I have always been a vivid dreamer. My dreams are almost never mundane; wild stuff happens. I remember once, while I was in high school, I had a dream I was travelling to a foreign city with my father where we were going to investigate these old ruins. There I and our lovely guide wound up fighting robotic tin soldiers through the ruins of a subterranean carnival. This kind of dream is pretty much par for the course for me.

The last few years I realized I hadn’t been remembering my dreams as often. I still had them, but they never stuck in my head the way they used to. I should have probably kept a dream journal, but I was never so organized as that. Anyway, just last week my wife and I got a new bed.

Whoah.

I and my wife are nestled in the belly of some kind of flying vessel that seems formless and asymmetrical, like a storm cloud. It is a moonless night and we are coasting silently down a canyon edged by jagged peaks of black, dead rock. We are both quiet, like submarine crews waiting for their torpedoes to hit. Over us, through the hazy, film-like windows, we watch an even larger stormcloud vessel pass. It is so close to us I can peer through its portholes. Inside is a great room lit by blazing iron braziers. It has a single door – broad, circular, and fashioned from dull, dented steel. I get the sense that it, the ship, is looking for us. We evade it.

Then, surprise! We’ve forgotten something. I peer through the forward porthole to see we are careening towards a wall of midnight stone and iron spears. The gate is closed –  pull up! Pull up! We pilot by instinct, just clearing the battlements. There, arrayed beneath us, are a forest of ballistae, loaded and ready. Barbed bolts two yards long sail into the air after us, fired by crews we can scarcely make out. We dive, we roll, we weave as the shots shower around us, piloting our stormcloud ship gracefully to safety. Then I wake up.

This has set my mind rolling. A story is being hashed out of it, even now. I’ve also got a pair of novels to submit, agents to query, a short story to edit and re-submit somewhere, and loads of grading and reading and all the stuff that has to do with being alive, married, and having a child and a dog. You will forgive me, readers, if this is my only post this week. The hard work of building dreams into something hard and dark calls to me. I must answer.

See you next Monday.