On Nearly Being Mounted in a Hospital

Continuing with my on-line therapy session regarding my visions when I was in the hospital last September: I had been moved a new room. After two weeks I had shown improvement. I was still very sick, just not as sick.

Over the next few nights, the new room, due to my condition and who knows what else, at times resembled less a hospital room and more a beauty parlor (complete with a row of sinks) or a Japanese folk remedy store (my mother was in a kimono) or a seedy motel room (with an Elvis-like male nurse). But perhaps the most haunting of all of these visions - all of them feeling as real and frustrating as real life - was the night I thought my hospital room was a trailer home.

The room was very dark. Outside my window I saw a glittering Cincinnati off in the distance like some Emerald City by night. It was if the trailer was on the outskirts of the city, in the hills and brush and bramble. On the wall of the room were mounted moose heads. I became very frightened, but unsure as to why. I just knew none of what I was seeing was right. Everything was much too dark and heavy. Like a power outage.

I looked to my side. There was the hunter leaning against the trailer wall with a rifle clutched in his hands as he slept. His snores sounded like growls. I could not see his face, but he was an immense man, with a protruding chin like one would see on a Neanderthal. If he woke he would kill me just for being there, and he would do it with glee, a hungry grin stretched across that deformed jaw.

Then, to my horror, he began to move. He knew I was awake. I squirmed in my bed, trying to shrink away. Trying to dig far enough under the covers so that he wouldn't be able to get me. And just as he looked toward me, just as I made a faint sound of terror, everything lessened and transformed. And I was looking at my mother who had been sitting in the chair beside my bed the whole time.