Last night I had a dream of horrendous power and it has moved me to great agony and despair all day; even after sleeping briefly once again the idea of it still burns inside of me.  I dreamed that I went away on a vacation with the dancer Anona. I am unsure where we went exactly, for such is the nature of trying to piece together the cobwebs of a dream that still fill your mind when you finally awake, but it seems that we went somewhere to a cottage near the beach.  

Even though there was never any sex that I recall in the dream, it still had a very sexual quality. I would take her to dinner, walk along the beach, awaken in the morning to her wearing silky bedroom clothing and clinging together. She would laugh, smile and talk to me with that glitter that seems to come from someone when you feel the mutual flames of love shining out like a noonday sun. 

This alone would have plagued my thoughts possibly, for I am pained that in the real world she has never given me this level of joy since the long ago day when she was too young for me and I obeyed my morals and fear and pursued her no further than the single passionate kiss that I could not resist.  But in the realms of fantasy there can also be the lurking nightmares that forge themselves of just the sort of fears and righteousness that kept me from her arms in the first place. 

Somehow, in the dream, I became aware that she was leaving me for a time here and there.  I never caught her at anything, but I became suspicious and a certainty crept over me that she was leaving me to be with others.  Of course I knew she was a dancer, and I had come to deal with that in the dream, but somehow I knew that it was more than that.  I asked her why she sold herself to the others, why she wouldn't stay with me and let me care for her when she knew that I could. 

She looked at me with a smile that melted me inside and made me for a moment doubt the sins of which I accused her.  She could have lied to me at that moment and I would have believed anything she had said. But she didn't. She told me that she could never give up that way.  That she wanted to dance, and that the dancing was never enough for them.  In the dream she promised me that I could have as much of her as I could take, but that I would never be able to take all of her. 

I awoke dreaming that I was crying in her arms.  No tears actually stood upon my cheeks when I realized that I lay in my bed and that it had all been a dream, but those tears still gently run down the cheeks of my soul.  And in my heart, I am still in the arms of a fantasy girl who will never be mine because I did the right thing. 


Copyright © Conrad Hubbard Go to Poetry Home