I have always been a dreamer. Waking hours filled with daydreams of a younger, more vibrant self living other, more exotic lives that take the edge off the stupor of middle-age suburbia. Sleeping hours filled with images of places I have been before that morph and change, nightmarish Wonderlands, and places I have never been that haunt me just the same. Some nights I languish in cages built of my rigid small town girlhood; other nights I am prey climbing out of impossibly small, high windows, crawling through rough stone tunnels, hiding behind faux fireplaces on the run for my life. Or at least for my freedom.

Some dreams find me on my knees, lips and tongue forming the shape of silent prayers, fingers anxiously reading the silver chains that confine me like a blind woman’s rosary. My waking self is a recovered Catholic who rarely walks through the doors…