The Fear Dreams

by Delee Fromm

About the Author: Delee Fromm is the author of two nonfiction books, Advance Your Legal Career and Understanding Gender at Work, and co-author of A Workbook for Understanding Gender at Work with Rocca Morra Hodge, a director at Rotman. In the realm of fiction, she has two published short stories: “The Neighborhood Watch” in A Grave Diagnosis by Carrick Publishing (2020) and “Not in Canada” in the Crime Writers of Canada 40th Anniversary Anthology.

Excerpt

A man wearing a black balaclava towers over me. A deep dread fills my body. A dread that pierces my core. His black marble eyes pin me to the bed and I feel helpless. He wants to harm me. Oh, God, I know him.

The woman relaying this frightening dream is my client. Her name is Caroline, a tiny woman in her mid-seventies. Even to a person who is not a dream interpreter like me, this is clearly a fear dream.

Caroline has been coming to me for a full year but during the last three months her dreams have become darker and more frightening. That the figure is not a stranger is most disturbing. I rub the stubble on my chin and look at the ceiling, pondering the dream’s meaning. She watches me patiently and I’m careful to keep my expression neutral.

“Did you have a sense of what the figure wants from you?”

“I don’t know.” She sounds exasperated so I move the conversation to neutral ground.

“Tell me about the day of the dream. Did anything make you fearful? Anything stand out?”

“No. Nothing.”

“What did you do that day?”

“My daughter visited, I came here, then I did some yoga.” She looks over at me and smiles. “That’s all I can remember. Sorry.”

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