You are drifting, drifting …. How much frustration can one bear before it becomes a nightmare? You may now begin just another in a long series of seemingly endless frustration dreams:

I watch a Star Trek rerun with Ricardo Montalban as Khan. I sink into the show, and find myself standing by the narrator, in a sunny room.

Apparently, I’m one of the autistic guests to be interviewed. I try to toss all this junk out of my mind as I leave the booth. Forget politics!

What am I doing here? Defining just who in Hell I am. Point at a lamp post and say, “I don’t want that.” At a bus, and add “Or that!” A businessman passes. “Or THAT!”

Immediately a gigantic wheel appears in front of me; it seems to be rotating at a colossal speed and on the great spokes I thought I could make

out nebulous shapes. As we fled through a circus tent, we met a Lykan [a werewolf or human/wolf mix]. I found his brown skin and long brown hair

quite handsome. His caravan wheels into town and floods the place. He’s getting big! Insisting on privacy, his own people take over all the staff positions.

Experimental surgery might cure me. I was feeling helpless about something and it has been haunting me since… muttering, at the back of my brain.

“Some have gender; some have hands.” At every place, I was searching for dead people. I don’t know who I was looking for exactly. But definitely dead.

My mother’s around, may have arranged the party but won’t be in it to interfere. She is me in another existence, the one to end in madness.

Source and Method: THE WORLD DREAM BANK An online database of 2300 dream texts and images, sorted by topic. Here, I utilized excerpts from each of eleven different dreams. This poem was sourced entirely from the “Frustration” dream section.

I find that most of my own dreams lately have a strong thread of frustration running through them. They almost always begin with me trying to do something, and then evolve into a series of events that move me further and further from the original objective.

S. Clay Sparkman was born in Portland, Oregon. A book of his poetry was published as A Place Between Two Voices (by Tabor Hill Press). He has had poetry, humorous articles, short stories, and essays published in Praxis, Moonglasses, Occulum, The Higgs Weldon, Down in the Dirt Beautiful Losers, Parenthesis, Zeroflash, Literaryyard.com, and 1859, Oregon’s Magazine, among others. He married into Chile, and considers Chile to be his second home—maybe his third. He currently lives in Nicaragua, with his wife Veronica, his 12-year old son Javier, his dog Lola, and his cats Torcha and Other-Cat