Another dream

Another dream. It's unsettling and it seems to be getting worse because now I keep finding myself dreaming during the day as well as at night. I rap my desk with a knuckle, yeah, wood veneer and it's real enough to hurt. I am sunk in a burgundy leather chair in my tiny office at Viceroy with a view of Chicago that makes the city look like a gleaming number one tourist hotspot fit to grace the cover of any vacation brochure. I can even see sunlight glinting off of the lake, polluted as it is. If I look hard enough through the wall length window, I can see joggers padding the route on Lakeshore, their damp breath misting the air. At this moment I wish I could join them in their mindless exercise, concentrating so hard on breathing that all other thoughts, intrusive thoughts flee.

I always feel weird after one of my dreams, my "episodes" as Hannah has started to call them as if they were instalments in a weekly daytime soap. It's like I switch off for a minute or two and my eyes glaze over like a dirty window. What I am experiencing, from my point of view, has a conviction to it, has smells and feelings and atmosphere. Damn, it is real to me. It's like time traveling, or at least what I imagine time traveling to be like. My body and mind, my consciousness are all relocated and I see and feel everything like I see this room, this desk, that window, these pencils, this map, now. I feel myself breathing and thinking all in real time. Afterwards I feel like my body and mind are detached one from the other and it takes me a while to come round, a strong coffee helps. Usually I feel weak- closest I can describe it is to say it's like having food poisoning; my body throbs, my stomach heaves, I have a pounding headache as if I were dehydrated.

I push away the chair and stand bent over and hissing in breaths of recycled office air fighting the nausea. Maybe I have sick building syndrome, that is supposed to make you feel weird and affect your concentration, isn't it? All that dirty germ filled air being blown through the ventilation system gathering more and more bugs as it travels around the building. And you don't know you've got it till it's really made you ill. Or maybe I need to get out more, take more exercise, and maybe I am just not suited to this sedentary life. When I was a thief I didn't get like this, I didn't see things that weren't there, my nights were dream free. I suppose I didn't have much of a conscience then, didn't want or need one. Now I have responsibilities, I have Hannah.

This is the real world, Cade, your reality, this office, these living nightmares.

There's a broken pencil between my fingers, the graphite crumbling onto the notepad, my knuckles are white with tension. I fold back into the padding of the chair to contemplate what I have subconsciously drawn there. It's a man's face, no one I know, a face that has been haunting me for weeks. I see that craggy face, usually fronting a severed head, with bulging eyes and bloodied mouth when I unclasp my case, when I open a drawer or a safe door, or a closet or a cupboard or the car trunk. Sometimes those features even superimpose over Hannah's at night when we are embracing like a scene from The Godfather, then I have to stop and recover. We haven't made love properly for weeks. It's not an acid flashback or an ecstasy induced vision. I don't do drugs, haven't done for many years so what's the explanation?

Madness.

I see it in Hannah's eyes when I have the courage to tell her- she thinks I'm going insane and she is afraid of me. I saw it yesterday: the fear in her expression, her brown eyes uncertain of me and what I might do. I know she is wondering if I am going to start stealing again, to revert to my criminal past. I am so unpredictable lately that I know she is losing the trust she had in me. If she stops trusting me what will I do? She is the only secure thing in my world, my safe haven, my rock, my anchor, she has kept me on the straight and narrow all these years, and she's kept me safe. She saved me from myself, she's my redeemer. My world will fall apart if she loses her trust in me because she is the only person who believes in me, and apart from Harry, the only family I have now.

She wants me to see a psychologist, someone recommended by her Mom. I won't. We argue about it frequently. I know she wants only the best for me; she's doing all this because she cares for me but so far this "thing" has not affected my work and doesn't really adversely affect the rest of my life. She's afraid for me because she loves me. Is it possible I don't love her enough to do what she wants? Or is it simply that I am even more afraid than she is? Petrified of admitting I am going insane?