Eng. 412 (Creative Nonfiction) Dream Essay
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I dream of staircases. They tower above me in square spirals, going up to what looks like infinity. I wish they did. If the staircase never ended, I could climb with impunity and never fear the final flights, those last steps.

Often I will dream of buildings, running through them with that strange conviction of a dreamer. Looking for a friend or shoe or bathroom, guided by impulses with an obsession that seems completely natural, although not always comfortable. Constantly moving, I could be anywhere, from a grand hotel that gleams with newness to a battered old house clinging grimly to a cliff’s side. But eventually, I come to a staircase. To the staircase.

It might begin with a stairwell of an office building, bland and boring, used simply as a way to move from one floor to the next. I take that first step, preoccupied with the voluptuous skirts of the wedding dress in my arms or the duck that I need to catch, when the plaster walls around me shift to badly jointed boards, dim light leaking through in narrow beams. The cool metal railing under my hand becomes a crumbling wooden banister, dark with age. The staircase found me again.

The other details of the dream slip away and nothing exists but me and the staircase. Quite often I find myself moving up each creaking step quickly, eager to at last know the mystery at the end of the staircase. But there is an almost perceptible shift in the air when I approach the final flight. My steps grow sluggish, my initial enthusiasm fades into a growing dread. There is something bad at the top of the stairs. Something wrong. It knows that I am on the stairs, but can’t get me until I reach the top. It is hungry.

Until this point, I never consider the possibility of going back. Whatever compulsion that drove me in earlier dreams narrows down in a tight focus. I must get to the top. But every time I get close, fear tightens my chest like a fist around my heart, making it hard to breath, hard to think. The ball of dread hatches open into a blind panic that floods my entire system, and I turn and rush down the stairs. And then I wake up.

I’ve had dreams like this for as long as I can remember. My dad has heard many of them since he was usually the one awake when I stumble out of my room, the memory of the dream still hot behind my eyes. He has theories on how the staircase represents change, and how I have always feared change. He likes to bring up how long it took me to quit the job I hated because at least I knew what to expect at that crappy place. He also links the stairs to the panic attacks I sometimes get, when anxiety cripples me to the point where I begin to hyperventilate, and my chest hurts until I think I’m going to die.

Every time he lectures me with a new theory, I listen, but inside I reject it. I know I have problems; everyone has problems. The staircase is just a weird reoccurring dream, and has nothing to do with some reflection of my psyche. At least that is what I tell myself when I begin to get analyzed by some armchair psychologist or another. When I start to feel threatened.

I dream of staircases. I don’t know what is at the top. Maybe I am afraid of change, but not in the way my dad thinks. I’m afraid of facing my fears. I’m afraid of what I would see in that dark attic, and know how flawed I really am.