I dreamt that I was younger.

I had my long hair back and I was in my old hometown, a place I haven't lived for 20 years. Everything was abandoned, caving in, falling down, boarded up. The ground was covered in skeletons.

I dream the above scenario time and again. Hundreds of times now. Variations occur, variations on a theme if you will…

This time, for example, my hair was black. When I was young, my hair was dirty blond or light brown. It only turned black in my late twenties, after I shaved it all off. I was walking through the empty streets, stepping over the skeletons. There were thousands of them. Thousands and thousands.

I am heading, for some reason, to the grocery store. I don't know why. I feel compelled to go there. Just as I approach it, a young boy runs up and asks for my help, saying "Please, Mister!"

I begin to follow him and suddenly we're in the woods outside of town. The darkness of the abandoned, death-smeared town is gone and we're in the brightness of the forest. Summer sun, high noon, cloudless sky bright. Greens everywhere. Heady smells.

The boy is crouching above a man a few feet away. The man's chest is torn open and his heart is exposed. I can see it beating wetly.

"Please, Mister!" the boy says again.

I hurry over and kneel beside the man, who is barely conscious. I try not to look directly at his exposed heart. It seems like nudity to me, but the boy and I both know something needs to be done and that I am the one to do it. The boy's eyes are filled with tears as he looks at me desperately.

Finally, I look at the exposed heart. I reach out to it and touch it, feeling it squirming and twitching in my hands, which are quickly covered in blood. I try to put it back into his chest, into the large hole. I hear a ripping sound. One of the veins or arteries has severed and blood is shooting up in the air.

The boy screams, piercingly, making my ears ring, and runs off into the forest. I look at the man's face and he is dead, staring straight with waxy and vacant eyes. I stand up quickly and look into the flat blue cloudless sky. I notice how there is nothing up there and that it isn't a real sky at all, but a fake one, a painted-on sky, covering up a terrible black secret.

I look down again at the man and he is a skeleton. My hands, which once held his heart, have also become skeletal. I look at them poking out from the ragged flesh of my wrists. They are like aliens.

That's when I woke up screaming.

Jesus.