It was always the same, with the darkness finally pounding his eyes shut because he couldn’t tell the difference, except that when his eyes were shut he started to see things painted in red fire on the back of his eyelids. Things that people shouldn’t see. Or rather, things that people had been taught not to see.

The dreams; he refused to call them nightmares even though they undoubtedly were, seemed to happen every night, and on the night when sleep did take him without a fight he forget it instantly. Forgetfulness was not a virtue that his dreams were normally given to. He could remember a time, and often did in the darkness of the night, when he had dreamt of friends in fields, and clouds and rivers. He knew he had dreamt of these things, although he couldn’t remember the dreams they were connected to. It was like they were a memory of a life he had not lived, etched in his brain by someone else. When he remembered them he was given to thinking around them and remembering life before the nightmares, and that had the same cloudy patina of memory as his dreams. He could not separate by feeling dream from reality, and the only basis he had was that he knew for certain that some things had happened and some had not.

The mixture of reality and dream had fascinated him until he realised that his dreams were becoming harder to forget and relegate to that place when everything was good. He found it hard to remember without embellishment bad things about his life as it was before. When his dreams were no longer remembered, because to remember something your brain must be aware that it can scrub out certain details and fill in the gaps with a fuzzy warm thought, when they began to be experienced, he became afraid of sleep. Closing his eyes at night opened his brain, and he knew that people should keep their brain shut at all costs lest things better left alone escape.

When it first happened he was mildly unsettled that he could dream such things, but he knew that some people must, and he reasoned that he must have seen a horrific news story or something the day before which he was remembering. But then they continued, with no relation to any news stories he had ever seen. Things happened in the confines of his skull that had never happened on earth, because people knew instinctively that only beasts would do what he was dreaming. His dreams broke the bounds of morality and let loose the beast that every man is. He knew it, and he began to examine his waking thoughts for any evidence of the taint of his sleeping mind. He looked at women and wondered whether he had thought of them tied up before or after he had tried to remember.

Were the dreams in his mind or was he thinking under the guise of dreams, under the protection given by the fact that he had no control at all over what he dreamt? He didn’t know, couldn’t decide and most of all couldn’t stop now he had started. He travelled now in the fog of a dream he couldn’t wake from, thinking twenty four hours a day, never resting his mind from the depraved urging of what he called his subconscious in an attempt to excuse himself to himself.

He couldn’t accept that he was thinking these things so he constructed an elaborate system of denial to cover what had stopped being leaking from his mind and had become thoughts in themselves, governed ponderings from his waking mind and fully under his control.

He lay awake, looking into the darkness pondering whether he was evil. Was this, the—freedom of thought he had, was this evil? He was no villain, no sneering mechanised dwarf bent on world domination. He was a normal man, if he was evil then every man was evil. He shrugged, making the bed creak. He was as good as he was evil, if indeed he was. He cared for people more than he cared for himself and he would gladly give up something to aid them. But they were few, and the rest of the world was seen through his darker eyes. If it was his shadow thinking these things he accepted that. It was the way things were, and as long as he kept the thoughts in his head then no one would know.

He no longer cringed at the things his mind threw up, because with acceptance came numbness. He couldn’t be shocked by something that his brain was doing any more than he could find it surprising that his hair was growing. He knew what was happening before it happened, and he felt relived that when he dreamt he could say, I dreamt, without having to explain it, because who can explain their dreams? Staring at the ceiling, he took a deep breath and closed his eyes and slept a human sleep.