text: When I dreamt, I became someone else. It started two nights ago. The last thing I could remember before it happened was getting ready for bed, brushing my teeth, everything was normal. As I fell into sleep, something changed, not in my bedroom, but in myself. A force had found me, for whatever reason, it reached out and pulled me away. When I opened my eyes, I wasn’t in my apartment anymore. I was sitting in a stranger’s chair, in a stranger’s apartment. I tried to stand up and found I couldn’t. I tried just turn my head or flick my eyes around the room, but they would not move. As the panic set in I could feel something new lurking in its shadow, the otherness, or rather I was the otherness. A spirit trapped in a stranger’s body; a rare discordant note played by a master pianist. In my dream, although dream does not feel like the right word, the man stood and went to the window and looked out at the starless, black sky. In the window’s soft reflection, I could make out the contours of his face, a weak, unassuming jaw and deep-set eyes made his reflection look like a ghost. Along his left eyebrow, I saw the shadow of a scar that came down around his cheekbone. I wondered who he was and where that scar had come from, but his sudden movement broke my train of thought. There wasn’t much to tell about the apartment, it was dark, it looked like a studio with a single recliner sat in the middle of the room, a shelf of books and movies and an unkempt bed with the box spring on the floor tucked away into one of the corners. It didn’t matter, he was suddenly on the move, stuffing his feet into ratty old converse and searching for his keys. As we walked out the door, he swooped his arm down and nabbed a prepacked duffle bag. When we were outside, I recognized that we were in the city. The man was walking pretty fast, the autumn breeze washed against his face and I realized that I could feel everything he felt, the rhythm of his footsteps on the soles of his feet, the clatter of the duffle bag against his back, the thin layer of sweat over his mustached lip. Dogs barked in the distance, and the me who is not me began to walk a little bit faster. He reached a hand to his face and stroked the tail of the scar there. After a few minutes we arrived at a beat-up old Honda, the man climbed into the car, tossing the bag haphazardly onto the passenger seat and turned the key. As he pulled out into the street I noticed that he was breathing heavily, and I could sense a tightness in his throat, the kind one might get when suffering with intense seasonal allergies or a winter cold. We, the Other and I, drove for a long time, far out of the city. I wondered if I might be able to read his mind to find out just where we were going, but it was as if his thoughts were completely blank and he was driving on instinct alone. We arrived at a ranch style house in the suburbs. The streetlights were sparse, and the man was careful to pull into the shadows between them. In the house a single light shown, the man sat in the car for a while and at it, in hindsight, I can guess that he was waiting for it to turn off. Even then though, I could still feel the peculiarity of the situation. This was wrong, it was too weird. I tried to tell myself that maybe he knew these people, maybe it was a sibling or a friend, maybe they’d not spoken in a long time and he was mustering up his courage. The light went off, the man grabbed the duffle bag and together we stepped out into the shadows of the night. The man moved swiftly through the front yard, somehow it was different from before, more calculated, more elegant, if one could call it that. He’d done this before I was sure of it. I tried to get inside his head again, wondering what it is he was going to do, rob them? Kill them? The only thing I could see when I looked inside his mind was an image of a dog, maybe a husky mix with great snarling teeth. The man muttered something to himself as he tossed the bag over the fence, but I was too distracted to hear it. He took a deep breath and leapt onto the fence. He scaled it the first try, but as he vaulted his rear leg over the fence his pants caught on one of the boards. There was a tearing sound as we dropped. We hit the dirt hard and it rang through our entire body, our ears buzzed and throbbed with the pain. Around the corner of a large hedge, a porch light flicked on and we heard the mechanical turn of a doorknob. The Other, although in pain, scramblee to his feet just in time as the door peeled away from the airtight rubber frame. A man stepped out of the house draped in an old robe. He wass taller than us and looked strong even though the paunch in his belly and the cigarette in his hand begged to differ. He did not suspect us sitting there in the bushes. I wished very badly then that I had control over the body that there was something I could do or say. In the Other’s mind I can see the hammer in the duffle bag, nestled between the lock picking instruments and the rope. *You can’t unzip the bag though*, I thought hoping to deter the Other, if in fact there were a way for him to understand me, *he’ll hear you.