The dreams that came about would have been a bit weird because where they were being dreamed from, and the movies that were in the house that I played to go to sleep. The whole thing becomes a mental picture that some people don’t want in their house when they live around so many horror films and read the books – sometimes they would say that I have been watching one too many movies or read one too many anthologies. The nightmares that came from them might have been something that I might have imagined there before being that I was in the most haunted block on the street.
     When I did my laundry sometimes I would see a cold spot in the cemetery and walking up the road when getting something to eat my imagination would get the better of me. Just when I am walking along 79th Street there are just things that come to mind when it comes to that dream. The whole thing sits in the back of my mind as a burnt memory. The thought that sits there for a long period of time becomes the dream that sits there for a number of years. The dreams that are there – I want them to check my brain because I was losing it because of the images that were in my mind, I kept hearing people shouting “retard” like it was my name.
     “Hello there!” I screamed at the top of my lungs.
     “Retard!”
     “Fuck you!”
     I was looking on in the cemetery and was looking from the Laundromat and felt that someone came in with a weapon and looking to stab me again as they did in 1999 along Federal in Mason City. Just there were a lot of things to take in and the detail didn’t seem real – the roommates didn’t think much of the dream when I kept it to myself, but when I was folding the clothes from the Laundromat, and ate a sandwich that I picked up – just seemed weird but mundane at the same time.
     “Retard can’t fold his laundry or write a story for the life of him,” I heard someone saying pointed at me. It was like I was hearing “retard” everywhere I walked and gathered in the dark places that wandered from shadows as the word was being whispered. Everywhere I walked I heard the fucking word whispered like it was my name. The world around me was turning black before my eyes as it was in the shadow of the nightmare as it remained – the strange dream as it was, and burnt in my mind as a shadow wandering. The whole thing in the Laundromat being the dream as it was – could I have seen the woman in the prom dress walking the street looking for a ride? It was burnt in my mind that she could been there but in some ways it was a nightmare and someone was calling me a retard for even thinking that she was there.
     “Hello there!”
     “Retard!”
     “Who are you calling a retard you fuck?”
     I kept hearing that throughout the dream and wherever I walked I heard someone calling me a retard like it was my name. It was like when I would see the people without the faces – the damnation of that being the result of endless smoking and fear of rejection played in the back of the mind there. I kept hearing the word that set me off throughout the dream, and in the streets it was being called loudly. It was clear to me as time went on and the dream went onward. There were details that I wish I was able to recall or relate but it is all a blur to me. The whole thing played out in the street on 79th and Roberts when I was walking from the apartment to the liquor store to get something. It was like what happened on Feb 9, 1999, within my mind but nothing happened that day at the apartment, just that those many years ago played in my mind over like a movie. I had nightmares about being stabbed again.
     It was my imagination when that was going on at the apartment, but it was in my mind as a memory playing out again and again. The combination of the nightmares about being stabbed and being hit by a car were vivid in my mind, as it was on the day they both happened. It was if I was seeing the headlights of a Lexus. Much as the day when I was hit by the car originally, but this was just a dream that was playing out in my head. The memories of it were still vivid to me. The night of when it happened was still strong in my mind about the slashing and about getting hit by a car years earlier. “The retard got hit funny as hell,” one would jeer.
     That was what played out in the dream as details would go on, and it was if it was in replay over and over again. The whole thing played out as a blur in me but it was showing bits and pieces of the dream as it would play out – the whole thing being called retard being the most vivid thing in the dream. The nightmare would be out of that, the whole thing being heckled for being hit by a car was the thing that would come to mind there – and heckled for being stabbed was the other thing that played in my mind too.
