Lighthouse on Dream Ash Island.

It's an unseen orb that arrives from time to time for no reason at all. An unwelcome guest with no immediately apparent rational explanation. The first response is to look for a cause outside one's self. Something in the environment, some condition or circumstance. Anything in the real world that is an unwelcome influence or minor irritant.

It's a darkness unseen but often illustrated in cartoons as a storm cloud following someone. It could be sadness, despair, anxiety or anger. We often look deep into our past to search for explanations. Some event in our childhood, some wrong decision. Something, anything to rationalize the suffocating presence of the unwanted negative emotion.

For some it is present all the time, lurking in the background, influencing our behavior, activities, decisions; rendering us insufferable as colleagues, friends or family. The vaporous demon of negative emotion is compounded often by the resulting feelings of abandonment. We often say we have abandonment issues, but it's the same emotion creeping over us with the arrival of empty weekends, holidays or fair weather shared with no other.

The feeling interferes with the ability to remember names, instructions or directions without the aid of pen and paper. It can be beaten back only partially with food, alcohol, gambling, or other distraction that shifts focus from it to the sensation of gratification following simple materialistic activities.

The frustration of not knowing its true nature, that it lies only within ourselves, can cause some to escalate toward violence, lashing out. However, recognizing its true nature, that it's merely a combination of chemicals in our brains that trigger unwanted feelings, that nothing outside ourselves causes negative emotions, may provide some solace and strength in our social character. If it weren't so damn insidious.

Years later the damage is done. friends are gone, family gives a wide berth, intimate companionship is long foregone. All that's left are the ashes of dreams upon which to build a lighthouse, a warning beacon for the rest of you to find and strangle your dark, persistent, insidious negative emotions, and not blame them on others.

Dream: The lightning of the molten moons

As best I can recall in this dream, it was a cool, partly cloudy evening at what I now can assume was some sort of picnic, carnival or farmers market near a street or a park. As far as I could see there were tables and booths. I never saw so many people crowded into one place and enjoying it.

I was sitting with a friend at one of the crowded picnic tables. He had fried chicken and coleslaw. It made me hungry so I got up and went browsing through a sea of serving tables and booths serving all kinds of food. I reached into my pocket for my wallet. It wasn't there. As I was walking out of the park I looked up and saw something the filled me with dread. The moon was the color of slate with cracks glowing reddish orange. Behind the moon and slightly to the right was another larger moon and they shared what looked like lightning. There was a ring of debris expanding around them.

I went back to my friend's table and he tossed me his car keys. My appetite was overshadowed by dread and anguish. I kept looking up at the moons slowly destroying each other, debris spreading wider. I reached the edge of the park and the keys were gone. I surveyed the massive crowd of people milling about and was overcome with a sense of hopelessness that I would ever find the keys so I just walked home. In the living room I found another friend laying on the couch staring at the TV.

There was nothing to do but go about our every day lives and not think about the falling molten moon debris.

The takeover

I had a crazy "Planet of the Apes" like dream last night where I had to find a hiding place from an invasion force of primates. The neighborhood was teaming with gorillas, orangutans and chimpanzees. They moved through the street like a giant hairy pyroclastic flow.

I hid in a closet behind a pile of clothes. At first I heard growing sounds of car alarms, smashing glass and metal, then I heard shreiking and thumping footsteps growing closer. The hairy horde exploded through the front doors and windows and seemed to pass by me. I thought for a moment that I would escape until a big hairy hand reached over the pile of clothes and grabbed me by the back of the neck.

After that I remember little of my dream except the feeling that I was under constant supervision. At one point I was sifting through debris looking for shoes. At another point I remember trying to get a cup of coffee and I picked a large mug out of the cupboard. I worried about being perceived as greedy for picking such a large cup. I didn't know what the punishment might be so I put it back and got a smaller cup. After than I don't remember.