She woke me. I was dreaming, and her palms eased gentle pressure against my shoulder blade and bicep. “You were groaning and talking in your sleep,” she said, her tone babying, kind, reassuring. “You were having a nightmare.”

I felt dazed, my eyes opening to a blur and black. I didn’t remember dreaming—not the spies who plot against me some nights as part of a cinematic adventure, not zombies stalking after I’ve binge-watched The Walking Dead or something comic like Z Nation. There was no shadowy stranger who chased me until I walked backward off a cliff and woke up startled, out of breath. I didn’t drown in my recurring childhood visions of sitting in back of the station wagon while my dad drove us toward a tidal wave, turned left to find the wave there, too, approaching from the front, then left again, the same.

She said groaning and talking, which fit more with something sexual, tender, or romantic, but I didn’t recall that either. There was a brief opening of my eyes to see darkness, followed by closing them to see it there as well.

Did she save me from monsters, sleep apnea, an ex-girlfriend arguing about the cost of my mp3 collection? I recalled none of these later. I slept as if drugged, awoke once to the shushing of her voice as if she were humming my name like a mantra: “Shawn, Shawn, Shawn.”

Wish I had responded with her name in the dream language of a Catholic rite, “Dirige nos, Eloise,” followed by a prayer not worth remembering.

I never played this role: the rescued. I was the one who gently nudged my exes when their nights turned sour. There was Genevieve, tall and creamy-skinned, whose head held a haunted house of blank-faced men that hurt her. How many horrors did I save her from? And Carol, whose round face wore sadness like a porcelain mask—every other night she envisioned me in flagrante delicto with a woman not her, her biggest fear that I’d cheat on her. Which, of course, I did as prophesied. Then came Sheila, short and dye-dark-haired. She never told me her dreams. They were awful. She screamed in her sleep as though pierced in the spine by an icicle spear—sudden, chilling agony. She cussed and flailed her arms about, one time waking me with an unintended elbow to the chin. Finally, there was Cynthia, who looked like me but with longer, slightly sandier hair. We had the same wide forehead, the same sunken, black-banded eyes and somewhat-overweight bodies. For four years, I held her while she whimpered like a scorned animal. Sometimes, I woke her and she calmed. Others, she slept through my attempts at comfort, even if I shook her and said her name. When I asked her what troubled her, she always said, “My stepfather,” and left it at that.

Now, I was the nightmare keeper. I was the lost wanderer in a dystopian dreamscape. But what did I witness? I couldn’t account for it in the few seconds of consciousness before I drifted off again, and when I awoke that morning, I barely remembered Eloise’s touch and whispers.

I felt cheated. Nothing’s more personal than a nightmare, and I had been robbed of one before it could leave an impression on me, before it could define me in some small way I didn’t understand at first and now never would.

What disturbed me so? Were there guns, knives, teeth? Did the graveyard of my sleep city come alive with phantoms? It could’ve been a tiger sizing me up from the underbrush—I always thought a tiger would be the perfect villain for a nightmare, its addition leaving any bad dream worth remembering. Was it that? Much worse?

The last time I had a terrible vision, one from which nobody woke me, it involved a snake in an unlit basement. I was packing up everything in the house—whose house, I can’t say—before effecting my escape to somewhere new. Through dark, I saw boxes stacked on top of boxes. In one of them, the serpent lurked. It lunged and struck my ankle. I cried out in pain, but the snake disappeared before I could figure out if it were venomous. Had it murdered me? Had it tricked me by playing a mysterious game of tag? I lay on the floor for what seemed like hours, clutching my leg and calling for help. No one came—not friends or family, none of my former lovers, not even the movers in their puffed blue jumpsuits. I had nobody, nothing, just hours of agony and dread that the viper—if it was a viper—might come back.

Now that was a nightmare worth its salt.  I think it meant I had a fear of leaving or moving on. My relationship with Cynthia would end soon. I knew that already, though I refused to admit it at the time. So, the pieces fit. It made sense, and it was interesting. Maybe my subconscious razzed me, its passive-aggressive way of telling me to get going.

Before the serpent dream, I had the same nightmare three times about being yelled at in a coffee shop by a dead celebrity I was obsessed with at the time. I always found the same setup, same wood-paneled coffee shop, same beginning—my fault as I bumped into him and spilled hot coffee down his back—but a different dead celebrity. First, the long, wrinkled face of William Burroughs berated me in words that each seemed to drag on forever. I had listened to the Dead City Radio album on YouTube a few nights before, so clearly heard his drawn-out phrasing as he hurled obscenities I didn’t always comprehend. The second night, I doused Kurt Cobain, who, in a weird coincidence, once made a record with Burroughs. Kurt wore that olive sweater I always pictured him in, now stained down the back with coffee. His eyes were calming as he cussed me and my wretched existence. The last night brought me Hermann Hesse, whose voice I had never heard.  For some reason, he sounded like a preteen girl as he squinted at me, punched me in the chest, and told me to “Get some goddamned serenity.”

