Parasite

14^th May 2013

Dear Cassi,

       

For some time now I’ve had this reoccurring dream about being lost on this campus. I’m not sure if it’s a college campus or a commercial campus, but the buildings are so high they block the view home. I can also tell you they are made of white concrete and decorated with muted pastel. There is a sterile hospital feel to this place. The people of this place are always turned away from me as I wonder about searching. I feel as if I am just a phantom among them, but they have no identity.

       

I would wander around the campus looking for the parking structure that has my car, but as dreams would go, there was more than one place my car could have been. I would wander around as the sun went down in my dream feeling the need for sleep but finding no place to even sit. This was a thing that in my dream would last days, and I would get more and more exhausted. I felt trapped in a world where my efforts were useless. 

       

Trapped and weary are feelings common to my life, and I think you can understand these feelings as well as I. The feeling is strongest in my back along the spine. It is pain but not just pain. I feel an internal nagging itch that cannot be scratched and yet will not go away by any other means.

       

Then there was my dream this morning and it was so vivid in nature but so very strange. It started with a black shape moving beneath my skin.  I caught it and it writhed under the pressure. Feeling a hard body I pressed and the thing came to the surface as some mutant thorny turtle protruding from my flesh. The thing was not a true black but rather the dark gray brown of burnt car oil. I squeezed this like a pimple and it came away taking with it large shreds of skin.

       

As is the nature of dreams the product of this action was rather large by comparison, and I saved it in a specimen bottle. There was some blood but not much, and the wound was little to worry over. I then found myself wondering that same campus in search this time of a doctor to look at my bizarre parasite. Sometime in this adventure my legs were wounded and I took to having to crawl. The specimen became very large as things can do in dreams and was much the burden.

       

In my crawling, I found friendly faces that both helped me along and at times asked for my help. I found my way to a lab where my injuries were seen to, and I so left to wonder again looking forever for my way out. My steps were retraced and the building finally looking familiar I found myself oddly alone but without disorientation.

       

In the end, I found myself somehow, as only can be in dreams, able to fly and so flew home. I felt so much joy as the wind rushed by and the scenery ran beneath me. After a long time, I was finally free.

Freedom lives in your heart, little sister,

Richard Leland Neal