Competition Thirty Highly Commended: Dream Catcher by Karen Arnold
It is never truly dark in the hospital. At night, dreams hover above each bed, drifting like smoke. Some are delicate as shells from childhood beaches, others dark, slick as canal water. I wander unseen from bed to bed, trailing my ancient fingers through the gauze of each mind.
I linger near the cribs of new born babies, hair still plastered to soft skulls with blood and vernix, delicious wordless dreams of warmth and a soft, rushing, red dark where they were never alone. I take just a few, enough to make the baby stir and whimper with a new knowledge of separation and loss. Enough to make mothers reach out and shush shush shush with tired fingers. Into my pockets they go, tiny tucked away dreams.
The wards of the oldest ones are never still, their dreams are rich and deep and satisfying, I am greedy there, reaching out for handfuls, gathering great skeins and hanks, the warp and weft of a life. sometimes the threads are black, glittering green with malice. I take those too; my pockets are deep.
I have walked through the years, through white tiled corridors older than anyone working here really knows. Catching dreams from war blasted, gassed minds, mustard yellow and slick with grey mud. Sometimes I took all of those, as a kindness, letting them slip into a gentle night.
In a time before doctors and machines, on this same ground, I walked through a hut, wood smoked and spell chanted, filling my hands with fever dreams from hag ridden minds. I remember the old woman at the fire who nodded to me as I passed. No one nods at me now, invisible in the bright white light of progress.
Karen Arnold is a writer and child psychotherapist. She came to writing later in life, but is busy making up for lost time. She is fascinated by the way we use narratives and storytelling to make sense of our human experience.
Photo by Vitor Monthay on Unsplash
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