Katie Cappello

A Dream Manual

Only the dreamer himself can be positive about the significance of his dream and know the truth it holds for him.

--Gustavus Hindman Miller, Ten Thousand Dreams Interpreted

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If you dream about gremlins

If the gremlins emerge from the television

If the gremlins live in your empty shoe boxes

If your mother is a green scaly monster

If your father is a vampire and you must put a stake through his heart

If your house is burned and your baby sister disintegrates into ash

If you dream that you have to go to the bathroom but the only toilet is in the middle of a large auditorium with a huge crowd of people milling around and you have to pull your pants down in front of everyone

If all those people are zombies and they want to eat your brains

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If you dream the end of the world

If you dream the end of the world and all the washing machines are broken, so you scrub your clothes in the gutters and your brother is washed away by the post-apocalyptic current

If you dream that it is the end of the world and you are living in a house run by Satan who only gives you red meat to survive on and even though he loves you, he punishes you

If you dream an antique store and your brother apologizing for gutting your sister like a fish, explaining it was an April Fool’s joke and laying her organs out, tissue-paper thin, on a vintage butcher’s block

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If you dream that you die

If you dream that you come back as a ghost but no one believes you are dead

If you dream that, while swimming in a lake, your toe snags on the skull of a drowned girl

If you dream that your grandmother dies

If she dies from the weight of too many hairclips in her head

If your dead grandmother appears in your dream walking down a hospital-green hallway wearing a green dress and sticking her tongue out at you

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If you dream about wolves

If you dream that a man makes love to a wolf

If you dream of werewolves chasing you

If your throat gets torn out by a werewolf and just before you die you notice the white fragments of bone sticking out from the pumping red flesh

If you dream yourself part of a werewolf couple with a blue and white kitten for a child and your werewolf man must fight another to save you

If you dream of a war between humans and werewolves and you realize the only way to defeat them is to become one of them, so you let one bite you

Katie Cappello lives and works in a small farming town in Northern California. Her poems can be found in journals such as Boxcar Poetry Review, Los Angeles Review, and Cave Wall. A Pushcart Prize nominee, Katie is the author of Perpetual Care (Elixir Press, 2009) and the chapbook A Classic Game of Murder (Dancing Girl Press, 2009). She writes book reviews for the San Francisco Book Review and California Literary Review, and blogs about art, literature, and life on the farm at www.drowningthefield.blogspot.com.