=A Confession=

I have the ability to murder people in my sleep. I dream people dead and a couple of days to a week or so later—boom!—a heart attack, a car wreck, a random mugging in the street, whatever: out of the blue, they're dead. 

It's terrible because I really try hard to let go of old angers and grudges, to let bygones be bygones, but I have no control over what happens in my sleep. In fact, to look at me from the outside, you'd say I was  sleeping like a baby. Clearly there's a less developed reptilian part of me always at work, coldly going over the Book of Old Grievances like a Mafia don and systematically exacting revenge on those who've done me wrong. 

Sometimes it's a complete surprise—even a shock—who my dreams decide is worthy of death. It could be someone relatively unimportant in my life, someone who committed what I'd consider a minor slight, something I hardly even took notice of at the time, while someone who really did me dirty might go scot-free for years. Sometimes it's not even the person who deserves it themselves who's struck but someone close to them, as if the point is to torture the guilty first with  unendurable grief before finishing them off. 

I stare and stare and stare at this ugly, cruel, capricious thing inside me and still I can't figure out what it is or what to do about it. It's like a lightning-maker or a doom-machine or even God Himself. It's a murder weapon, really, but there's no deep quiet lake I can row out into at midnight in which to drop it. Still, for all that, I can put my head on the pillow at night with a clear conscience. I can see the stars above. I can love myself. It just goes to show you. But what it goes to show you is so completely open to interpretation that any explanation I've heard so far strikes me as essentially meaningless.