Drabble 125 – Sweven

When I was a kid, I lucid dreamed without trying. I thought it was something everybody did; I’d wish myself out of nightmares and turn every dream I could control into a grand, playful experiment. I worked out problems from my real life by acting them out in dreams. It didn’t help, but at least it gave me some measure of control.

Now that I’m older, I never lucid dream. I still try to work my problems out, but my dreams seem to actively work against me, coming up with increasingly difficult problems to solve, more frustrating situations, more awful rehashing of my worst fears.

I kept a dream journal for a while to see if there was any consistency there, but there wasn’t. Just an inscrutable soup of thoughts bubbling to the surface and sinking back down again, over and over, while I sleep.

Anyway, here’s a drabble.

SWEVEN

(n.) From Latin somnus, to sleep

A dream or vision.

Nika’s dreams are violent. They always have been; there’s never been a morning she wakes up with her blankets tangled about her body, some part of her aching or bruised or bloodied from her thrashing. All night, she fights things; people, demons, entities without name or form. It’s what she knows best.

Her sword slices through dream creatures without effort; they are nothing more than thought, after all. In reality, she swings so hard, so fast, with so little finesse, that she stumbles or lodges her sword deep into everything and must yank it free, grunting.

She likes reality better.