I’ve been having these horrible nightmares.

When I dream , I know I’m dreaming, and a nightmare happens when I can’t control what’s going on, but the entire time, I know I’m dreaming, and if the nightmare gets too bad, I can thrash around and scream loud enough so that someone will hear me from across the aether and wake me.

Lately however, my dreams have changed. I’ve moved into this new house, an old-fashioned, pier and beam, two-story house with wood siding, and a front porch. The siding is the old fashioned kind, thin and laid up overlapping like fish scales. The front porch has four posts holding up the roof, and three wooden steps painted in a weathered, worn, barn red. I’m renting the house or a room from some woman.

It has one staircase. If you go up the stairs from the front, it starts near the front door, goes halfway, and then makes a turn to the left and continues up to the 2nd floor, but if you go up the stairs from the rear, the stairs are straight.

During the day, the house is white inside as well, flat, matte white on walls with no texturing, and the floors are wooden, dark, caked with ages. They haven’t been refinished in a long time. But at night, the house interior changes to dark colors, deep reds, burgundies. The white walls are covered with dark panelling and a patterned burgundy carpet with intricate paisley-like designs covers the floors.

Upstairs, there is only a hall that connects two doors, the one to my room, and the one to the other room. During the day, a banister forms the hallways right-side, looking over into the living room and front door downstairs. This is where the stairs come up. At night, though, hall is just a hall that leads to the other door.

During the day that door leads to another room, but at night, it leads to the front door, and there’s alternately an anxious woman, a quiet man, or nothing behind the door. The man will open the door and look down the hall toward my room, but the woman won’t.

The change in my dreams has been that I do not know that I am dreaming. I always know when I am dreaming, and waking with the sudden realization that what was real wasn’t is odd. And more weird, in my dreams, I fall asleep and dream, having nightmares in the house (where it’s no longer the day white but the night burgundy), and knowing I am dreaming I wake. But I’ve only woken in my dream and continue in the dream world, and I only wake slowly if at all, sleep pulling back like a slow tide to reveal the shore.

One night, the woman was banging on the door, screaming, pulling on the handle to the screen door and ringing the bell. I leapt from bed in my dream and in person and ran to the front door. In my dream I opened the door but kept the screen door shut, and the woman stood there, her hand on the screen door, mouthing somnething to me. In reality, I stopped somewhere in the hallway as I noticed the tides of sleep recede.

Another night, I stood at the door to my room, looking down the hall and the quiet man opened the door and looked at me from down the hall. I know the woman some how, but I do not know the man. He’s older, broad shouldered and thick-chested, wearing a white undershirt, receding, greasy hair, light colored pants. His arms are thick and covered with dark hair.

The woman has short hair and intense eyes and pleading fingers. Last night, the woman was outside the bedroom window with a drill, drilling and banging. I woke in the dream, and it was Debbi fixing the blinds, but as sleep crept away, I realised I was laying in bed with my arm around Debbi.

The woman is both the woman I rented the house/room from, and not that woman. She does not scare me, but her anxiety is like a sickness I can’t bare to look at, but the man has a slow, dark reek, like old sweat at the end of a long, summer, Texas day.

The dreams seem to be coming closer and growing more intense. Last night, in the dream, Debbi was struck with a terrible pain in the stomach. When the woman could not come through the windows. Oddly, though, I do not think the woman means us any harm. It’s the man, whose big hands I’ve seen clenched around Debbi’s wrists, that I fear. But I do not fear him for myself.

Debbi has been waking me as she notices I am more agitated. It’s always odd because I am supposed to know I am dreaming, and I am supposed to get her attention so she will wake me. But I don’t even know I’m dreaming. I’m glad she wakes me though.

I haven’t been sleeping well.

He would do things like this: http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php?date=2005-07-29&res=l

And walking up to the hottest girl in the room and leaving with her. Immediately.

And painting roman columns on the living room walls. Cause we’re having a toga party.

And leaving the kitchen a condemned toxic waste zone of pancake batter and spaghetti. Only six hours after I’d cleaned the kitchen so it was spotless. He destroyed it in a brief manner of hours.

Man, I miss his insanity. It’s very possible that duplex on French Place I shared with Steve Cunliffe, Bryan Waters and Braettie Gainer — nicknamed the Hellhole — was the very first incarnation of the House of Dischord.

Sometimes, while crossing the Atlantic, the wind would disappear, and the sailors would drift, aimless on a dead sea with nothing to do but wait for the wind to come back. Sometimes, all you can do is wait for the wind.

Tossed and turned all night, anxious. About what? Don’t know.

My anxieties never play out with real world consequence. Perhaps I sense the impending collision of fate — a proximity alert for destiny. Perhaps, every time, the crash is narrowly avoided, a troubled night’s sleep left like skid marks on the road.

A gulf exists between creation and production. The urge to create has no link to the urge to produce. Just because I scribble something down, satisfied with its birth, doesn’t mean I’ll ever take the time to share it with anyone.

And the urge to produce, need not rely on one’s own urges to create. Publishers are driven to produce the creations of others with no regard for themselves.