I woke up, gasping, my heart pounding. I could hear my own voice as some sort of wordless snarl trailed away; raw, white-hot rage gripped me, brutal, violent, killing rage.

I sat up, breathing hard, sweating, my fists clenching. Needing to hurt the objects of my rage, already out of reach on the other side of the filmy curtain of dream.

even now, I can feel my teeth grind; rage will not dissipate more quickly, more easily, for it’s source being imaginary. Not when that source lives in dreams, real as waking day for only those few moments it has life.

The details of the dream are not important; my sub-conscious mind assembling people and scenarios out of the past, building something rough and new out of them, as with stones from a crumbling castle turned into crude, temporary dwellings.

Small, old hurts and frustrations, angers almost forgotten, dredged up in the dark of night and used to assemble daylight-sharp ‘memories’ of things that never happened.

I can still feel the skin on my knuckles split; I can feel my throat raw from screaming in raw, murderous fury. I can feel my opponent’s nose crack under my fist.

Now, in mid-day sun, what stands clear are the minor, sensory details, not whatever baroque tale my sub-conscious concocted. And I cannot, quite, release the targetless rage with which I woke, sweating and seething.

There is nothing to hit, in the dark, when the dream flees. No target for that impotent rage. Nothing at all.

I lay a while, staring into the glow of my digital clock, trying to let go, or to understand whatever it was that trigged such a dream. I do not know, now, if I got anywhere, but at least, I re-found sleep.

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When I woke, hours later, it was to my daughter’s voice – Daddy, I made you coffee.

Some things are better than others at sweeping away night’s cobwebs, That, certainly, was one such.