Prologue

There’s a nightmare that I often have. It comes and goes, irregular at best, and sometimes months will pass and I will almost forget it ever existed in the dark recesses of my mind that control my dreams. Then it will come back with a vengeance, haunting me nightly for weeks. It is my nightmare, the one I must bare, seemingly for the rest of my life. That is rather presumptuous to say, isn’t it? Seeing how I’m only 25 years old, only halfway towards my mid-life crisis. But I don’t doubt that it will be with me until the end of my days.

My nightmare is of a clock. Not an “evil” clock in any sense of the word, nor a maliciously happy clock beaming it’s smiling face to my mind’s eye. Just a plain, small, silver desk clock with black lettering and red accents. It’s body is not perfectly round but leaning towards oval with a flat bottom to rest easily on the desk in front of me. It has long slender black hands with small neon strips providing the vision of the time when it becomes to dark to see its face. But it never grows dark. The long black hands never rotate. Just a single red second hand clicks away the time letting me know I’m not frozen. But the clock always reads 11:59.

It seems a fairly passive dream, not one to inspire cold sweats and the stabbing screaming when you are pulled to reality and open your eyes after a typically scary brand of nightmare. But those are just the symptoms it causes me to experience. More often than not after I awake from one of these dreams, I can not go back to sleep the rest of the night, fearing the sight of the calm smooth clock, always ticking but never progressing through time.

I’ve told my shrink about this dream on several occasions in the past few years. Every single time he comes up with a new and different explanation for the symbolism of the clock and the terror it causes me. Big Ivy League words spill from his mouth inspiring him to spring up from his chair and pace around the leather and cherry wooded office. His excitable activity always startles me as normally he speaks in slow calm tones to soothe whatever psycho patient he has a session with for $100 an hour. But in all the explanations and pacing, he’s never once given me an answer that will satisfy me and make that clock go back to whatever demonic electronic place it came from. So now I never mention it when the dream occurs. I think he misses those sessions and the excuse to run about the office and express emotion like a human being. I don’t. Because now all I hear is those same calm, soft, caring tones that gently puts a sleeping spell over me.