What dreams may come

So there I was, just now, trying to get past the turnstile near the guard, when I realized that I couldn't go in with food and drink. I turned to finish it off before going in. Another guard, young, tried to snatch it from me and throw it away. I told him I wanted to finish off the drink first. He asked me if I was trying to pull one over on him. I said no. But he was right. The cup was empty. What was I trying to pull? So I took it over to the trash where another kid threw in a whole cupcake tray with cupcakes still in them. Maybe they were smashed and without frosting, and they were a little tougher than normal, but throw them away? So I reached in to the bin and worked one out of the tray to enjoy before going through that turnstile. It's not often that I get to eat anything in my dreams. Usually the sight or thought of something wonderful is enough to wake me up (sadly). But this cupcake wasn't good enough to do that. But it did leave me with black cupcake all over my fingers, which I was working on quite contently, when our neighbor friend Ian came running toward us from the other side of the gate. He ran through the turnstile and whizzed by us, telling us to run, because the cops were coming. As though filling some bizarre quota, the cops were always coming around in large groups looking for kids to arrest. To pick on was more like it. Anyone who got picked up during one of these raids was severely beaten by these cops before being taken to spend the night in the jail. The setting was in the early 1900s. I could tell because everything was sepia-colored.

So we ran. I got about ten steps when I caught up to Richard. He was holding back, trying to find me. What a good brother. We took off. He knew a way back so we took it, each running along the edge of a large gutter filled with water, a sort of drainage tunnel that ran through the park and came close to where we lived. But I was running on the opposite side of the gutter from Rich. I should have followed more closely. Cop cars were now lining the street up ahead. Some cops were chasing down kids. Others were waiting by their cars for kids to run by. Kids like me. Richard's side of the open drainage tunnel was too far for the cops to bother. They would never catch Richard anyway. Not in that or any other dream. He always seems to be okay. I couldn't turn around because of the cops on our tail, but running forward just took me past a nearby set of police cars. And they definitely saw me. And I definitely don't run fast in my dreams. And that was when I thought to myself, "Self, you are faster than this, by at least a little bit. Is this situation not dire enough for you? Or are you perhaps dreaming? If you are dreaming, it is possibly unnecessary to get beaten down by these cops."

So I forced myself awake. Forced awakening is my only well-developed subconscious superpower. I have been different superheroes before, but I have yet to hone their skills. When I was the Pan (at least twice now), I could hover just out of reach of Captain Hook and his pirates. But I couldn't ever get comfortably high enough. It took a great deal of mental concentration to just stay afloat, as though I were low on pixie dust. I guess I don't make a very good fairy boy. When I was invisible Super-Batman, I could fly much higher and faster than before, but I kept crashing into things and needing to hold on to things that I flew by to help direct by flight path. And people could see me anyway, because almost everyone else had super powers in that dream, too. Except the orphan kids I took those lollipops to. They thought I was great.

So I wish that I could completely control my dreams. That would be fun, though they would never turn out so creative. As it is, I have only learned to bring my subconscious self to an omniscient enough state to hit the abort button on the subliminal process, screeching all rapid eye movement to a halt and jolting me awake, sometimes violently, like a crash landing. I guess that makes me like the Launchpad McQuack of the dream world.