Direction

Every now and then I wake up to a dream. It's never the same one - the theme is the same but the framework is always different - and I never jolt out of bed in a cold sweat or a screaming fit. But the dreams have become so real that I can't see the thing in real life without my hair standing on end and my breath catching in my chest.

Black dogs.

Wolves.

Grinning around evil daggers in their red mouths.

Angry eyes.

Lean, mangy bodies moving with terrifying confidence, vicious accuracy.

The dreams started when I was in high school. They all begin the same: a school gathering, standing in my kitchen, doing some mundane task, a normal day. The most recent one opened with me going to the garage to let my dogs inside.

I saw more than just my dogs though. There were more, maybe four or five. Their faces were so different from my cheerful, mousy labs.

While I had to get Sasha and Casey inside, I had to keep the wolves out.

That's the other thing: they're always going after something or someone that I love. It's the toss-up, that choice between saving and fleeing.

In previous dreams I usually stood by and woke up when they got inside, got too close. But the last time was different. One of the wolves scrambled up the steps and burst through the laundry room door. I grabbed it and threw it back outside.

It was the first time that I took action, that I did something to not only prevent the beast from invading my house - as I had in all the dreams before - but also to get it out when it did break through.

My uncle - the doctor one - told me that dreams do mean something. Not the ones where you're chasing Goldfish through a swimming pool of Jell-O dressed like a ninja chicken, but the realistic ones, the ones that could be reenacted in real life. I wish I could interpret dreams. I wish I knew whether or not I could discount the one I had in a hotel in Rhode Island, when I looked at my new husband and thought, "He will cheat on me." I wish I knew whether the boy would come after me when he saw me through the storm door and not wait to be pursued by me. I wish I knew what the wolves meant. In "Harry Potter," black dogs meant death, but I've been having these dreams for years and have lived to tell about it. I thought it was something related to the "wolves in sheep's clothing" idea, and my most recent dream represents my efforts to keep my wolf at arm's length instead of playing the game, suffering through the hypocritical meetings, putting a smile on my face while my dead eyes give away my lie. My personality is such that I search for reasons in everything, and I put this reason to it because I can't stand to leave it open-ended, unlabeled, unanswered.

Maybe that's the answer. I don't have the dreams very often, but since I've put this label to it, I haven't had them at all. I still can't hear wolves howl without something stopping in my chest, Halloween still sets me on edge when it falls under a full moon, and I'm having a really hard time getting through the Hound of Baskerville episode of "Sherlock."

But for now, at least the dreams have stopped.

They may start up again, but for the present I have a story to put to them, a chance to say "this is what this means, it's not as scary if you look at it like this."

And that is some small comfort as I lay huddled under the covers, begging the howling demons to go away.