When you get too much sleep, you don't remember your dreams with unusual clarity, or particular vividness. Or, in my case, you don't remember them at all, until they place themselves into the events that unfold in your day's fate. You're talking with someone, and they mention something that sets you off, and you remember a vague feeling of horror beyond words. You're in a conversation and your focus changes to a glimmer of metal in someone's ear, and you remember the crunching you thought you heard, or you thought you heard in your head. Disturbing images rise slowly to the surface throughout your day, like buoyant pieces of flotsam and jetsam from a ship that has sunken hours before - sinking with the people you've made, onboard the world you've crafted in your mind's own wanderings. It's worst, of course, because this dream wasn't peaceful, it wasn't heartwarming. It comes back into focus like a long repressed memory, like it was you who died. And yet, the places I've seen were real, I see them every day. I've taken a path startlingly like any I could take any day. And I remember feelings of horror and vague guilt, and yet I was removed in my dream, because the horror of my own actions were too great for me to go on dreaming. Someone had died, and the pieces of them lay strewn across the Forest Avenue bare for all to see. I remember the warning words of my mother, about how horrible it must be, us driving by; that I should not look, because it was terrible. But you have to look. That's what you're thinking about... how bad it can be. And in a dream, what you think is what is real. What you think is what you face. I came to face, in making a turn, a faceless body with no legs, with blood strewn about, and hints of pieces around. These images struck me today, haunting me throughout my happenings. In conversation, in instruction, in relaxation. You can't quite focus when you can't quite face your horrors, and even when you're aware they're only in your head, it makes you cautious. It makes you vigilant. It makes you watch for signs that you are, worst of any possibility, correct in your fear- that somehow, you've seen the future and you are thus powerless to stop it.

I remember this like I would remember the real thing. Bits and pieces. Trauma. Nothing coherent – nothing coming back in order, nothing clean. It’s as if I had been hit, and somehow, I feel his decapitation as my own, and I feel his loss of legs as if my own had run from me to join him. I feel my blood run cold, cooling as if unprotected in vein and capillary, cooling on the spring asphalt. This is the death of a stranger I know as myself, seen from my own eyes and reflected over my own meditations.