Foiled

  Tonight I will have a dream that everyone's wearing fencing masks.
  That won't be all it's about; that won't even be the most important part of the dream. It won't be plot-relevant, such as there is one, and in fact it probably won't even be mentioned as notable in the dream at all. It'll just be one of those weird little dream details that gets filtered through my subconscious, weaved into the narrative by the committee of my brain but lacking an explanation as to why. But, insignificant a detail as it is, that will be the thing I'll remember.
  The dream will be poignant, touching and deep, where I'll perhaps connect with a mysterious stranger – in reality an extension of own psyche – and confess a secret to someone I'll care about, or get in touch with nature and find solace in the wind that blows like waves through cornfields. Perhaps I'll be the saviour of some strange backward village, or perhaps I'll just be sitting in my old school with friends I've never met and talk for hours. Maybe I'll witness a blossoming romance, a tender kiss between lovers (though their lips won't actually meet, of course; more a bumping of faceguards than a kiss really). Whatever the content, it will be a good dream, and one I'll look back on fondly, though I can't remember a thing about it, except those damn fencing masks.
  Even immediately after waking, still in the throes of contentment and bliss given off by those strange hallucinations, the details will be forgotten. It'll all become blurred in an instant – did I confess a secret to the cornfields? Was I sitting in a village with backward friends? – and I'll feel a strange sense of loss at forgetting it, like I'm betraying something or someone; maybe that stranger I connected with, that enigmatic id whose face I never saw. The only thing that'll stick firmly in my mind is that we were definitely all wearing fencing masks.
  For weeks to come it'll make me frustrated. I'll hear a reference to the sport or see a film prop and I'll be reminded of the dream, those strange half-remembered images and tantalizing glimpses, all clothed in nylon and metal mesh. Incensed, I'll pore over dream encyclopedias and oneiromancy websites, decorated in the tackiest clipart of stars and crescent moons, to find some meaning in the masks. I'll read that to dream I'm wearing a mask means I'm trying to be someone I'm not, that I'm trying to hide my feelings and only reveal half-truths, and it won't offer me any closure or relief.
  And that'll be that; just another weird dream forever lost to the archives, this one stupid little detail inexplicably filed under “keep” in the memory department while the rest gets flushed away. When I wake up, yawning and stretching, someone will ask me how I slept, and I'll respond that I slept well, and had the strangest dream. But I won't talk about the masks. The masks I'll keep to myself.