This is just one of the many vivid dreams I’ve been having lately. Detailed and highly emotional. Usually, I welcome such dreams. They can be useful sources of inspiration, and when I’m bored (which I am, most of the time), they can be interesting subjects for contemplation. But when you keep having them night after night, one after the other, you wake up everyday feeling sleep-deprived and so, so exhausted. I haven’t had a proper night’s sleep in a while. Perhaps it’s time to manually induce a cough just so I can get myself knocked out by cough syrup.

**

I was incarcerated in a women’s prison. Perhaps framed for something I didn’t do, because I felt like I didn’t deserve to be there. It actually felt more like a highly secure underground facility (with dank stone walls and low-lighting) ‘cos we were free to roam the area and were not locked in cells. But, I knew I was in a prison ‘cos there were guards everywhere, and they didn’t treat us like human beings. They were mean, cruel bullies, all of them men. There was no rape, but they would occasionally single an inmate out, take her to a secluded room, strip her down and just beat the hell out of her. In my dream, I was unlucky enough to be one of them.

After the ordeal, I was brought back to the main hall where the rest of the inmates were. I shouted that justice will come and all of them will pay for what they’ve been doing to us. They laughed. No one believed me. Even my family, who were there, watching me from the outside in.

Eventually, a good man, one of the guards, saved me from the place. He took me to a boat and we headed to Australia. We weren’t lovers; I didn’t even know the man. He was a silent one, but I felt safe with him. He made me feel like I was human again, a woman again. Maybe in that way, I did feel affection for the man.

Perhaps… I even loved him.

**

That was my last thought, or rather, my last feeling when the dream ended. A sort of love, born out of sorrow and misery.