4:05 A.M.

I sleep soundly most of the time and seldom need an alarm clock to wake up in the morning. My dreams are usually about work, and I try to forget them as quickly as possible. The dreams I do want to rememeber I usually can't. Only a few times in my life have I had a nightmare.

The dream started simply. I was driving a truck down the Kansas Turnpike. I have never driven a truck, and although I lived in Kansas City at the time, I had never been on the Kansas Turnpike. It was night in the dream, and I could see only my hands on the steering wheel and what was illuminated by the truck's headlights. Suddenly in front of me, shining in the headlights, was a human arm. Horrified, I swerved to keep from hitting it as I frantically tried to step on the brake, but I couldn't slow the truck, and as soon as I got around one body part, another appeared up ahead. The farther I went, the more body parts I saw. They kept coming up at me, faster and faster, until I finally hit one with a grisly thump. A moment later, I sat up in bed screaming.

I realized that I was having a nightmare. I took a deep breath and looked at the clock, more to reassure myself than to find out the time. It was 4:05 A.M.

I enjoyed my Saturday and forgot about the dream. Sunday, I bought the weekend paper and read it in my usual leisurely fashion. Near the end of the first section there was a two-paragraph article about a truck driver who had run over a body lying on the Kansas Turnpike. The accident had occurred on Saturday, at 4:05 A.M.

submitted by Matthew Menary of Burlingame, California



Blood

In the summer of 1972, I went home to visit my parents in Burnsville, Minnesota, for a couple of weeks. I slept downstairs in the basement. Every now and then, a fourteen-year-old boy named Matthew would come to mow the lawn. Early one morning, as I was sleeping in, I heard him outside cutting the grass. I paid no attention and went back to sleep.

I dreamt that I was in the upstairs bathroom, standing in front of the sink and looking at my face in the mirror. It looked like my face, but at the same time there was something odd about it. I could see my black hair, my blue eyes, my mustache, but the shape of my face was different. I looked down at the sink, where the water was running in a counterclockwise circle down the drain. I held my hands unde the water and started scrubbing my hands with soap. Again, I looked at the face that wasn't my face. There was something different about it, but it didn't really trouble me.

I went on scrubbing my hands, but my left thumb hurt. The pain was fairly intense, and I wondered what I had done to make it hurt so badly. It was as though it were sprained.

Then I looked down at the sink again, and there was blood running into the water, going round and round in that counterclockwise circle. "What's going on?" I said to myself. Blood was gushing from my thumb, pouring out from the fatty part just below the knuckle, then running down my arm and dripping off my elbow into the sink. I grabbed my throbbing hand and said to myself, "What did you do, Jim? What did you do, Jim?"

I heard a voice calling out to me, "Jim! Jim!" I woke up and realized that it was my mother calling me from the top of the stairs. She told me to come quickly. I threw on some clothes and rushed up to her. Matthew had hurt himself cutting the grass, she said, and she wanted me to go to the bathroom to help him.

Still half asleep, I walked into the bathroom and was astonished to see Matthew standing in front of the mirror and holding his left thumb and first finger. Blood was running down his arm and into the water, going round and round as it flowed down the drain.

submitted by James Sharpsteen of Minneapolis, Minnesota

Labels: auster, brian, dreams