In the sun’s hours he wanders, roams the garden,
climbs the treehouse at the bottom of the hill,
plants a hut at the hill’s summit,
reads his book, dreams new books.
He dreams in the hours of daylight.
And the day is long. In summer the sun scarcely says goodnight.
Daylight still glimmers through the hippos of his bedroom curtains.
On his wall the Hundred Acre Wood dapples at day’s end.
Adventures sparkle at sunset.
When he wakes, dark disoriented, the hippos
transfigure into monsters. The map of the wood
warns of dragons and giants.
Nothing is safe in the undiscovered dark.
Here is an instance.
One night at home, his parents away, grandparents on hand,
he wakes from a nightmare about a cruel old hag, the sort
that populate his storybooks, and when
he wakes he finds the dream’s image lingering on his eyelids.
The friendly hippos’ faces on his curtains
have become hags,
and his grandmother, when she comes to him, stirred by his screams,
is herself disfigured, a crone, and in
the wasteland between waking and reality settling, he feels
that night has no refuge. Even
when his grandmother’s arms have calmed him and years
lie between him and the dream, he will still dread
the thought of one night waking to find
the screen between nightmare and comfort pierced, and proven
a thing as thin as breath.
Matthew Pullar is a poet and teacher based in Melbourne, Australia. His work often explores the depths of human thought, with a particular focus on the first-person experience of mental illness.