At night, no matter how exhausted you are, when you turn out the light, your brain pops awake, sits on your chest, and says “let’s chat.” You picture it as some acid green, cross between a gremlin and a very fluffy cat with a Cheshire grin. So you take melatonin to sleep. Perhaps you could meditate or do something healthy, more useful in that sense, but the melatonin knocks you out for a good ten hours with little or no interruption and none of the jittery legs of antihistamine.

Melatonin takes you down into dreams. The dreams dissolve within minutes of waking, but they leave you with a sense of having been vivid and real. Two weeks ago, you woke yourself just as your husband, the Eminent Historian, also woke you screaming. All you remember was that the nightmare that awoke you was a nightmare within your dream, not the dream itself. The nightmare was two levels deep in your sleep. This week, your husband, the Eminent Historian, woke you twice from restlessly loud dreams. You have no memory of either except the sense that your mind told you turbulent stories in the night.

Last night’s dream you remember, closer to the surface, closer to the morning, filled with imagery both familiar and yet, new. Basements, instead of attics, storing not just toys this time but also old items. The desire to clean, dust, purge of insects. Snow, not just white edges of unconstructed mindscapes. Parents in turmoil, but no longer at you, and you in a position to help them, who do not want it. A mountain instead of an old neighborhood, but the outlines of the neighborhood showing. A marker for a beacon for some forgotten meeting of political subterfuge. A house that shifts floor plans. You living with your parents now, but able to move away, wanting to use those funds to help them move instead. Your mother not really the mother you have, but still her, looking more like a Big Eyes painting or perhaps like the Corn Poppy, but with eyes that are all black shadow, and skin sallow to yellow.

Dreams have always been your deeper self trying to tell you something about yourself, stirring up muck in the dark part of your psyche. You think of the dark water that Nick Adams avoids in your college American Literature class. Did Phil Collins’ plaintive voice accompanied by Eric Clapton’s crying guitar, along with his solo oeuvre to that point, which you and your husband, the Eminent Historian, listened to yesterday evening, dislodge something? Perhaps the Sherlock Holmes — original series with Jeremy Brett — and its unintended 1980s aesthetic joined the excavation. Something in you tore and released this dream; and something in the dream tells you something has shifted. You don’t know what.

Last week you a creature bigger and nastier than the gremlins emerged from your depths. You are too afraid to tell anyone about it, even your therapist. This monster told you that, small though your sins may be, they are unforgivable. You cannot be forgiven nor redeemed nor absolved. No matter how far back you go, no matter the pain put on you by other people, your fibre made you respond in the ways that you did. You were not just doomed by the people around you. You were doomed by your own being of narcissism, self-pity, and weakness. You were simply born into an environment that cultivated it. You are evil, a low-grade brand of whitegirl evil, but evil nonetheless. You cannot be absolved.

This dream was not like that. It wasn’t counter to it, but it was something more complicated in its symbols and places and you.

You wish you had someone who understood this language. Who could help you fumble through this maze of you.