NOW LEAD ME OUT OF THIS STORY, SPIRIT

The truth is, our regular problems are enough to fill the day. They occupy us completely. Just this week more than two hundred and fifty schoolgirls were kidnapped at gunpoint and at gunpoint forced to wed. Prayer was just allowed at Town Meeting in America and though this might not sound dangerous, it is a kind of torch to the house we dreamed we built. Scars and burns. Psoriasis. Epidemics of all kinds. Whistle, we have no idea how worried to be about the unforeseen effects of scientists in corporate laboratories shuffling the DNA of our food, but we know enough to be terrified of the master they serve. Master is at once a horrific and a hallowed word in our lexicon, Whistle. Maybe it’s one we should never use again. Master class, master lock, master key, master cleanse, master of ceremonies, master of his domain, mastery. Lucid dreaming is a technique to gain mastery over dreams. I’ve had dreams, Whistle, since I was a child, of Nazis coming to our neighborhood, of them standing in the street below our windows on the evening before the day they will take us or everything we own away. The near-before, the pivot point between having and not having. Still having, having it taken from your very hands, Whistle, or having no choice but to watch it, to let it, go is exactly the moment most painful in the dream, which is always a bit different, but mostly the same: footsteps, long dark heavy coats, a chaos of choosing, belongings thrown from windows, but never the night inside the apartment, the hours there left to live.