"Our life is frittered away by detail... simplify, simplify."
-Henry David Thoreau
I had some pretty strange dreams last night, all of them emotionally draining. In the first one, I was a young girl living with her parents in a pleasant sort of shack by the sea. For some reason, I couldn't go far from the ocean or I would get very upset. However, despite this we were moving to another house that was much farther inland because the shack was being haunted by the spirits of several dead people. They were all angry with my family for some reason, and tried to make us miserable. My parents, who were unable to see them, blamed the strange occurrences on the shack itself, thus believing that moving away would solve our problems. Because I was the only one who could see them, they were constantly talking to me, telling me that we couldn't get away from them by simply moving. Out of all of these specters, only one was kind to me. It was a man who was a butler in his former life and, with my parents constantly gone at work and the others haunting me, he was my only friend. Compared to the rest, who were well-aged before their death, he was relatively young. He told me that I needed to get my parents to move everything we owned from the shack because the only way to solve the haunting was to burn it down. The spirits would then take on a physical form and burn with it, then being laid to rest. I was reluctant because I didn't want him to have to "die" too. I wanted him to come with us, but he said that once the shack started burning, he would have to burn with it, otherwise we would never escape the incessant misfortunes the spirits were causing us. I told my parents everything. About the true reason why we continued to have tragedy after tragedy, about the one spirit who was my friend, and that we needed to torch the place. It seemed like after this, they could see everything I could and understood completely. We moved our things under the direction of the dead butler and, after one last goodbye, set the shack on fire. The spirits screamed in agony, but the sound was drowned out and all was silent as I watched my friend become enveloped in flames. He smiled and seemed to be truly at peace.Then, everything was on fire. I looked around and realized that it was the end of the world. From my cottage (my actual non-dreamland house) I could see that a fiery chasm was swallowing up the houses nearest to the cliff. It slowly churned like liquid magma. The first thing I did was run. I ran from the evil beings beginning to emerge from the darkness toward the one place I would be able to find solace: the church. I could hear the huge cyprus in front of my house split in half, demons laughing maniacally as they swarmed about it. Suddenly, I was at the church and I was inside. It was quiet, the chaos of the ending world barred shut outside. My parents were inside along with many other recognized church-goers, but despite the calmness, I was still frightened. Calamity raged on outside the church doors. I sat down in one of the benches and listened as the congregation began reading from the Bible. Exhausted, I stretched out on the padded bench and tried to pass out. I dreamed.
I dreamed about a woman who was at our house. She was an evil, powerful demon who was calling my name, beckoning me to return to the burning neighborhood. The split cyprus that was somehow holding its own although divided, fell completely. It fell silently. She was laughing. I stepped forward, realizing that I had, in fact, returned to my house. The flames felt like ice as I approached the front door.
And then I woke up.