     There it stood, the blood from the stabbing and the sharp pain from the hit by the car – a stabbing pain indeed and that is the nightmare that I have night after night, old wounds reopening as I would be laying in my futon. It doesn’t seem real when the dreams are like that – then again that is the unreal nature of a dream as it’s finding its way into a page staring back at you with a pair of eyes in form of words as the fingers run across the keyboard. The nervous notion of what is there is the whole thing of what isn’t there looking at you as it is some kind of ghost in the house or some kind of sickness lingering – the nightmares lingered with the sickness, and in the apartment the first night the nightmares were evident because they fell on the death anniversary of when a former classmate died from having his skull crushed into the roof of a car.
     I could still hear that dead kid calling me a retard from beyond the grave, but there is a part of me that wanted to visit the headstone to get some closure because there were a lot of unresolved issues that came at his death where I insulted him before he died. I am haunted by his memory and the things that follow his death – the funeral was a no show for me because I would had felt like a pariah because the kid hated me in life.
     “What is this retard doing here?” a few would jeer, I could feel the cold fingers clawing my neck of him reaching up from the open coffin and grabbing my neck like that picture from the Iron Maiden album. The act of me showing up would had been murder on his memory – killing him over again, that nightmare first made itself manifest in the 1990s when I was sick at home with a loss of voice. My voice was lost in the dream too because I was too scared to scream – the dream took place a year after the classmates passing, and I still get dreams about that. More so after I was hit by the Lexus in Glen Ellyn, back in 1996. It was a few days after the accident that I had such dreams, some of them appeared when I was in the infirmary at the college when I woke scared to go back to sleep.
     It just didn’t seem real when those dreams played out in my head – especially when the stabbing took place those years ago. Though years had passed since those nightmares had occurred but they are still vivid in my mind as they are memories waiting to go to sleep but never sleeping again. They just seem to be there staring at me like that last Camel cigarette in the apartment waiting to be smoked. It just didn’t seem real with the nightmares because the horrors I faced were real – the stabbing and the hit by a car.
     “Look at the retard that got hit by a car, he should be dead right now instead of running up against the car like Superman,” one said in the funeral home during the dream that I had when I was in the infirmary that nightmare happened the night I was studying for finals and was stressed out from midterms the fear of failure was the thing that came to mind there. I was going to fail and it was something I couldn’t do about it. I missed a lot of classes because I was hit by a car and was stuck in the infirmary for the stress of the impact of when I got hit.
     “Screw you!” I looked at them and screamed at the top of my lungs – in horror that I stood in and it was before God himself that these nightmares I am the witness to. It started at the dawn of the accident and continued after the first car accident I was in – I had nightmares about the dead boy that distracted my wrestling match years earlier. The dead boy still haunts me to this day at times, always in my dreams and sitting in the cemetery laughing at me like he did when he was still alive. I know that is a bit disturbing to think about at times but it is there looking at me like it was staring at the computer screen waiting to be written. The details of the dream were vivid in my mind and they always had a way to show up.
     “Look at the retard in the cemetery.”
     The dead boy laughed at me – it was if his soul was still on the world where it is left to wander.
     “Fuck you! You’re still dead and you can’t speak,” I screamed. It was if all I heard was silence and it was something that I didn’t hear before – the silence was deafening. I mean it was still the dream that was playing out in me right? I mean this is the part of the dream that became more frightening than words themselves for me to put to paper. It was if part of me was speaking out the narrative in my head and the dream was still playing out at the apartment – where the cigarettes stared at me and the computer screen glowed at me in the darkness. It wasn’t something of the Biblical sense of what dreams were and it wasn’t demonic either but it was something that played out in my mind and imagination. The dead boy still laughed at me in the cemetery calling me a “retard.”
     Time moved slow in the dream, and I couldn’t tell if it was a minute or an hour had passed just that time passed. The whole thing with the retard being called to me is something that gets to me from time to time, and in the dream hearing it was the nightmare playing itself out in my mind and in the psyche. It was if it didn’t seem real to me or surreal because it contained the death of a classmate in the details of the dream – as strange and unsound as it is, just that some people might want my blood for relating it. It was all relative to me here and just doesn’t seem real enough to me but for me to write it – it does seem real enough to relate.