* I do not know if it was my thought or the Other’s that led him to tuck the duffel back into the bush, but he did. Then he looked out on the porch and the temporary relief I’d felt waned. There was a rusty old golf club that sat not three feet away from us. The other looked toward the man, taken in by his cigarette and his wandering thoughts. *You can’t!* I thought *He’ll see you! Just wait for him to go inside and then leave!* The other moves slowly, his spindly body narrowly folded through the stray unkempt branches of the bush. In our shared chest I felt the unmistakable pump of our heart, I could not tell then if it belonged to me or the other. The other fished both of his legs out of the bush soundlessly and then we sat on all fours behind the smoking man. The other reached out slowly and gripped the golf club. I felt the weight in my hand, in his hand. The Other pushed himself up on one knee and held the club over his head. Time is peculiar when true violence is involved. It’s difficult to explain, but I felt it on this night. The entire incident wasn’t more than 20 seconds in truth. Every instant piled lazily atop one another like autumn red leaves, but in hindsight, the mind pulls the pieces apart and lays them out in a neat fashionable order. The club came down with a whipping sound, slicing through the atmosphere. The man, who I imagine must have heard the noise turned around just in time to see the face of the nine-iron drive straight into his forehead. He fell to the ground slowly, stupidly, as if he were just pretending, and was waiting for his cue to spring back up. The other drives the club down again and again, the sick thud of the man’s skull is like an untuned primal drum. If I had eyes of my own, I would have wept. The blood spread thick and red across the rough brick tiles of the porch, draining into the guttural grooves between them, and soaking into the newly tainted earth. Don’t think that I’m being callous when I tell you that he was the one who got off easy. He would never have to know what came next. To my surprise the Other halted his bludgeoning. He bent down on one knee and set the golf club gently on the ground beside the body. A rumble welled deep from within our body as the Other removed one glove from his hand and dipped his pale white fingers into the scarlet pool. He pulled his fingers up to his face and the taste of copper rushed into our mouth. I wanted to be sick, right then and there. I prayed for the first time since I was a small boy that I might spit out the blood and be ripped away from this body, greeted by the patterned, familiar silhouettes of my bedroom. It seemed though that my prayers, like many prayers before it would go unanswered as I felt the blood trickle down our throat. The Other dipped his fingers into the pool once more and my mind squealed at the thought of another taste of putrid nectar. Instead of sticking the blood in his mouth again though, he did something strange, stranger than all the moments that had led us here. He traced a strange enigmatic symbol on our forehead. Then he peeled the glove back over his bloody hand and walked towards the back door of the house. The lights were off as we entered the house. The door crept shut gently behind us, guided by the sleeved fingertips of the other. For a moment we stood around in the darkness. As if we were waiting for something. I was still reeling from the strange disconnect of the previous moments, I thought to myself that if the Other were to turn around right now, we might still have seen the portly older man still standing there, smoking his cigarette. I knew however that was a lie. By the pictures, and the decorative touch of the house, I could tell that a woman lived there too. I wondered where she was. Did the Other know her? What did the symbols mean? All these thoughts ran through my brain as we dawdled from one room into the next. The back door opened into the kitchen from there we made our way into the living room, I guessed that this must have been where the light outside had come from. I half expected that the woman would be around the corner as we made our way down the L-shaped hallway towards the office and the master bedroom. She wasn’t the house was still except for a grandfather clock that ticked away in the office. It struck me then, something about the clock, how weird it was to even see a grandfather clock nowadays. You kept time with the phone, or the smart watch, or the stove or the tv or the microwave. It seemed so out of place for this relic of the past to be here. I guessed it might have been an heirloom and that unsettled me further. I was in these people’s home. Their whole life was laid out before my eyes, I felt dirty and awkward. The other stopped in front of the door to the master bedroom, wrapping his gloved palm around the doorknob and putting the slightest bit of pressure so the door just barely peaked open. Inside the shape of the woman lays still in the dark. I wish then that she might stir, that she might feel our presence staring at her, but she doesn’t. The door opens a little wider. As we’ve made our way through the house, I had an odd sensation that I had attributed to my nerves, a feverish sweat. It occurs to me just now that I could not have been sweating, because I’d become so entangled with the sensations of that other’s body, I’d forgotten about the lack of my own. It was only when the heat bloomed in our forehead and sent the other doubled over in front of the strange woman’s bedroom door, that I truly noticed. The pain was immense unlike anything I’ve ever felt before I imagined it was what it was like to be branded like cattle on every inch of your body. It was impressive that the Other was able to endure it silently. It was only when our bones began to elongate and shift around in our body that the woman stirred, even then it was just slightly, and she never fully woke. After a few moments spent writhing on the floor, we emerged again, changed, and accompanied by another. The spirit of the wolf. Its energy was truly petrifying, it felt like something ancient, that predated all of humanity and understood ways of the universe that mortal beings could not fathom. I was it; it was the other; the other was me. We could feel each other, but we could not understand. The creature moved on all fours slinking around the room, as it wrapped one giant hand-paw hybrid on the footboard the nails clicked and scratched against the wood. The woman stirred and the creature paused, but she didn’t awaken. I prayed she would, prayed that she might be faking reaching underneath her pillow for a gun loaded with silver bullets. I wanted this to be a world where at least one person seemed to understand and was prepared to deal with this unholy scenario. We lingered over the woman, a dumb, snarling, drooling beast. Surely, she must have felt the heat of the creature’s breath on her neck, smelling the same stench of foul rotted insides, but through it all the woman did not awaken. The creature hung one knuckled misshapen paw over the body ready to strike. I could bite at the tension in the air, and yet as if to torture me further the creature would not deliver its final blow. *Why won’t the monster strike her and end this?* I think, and then I feel it, a flinch, the slightest flinch in the arm. I can move the arm of the body, but it seems all I can do. In my mind, a mad cackle sounds and I know it is The Other. It had to be me, I realized, although I did not understand the how, I knew that the purpose of bringing me along on this spectral journey had been this moment. I held my paw over the woman, at that point, the only sense of power I had ever known. Could I do it? Would the creature do it anyway if I refused. As I stood in the wolf’s body contemplating over the pale moon face of the woman, the woman’s eyes surprised me by flickering open. I watched the woman’s face transform from serenity to utter horror as she became aware of what loomed over her. She let out a piercing cry and without my thinking the claw drew downwards. As if by a miracle the woman rolled at just the right time to evade the attack. I felt a pinch as the woman flailed and the wolf body was lifted off of the woman by a stray kick. There was a clatter as we rolled off the bed. I felt the creature override my control snarling back into the body. The woman reached for whatever she could and hurled it towards us. Glass shattered along the floor, sounding like the gentle chimes in this woman’s concerto of terror. The woman opened the closet unable to move since the wolf creature had the exit cornered. While her back was turned the creature dove aiming to pin her against the wall, but again the woman was too fast. She rolled herself into the closet and pulled the door shut. The creature roared as it slammed against the wall a smear of ancient blood splattered against the wall. I could sense the fury in the creature now, what ever plans this creature had had for me had fallen to the wayside and all that was left was blind rage. The creature pawed at the door, smashing at it over and over with its mutant man-beast hands. The Other and I watched in anticipating silence knowing that the woman would not be able to hold back much longer. That was when the door peeled open, the wolf lunged blindly and did not see what arose from the darkness there. It merely yelped when the old cavalry sword pierced its chest. Then it slumped and fell sideways, its breath went shallow, and I felt that the creature was beginning to dissipate. The last thing I can remember is the woman standing over us, and through the window a view of the full harvest moon. When I awoke, I felt sick and tired as though I had not slept at all. I had told myself that it had been just a dream, but I could not shake the true nature of the previous night. Sitting with my morning coffee I watched as the news came in about a woman who had survived a horrific home invasion in a neighboring city. The woman refused to comment for the news but seeing the outside of the home was all of the confirmation that I had needed. There’s not been any more deaths that I know of. At least none that sound like this one, but I’m scared. I think about going up to my uncle’s cabin, where I can be alone. I can’t explain why but I have the sensation that whenever I came home that night, I brought something back with me. It’s just a feeling, like looking at the pale face of the moon.