I guess you could call them stress dreams. I am always with a small group of people I care about (family, usually, mostly) and we are trying to navigate our way through buildings and a town to get away from some force (usually a single man) that is trying to kill us.

I don't know if it has ever come up, but I am really terrible at interpreting my internal map, the lay of the land, directions, etc..

And it's always me leading this group, scared but unwilling to show it, stern, with a single purpose.

Up tight, dark stairwells on the backs of buildings that no one ever uses anymore, up to doors so tightly locked and secured with dust and time that they don't even wiggle. In the car, while it's running out of gas, sputtering too slowly down alleys while electricity poles and street lights start falling all around.

Telling everyone to hush, hush, be very quiet and don't move, in some old church somewhere that smells like blood (old brass) and candle wax, hiding behind the fancy velvet curtains, just standing there, straight and still as can be, all of our hearts and abdomens unprotected.

I don't know, man. It makes the mornings tough and the days look like tundras from where I wake.