[ WP ] Write a true embarrassing fact about yourself , and make a story around it .

I dreamt about the wall last night. 
 
 It wasn ’ t the tall, ivy covered bricks that separates our small yard from Mr. Winchell ’ s enormous flower garden to the west or the splintered wood that separates us from the Santee ’ s on the east. 
 
 I dreamt about a wall that doesn ’ t exist. At least, I think it doesn ’ t, but I haven ’ t seen every wall ever built so I can ’ t say that definitely, can I? And even though I've seen it a hundred times, it might not even *be* a wall. This is how it happens: I wake up, my mind is spinning down from the whirling dervish dance, sweat cooling on my skin and all I have is the fading impression of an enormous, steel barrier. It could, for all I know, actually be a building or a sky or a hubcap. 
 
 The moment before I crash back into reality, I stand in front of something impossibly large, with my hand raised about to touch smooth metal. But trying to recall the details of that image is like gripping a pile of sand - the more desperately I clench my fist, the faster it spills out between my fingers. 
 
 Most days, I shove the dream violently away. I wake up with my elbows shaking and my heart hammering out of my throat and eyes and ears. Most days, I flip on the light, tumble into my bathroom, to the bathtub, sit in empty ceramic, and wait until my nerves are no longer trying to crawl out of the bottom of my feet. Most days, it ’ s all right I can ’ t remember - I don ’ t want to the think about the enormous metallic border looming like a funeral in my brain. 
 
 But last night, when I dreamt about the wall and woke up rat-a-tat-tat, I tripped to the bathroom with out turning on the lights. I sat in the bathtub, eyes open, unseeing, and breathing in the dark like a frightened horse. Exhausted and stretched thin, it took an hour for me to drift off again. 
 
 It might have only been a minute. 
 
 Time doesn ’ t keep track of itself very well at night when no one's watching it, so it ’ s hard to say exactly how long it took before I was hanging between awake and asleep without really being one or the other. 
 
 You know that space between? Where you ’ ve got one foot in a world were a knife can hurt you and cotton tastes like cotton, and the other foot in a world where knives are leaves and cotton tastes like amber? That ’ s where I found myself staring up at the darkly-lit, rising blade. 
 
 Head back and aware that I was there and yet not there, but not at all disturbed by the dislocation. It was warm, somehow -- vital. I almost expected it to contract on inhalation. 
 
 I leaned into it. Both palms flat, all of my weight on my bent elbows. 
 
 And then I wasn ’ t touching anything at all. 
 
 In the second ( or hour ) before I woke up again, I fell. Up or down or into something sempiternal. 
 
 I wonder if I ’ ll dream of a void tonight. 

