March 14, 2025 Friday

10:21pm

I had a dream last night that I ate my heart out.

I went to a movie theater with a light brown, toddler-sized teddy bear and there was only one row of red velvet seats in front of the screen. The person in charge of the film’s controls made fun of my bear. A group of us, all having watched the film, were lead into a room with earthen walls that extended so high they opened up to the sky. Bronze bars, like sewer gutters, lined the bottom of the walls. We were lead into a room with a big brown brick door and the same sewer gutters but with makeshift mattresses, beds, in them and another adjoining room (unofficially the girls room) was filled with beds lined up in rows like in an orphanage or an early 20th century hospital wing. The beds had blue and green striped sheets. From a window, I could see the earthen city bellow, it resembled what I image desert cities look like (almost biblical) with interconnected buildings and courtyards and a maze of narrow, dark streets. There I stood in the middle of the girls room until a figure/ a guide (unclear to me now/ almost as if it were myself but distinct and separate from me) asked me if I’d like to leave. I was hesitant, but they proceeded to tell me if I ate my heart I could leave. They rushed out of the room and I followed quickly, but I lost them. I retraced my steps to the movie theater and quickly turned around and went back to the room where they were waiting for me with my heart. I ate it. It went down easily. Many other curly haired men ate their hearts, and when nothing happened one of them suggested we go swimming. We walked through the monumental building, looking for an exit, and turned onto a corridor with a group of women holding rifles, wearing long black dresses—the guards. Behind them the light of the city, a dry radiating light, and a staircase down into the maze. The other boys started running and said they couldn’t hurt us. I joined. We were shot. I was shot only once and I felt nothing. We escaped and ran down through the streets, meeting no one, and finally came to a blue tiled building on a beach, connected to the ocean. We went inside and there were two pools, with vibrant blue tiles. I jumped in the larger one and they all followed. Someone suggested that we needed to swim through a tunnel to resurrect ourselves. I searched for a tunnel in the pool, and a dark curly haired boy swan towards me. He appeared from the rectangular tunnel that connected the two pools and said to follow him. I swam through and woke up.

I can’t shake the feeling I woke up in a new world. What if I ate the wrong heart? How did my guide know it was mine? How did I not look more closely at the heart that was given to me? The heart that I ate.

-KS