamers, but not for me. I control my dreams, I have always controlled my dreams, yet twice I lost, and my unconscious killed me.

I didn't wait for it to happen a third time.

I stopped paying attention, and without that waking attention they faded. Without my spending so much effort dredging them out of sleeping and teasing a half-remembered structure out of them, they were nothing. Pale little things. Sad little things. Dull little things.

Perhaps it was regrouping. My unconscious appears to have put a new battle plan into action. Suddenly my sleep is populated by people from my waking life, and that's not right, that's wrong. It's all sorts of unnatural, it's world-destroying, soul-crushing, and mind-meddling. Is that overly dramatic? I don't think so. With real people in my dreams, I am forced to be Tessa in my dreams, and I'm tired of Tessa, I have enough of Tessa when I'm awake, and she's a pale, sad, dull little thing. Tessa can't fly, leap, shoot, fire, pilot, command, rescue, wrestle, climb, dive. Tessa is not immune to gravity. Tessa cannot breathe in water. What of Tessa? She is nothing. And now, with you 'real' people in my sleep, I have no time away from her.

Now, when I wake, I must dredge my dreams out of sleep and pan events from them, and tell myself, this never happened.

I cannot resent this person. I cannot call this person. I never kissed this person. We are not okay. We are not destroyed. This never happened. I must remember. This never happened.

I don't trust my unconscious.

If I could pour it out into a bowl, I'd put that bowl outside, and let it evaporate in the sun.