He knew that he was dreaming.
He stood in a flat land. An arid land. But mountains and rain ringed the horizon, and the rain fell on the peaks and valleys from black clouds, in writhing, teeming sweeps, like a mass of locusts.
He thought to wake up before that rain pelted him, drenched him, or washed him away.
But in the wakened world his life had grown dark and black like the clouds. His girlfriend of seven years suddenly hooked on meth and sleeping with any random dude she could find; his best friend of decades dead of a self-inflicted gunshot; his virility a memory in middle age.
He wrapped himself in sleep as often as he could. Slept all night long, woke in the morning, rolled over, and dove back into the haze for as many hours as his body would allow. He would be glad to let the rain take him; he envied the courage of his best friend. He could never pull the trigger on himself.
He saw the octagonal disks the dry ground had cracked into. He looked down and saw them again, running jagged off to the horizon, which had changed: the mountains were there, but instead of a low range, now two peaks were prominent, with a valley between, and behind them the first light of a rising sun glowed.
Quickly he looked down at the ground again, because he knew that the rising sun indicated that he was about to wake up; he dared not look at it. He followed the jagged running cracks again across the desert floor, and saw sifts of sand now snaking along the ground, driven forward by a cold wind. Clouds pushed down, toward the horizon, choking off the sunlight, and a first few bits of angry cold rain fell.
He found that he couldn't look back, so he kept walking (had he even been walking before?), toward the mountain's twin peaks, and then they loomed ahead and above, and around him there was desert brush, mesquite, lavender-colored sage, and cacti, scattered among red boulders in a false twilight, and in the brush coyotes weaved, yipping.
But the rain had stopped. He thirsted for it to come back, still convinced by the dream logic that the rain could wash him away: the rain would be his escape from life, if only it would come and drown or dissolve him.
Now a coyote stood on the boulder before him, its tongue lolling out as it curled its lips back from jagged teeth. It was huge and it could be a wolf and he knew not to look it in the eye, but the eyes were sparking green and he couldn't pull his gaze away as the coyote turned black and its eyes shifted from green to dull yellow. He knew the fear was going to wake him up; the dream had become more frightening than reality, so he dove into the sand.
Into the sand he plunged, face first, hands clenched. The sand threatened to become a bed sheet; it was his sheet. No; he would not wake up. He rolled and looked into the sky (not the ceiling, the sky) and the black clouds with the rain were pulling away from the mountains; they were going away and leaving behind a blue sky.
He tried to follow the clouds and couldn't. He tried again to stand up, but the clouds fled and the blue sky brightened until it became his textured white ceiling. He shut his eyes and sought the seamless dark inside. He found it, and then in the dark, eyes open, he saw stars above and heard the coyotes yipping like demons all around.
But where had the clouds gone? The rain? The sky was clear at the foot of the mountains. The air crisp and calm.
Perhaps from higher up he could see the clouds. Yes, and he found that he could float, to the peaks to look down the other side, alarmingly in broad daylight again but with a massive storm in view below, its clouds billowing black, its lightning flashing white.
Yes, in that storm would be rain that could take him, dissolve him, end him.
He knew that he was dreaming. So he dove, as one can only dive in dreams, without fear of pain, into the roiling mass of storm, and returned no more to the wakened world, except as rain.
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