I loved my night terrors. I found them clever vignettes from lives I never lived. I collected them and wrote what I recalled in a little moleskin notebook.

Not this time. I kept nothing from the night except Eloise’s fingertips and kind voice: You were groaning and talking in your sleep. Maybe there was more. Maybe she would recall something specific I had said. I decided to ask her.

She didn’t get up until a couple hours after I did. It was Sunday, and neither of us had to work—she at the bank, I at the courthouse where I handled deeds and tax forms. We weren’t churchgoers, so nothing compelled us to leave the house. She slept, and I waited, sitting at the kitchen table and staring at my mug of joe. My auburn bathrobe hung open around my stained white tee and boxers with cats on them. That’s how she found me. “Morning,” she said as she came down the stairs.

“Good morning.”

“You’ve been up a while.”

I saluted her with my mug—green with a Marshall University logo on it.

“Did you sleep okay?”

“I think so,” I said, “other than that nightmare. How about you?”

“Fine, fine.”  She hesitated. “Oh, yeah. The nightmare. I already forgot.”

“Thanks for waking me, by the way.”

She smiled, her pale lips glowing under bright blond hair as if roses backlit in a glass case. “What was it about, anyway?” Her voice sounded concerned, but also a little unnerved.

“I have no idea. I was hoping you could tell me.”

She scowled and shrugged, her red and gray flannel nightdress rising with the motion to reveal flushed thighs. “I don’t know,” she said, her voice like a sigh. “Why would I know?” She turned and reached for the cabinet with the mugs, her flannel rising even higher in the back.

As she poured her coffee, I said, “You told me I was talking in my sleep. What did I say? Could you make anything out?”

She didn’t reply, staring at her coffee as she scooted over the floor toward the chair across from me.

“Were they real words or, like, sleep words?”

When she had herself situated, she said, “Oh, they were real enough, I think. Keep in mind, I was half asleep.”

“What did I say?”

“Something about fire. I think you were being burned.”

“Ouch,” I said, rubbing my forearm as if to put out a flame. That sounded terrible, but not something I’d forget right away. “What else?”

“I don’t know. You grunted a lot. You were shaking. I heard you mumbling stuff.”

“Stuff like what?”

She looked away and shrugged as if she didn’t understand why I kept pushing. She was anxious, and I couldn’t figure out the reason. Had I talked about old girlfriends? Had I said unpleasant words about her? “You know…,” she finally replied.

“I don’t,” I said. “Tell me.”

“A name. You said a name.”

All the more worried, I pressed on. “What name?”

“I….”

“Come on, El. What name?”

She hesitated again, looked away, looked back. We stared each other down like dueling cowboys.

“El?” I said.

“David,” she gasped. “There, all right? You said David.”

I felt my jaw drop but forced it closed before it could become offensive. David, I thought. There had been no nightmare—not for me. David was her ex. He was the villainous spy, the skin-sloughing zombie lurching after skin to eat, the bile-spewing Kurt Cobain. She had told me about him. It was a long time ago, but she clung to the abuse. He did things to her that left my worst nightmares feeling like merry-go-rounds. Things involving broken bones. Things involving lit cigarettes. I shuddered as I considered the stories about him—the ones Eloise had been willing to share. Now I understood. She hadn’t saved me from my dream; she had saved herself from hers, using me as a life preserver and pulling herself back onto the boat of reality. 

I smiled at her but said nothing. I could tell she didn’t want to talk about it. So, we pretended. We pretended David was a man-sized lizard that tortured me in my sleep since childhood. It shot fire from its eyes. Scary. And just this once, El came into my room, slipped inside my dream, and stood between me and the beast. She wrestled it to the ground, forced it to tap out, and that was that. I would never have a troubled sleep again.

Ace Boggess is author of the novels States of Mercy (Alien Buddha Press, 2019) and A Song Without a Melody (Hyperborea Publishing, 2016), as well as six books of poetry, including Escape Envy (forthcoming from Brick Road Poetry Press). His recent fiction appears in Notre Dame Review, The Laurel Review, Lumina, Folio, and other journals. He recently won the Robert Bausch Fiction Award. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia.