The Dream I Woke From Touching Myself

Sleep takes hold of me little by little, like a tide rising without my noticing. My legs grow heavy, my eyelids burn, and the laptop screen begins to blur in front of my eyes. It’s two in the morning and I’ve been battling exhaustion for half an hour to finish the chapter, but it’s a lost cause. The characters’ voices become a distant murmur and my head tips sideways against the sofa cushion.

I get up with great effort and drag my feet to my bedroom. The house is silent. Daniela, my flatmate, has been asleep for hours on the other side of the hall, and only the hum of the fridge breaks the apartment’s stillness.

When I reach my room I look for my pajamas and can’t find them. My half-asleep mind remembers that I put them in the wash this morning. Or was that yesterday? It doesn’t matter. I don’t have the energy to open the drawer and look for another set. I clumsily peel off my clothes, letting them fall to the floor, and slip under the cool, clean sheets.

The weight of the duvet over my naked body lulls me. The fabric traps my warmth second by second and, inside that warm cocoon, I feel like I’m floating. I close my eyes. The last thing I think is that tomorrow I have to put on a wash. After that, nothing.

***

I float, but not in the air. It’s more like a dense vapor, almost liquid, that holds me up and rocks me. My hair spreads weightlessly around my face, as if I were submerged in warm water. There is no floor or ceiling, no walls. Only that warm half-light enveloping me from every side.

Then I feel its presence. It approaches slowly, from somewhere behind me, slow and inexorable like something huge gliding along the bottom of the sea. It’s terrifying. I want to turn, I want to look, but my body won’t obey. It’s as if every muscle were made of lead.

Its heat comes before its touch. I feel it climbing my spine, a damp warmth that raises the hairs on the back of my neck. I want to scream, but my lips don’t respond either. It’s a dream, I tell myself, it’s only a dream. And yet everything feels far too real.

Out of the corner of my eye I catch furtive movement, shadows creeping through the darkness. The heat of that invisible mass is so intense that I can feel my pores opening, feel a thin film of sweat covering me from head to toe until I become a firefly of pearly, shining skin.

Something brushes my leg. Something firm and slippery that slides down my calf and vanishes. When I try to find the source of that touch, another brush, light but unmistakable, runs along my side. Panic makes my head turn very slowly, as if it takes a titanic effort, and then I see it.

A dark, flexible appendage begins to coil around my belly, which throbs beneath its weight. It is soft and warm, not rigid as I expected. It molds itself to my curves with a delicacy that disarms me. Along its surface I feel tiny pressures, like little mouths reproducing sporadic kisses around my waist while the tip lazily twists around me.

A second appendage slides beneath my arm, glides up grazing the side of my breast, and rises in front of my face, swaying slowly, as if studying me. I hold my breath. I don’t dare move. I don’t want to move, a voice inside my head corrects me, and that certainty frightens me more than the presence itself.

Something takes hold of one of my legs and starts climbing, millimeter by millimeter, up my calf. It gains the knee. It rushes up the thigh. With my last scrap of willpower I squeeze my legs together to stop the intrusion, but the sweat covering me mixes with its wetness and everything slips, everything gives way. The pressure is soft and constant, patient, as if it had all the time in the world.

One of those tiny mouths stops a scant millimeter from my nipple. I don’t even have time to think. It circles it, settles over it, and sucks with a tenderness that tears a spasm from the back of my neck down to my lower belly. It’s a jolt of pleasure so intense it feels forbidden, a current that leaves me breathless.

My lethargic body arches without me deciding it. And then my other breast receives the same treatment. The two suckling motions, simultaneous and rhythmic, cloud my mind. The worst part — or the best — is that I know I love it. I want it. I want more.

I explode into a pleasure that overwhelms my senses. I feel surrounded by heat and suction everywhere, trapped in a warm net that I don’t want to break. I moan. I writhe. I think I hear something like a low, satisfied laugh, but I can’t tell where it comes from. I only feel the fire pouring out of me and a strange, blissful surrender.

I don’t know how, but suddenly I have something firm between my lips. I lick it, I take it into my mouth, while a thread of saliva slips from the corner of my mouth. My breasts, swollen with pleasure, don’t stop being caressed, intensely and constantly fondled in a way I have never felt before. Every nerve ending in my skin seems to have multiplied by a thousand.

I open my legs. I do it myself, willingly, helped by the appendages that hold my ankles and slowly part my thighs. And then I feel, unmistakably, several of them sliding against my sex, shamelessly, mercilessly, at the delicious torture my arousal gives me. They brush, press, withdraw, come back. They play with me.

I moan and writhe. I no longer know what is up and what is down. I only know that my whole body vibrates like the strings of a guitar waiting, taut, for the first chord. Every nerve is tuned to the limit. Every brush is a note that shakes me.

I offer myself. I expose myself without shame, begging with gestures for what my mouth cannot ask. I move my hips seeking contact, I feel my groin throbbing, my hardened nipples burning, I bite the pillow to stifle a cry I can’t hold back.

The pillow.

***

The pillow is wet with my own saliva.

I open my eyes wide. The stillness of the room wraps around me, dark and silent. I’m sweaty beneath the sheets, my heart is pounding, and it takes me a few seconds to understand where I am and what is real. Little by little, I realize it all: it was just a dream.

I’m lying face down, naked, my body still trembling. One of my hands is trapped between my thighs, my wrist pressed against my sex. The other is squeezing one breast. My hair has stuck to my face, suffocating me, and I brush it away clumsily as I try to catch my breath.

How silly of me. It was only a dream. My mind played a cruel trick on me, as so many other nights, seizing my will in that confusing realm where time and space dissolve and reality becomes a liquid lie.

I stay still for a moment, listening. On the other side of the hall, Daniela is still asleep. The whole house is asleep. I’m the only one awake, in the middle of the night, my body on fire and my breathing ragged.

Because, one way or another, I’m very aroused. The dream stopped just before the end, leaving me on the edge of a precipice I never quite fell from. And now, awake, with my skin still prickling and the memory of those impossible caresses beating in every inch of my body, I can’t help myself.

I slowly roll onto my back. The sheets slide over my sweaty skin. I close my eyes and try to recover the images from the dream: the heat, the sucking, those soft appendages running over my whole body. I imagine I’m still there, that the presence hasn’t gone away, that it has only stayed watching me from some dark corner of the room, waiting to see what I do.

I slide one hand over my belly, slowly, just as it did in the dream. I stop where my breast still remembers the pressure. I stroke myself, pinch lightly, and a shiver runs from top to bottom through me. With my other hand I go lower, between my parted thighs, and find myself soaked, ready, throbbing with pure need.

I start slowly, tracing lazy circles, just like those touches that tortured me in my dream. My body responds instantly, as if it had never fully woken, as if part of me were still floating in that warm vapor. I bite my lower lip so I won’t make a sound. The mere thought that Daniela might hear me raises goosebumps on my skin even more.

I speed up. My fingers move with the urgency of someone who has been on the edge for too long. I imagine again those tiny mouths on my nipples, that firm appendage filling my mouth, the ones sliding between my legs without asking permission. And then, with two fingers, I penetrate myself. Slowly at first, then with more hunger, while the palm of my hand presses exactly where I need it.

Pleasure rises again, this time real, this time mine. I arch my back, bury my head in the wet pillow, and let the whirlpool drag me under. My hips lift to seek my own hand, over and over, in a rhythm I can no longer control. The duvet has ended up crumpled at my feet and the cool night air strikes my burning skin.

I clench my teeth to muffle the moan rising in my throat. I’m close, so close it hurts. Every movement of my fingers pushes me a little farther toward that precipice the dream pulled me away from. I think of the presence watching me from the darkness, imagine its eyes on me, and that is what finally undoes me.

The orgasm splits me in two. It comes like a wave breaking without warning, shaking me from head to toe, and I have to bite the pillow again so I don’t wake half the house. I remain trembling, with my fingers still inside, feeling my body contract in waves that take time to fade. The whirlpool of pleasure swallows what little sanity I had left.

When I finally catch my breath, I slowly withdraw my hand and collapse onto my side, exhausted and satisfied. The room remains dim, silent. I smile in the dark, my skin still throbbing.

I cover myself again with the duvet, find a dry patch of pillow, and close my eyes. I hope you come back tomorrow, I think just before falling asleep again. And I swear that, in the very last second of consciousness, before sleep drags me under once more, I think I hear that low, satisfied laugh again in some dark corner of the room.