Secrets

           When I went to bed that night I was still a bit unsettled.  I always needed ages to get over a confrontation, even the type that most people would classify as only a mild misunderstanding.  I lay awake for what felt like hours, but just when I thought I would never sleep suddenly I was standing in an enormous elevator.  Confused I looked around me.  That was when I saw it.

            A dragon.  A big red dragon.

            He was watching me through narrowed, yellow eyes.  He seemed dangerous in a quiet sort of way, although he said, in a perfectly polite voice, “Hello.”

            “...Hello.”

I tried to smile, but that only made him eye me with yet more suspicion, so I stopped.  “Um, are we going somewhere?” I asked him.

            “No.  At least, not yet.”

            “But we might?”

            The dragon clearly didn’t want to answer this question.  I therefore tried a different tack.  “I don’t understand why I’m here,” I said.

            “Because I wanted to know something,” the dragon replied.  He gave me a speculative look.  “Do you know who I am?”

            “No.”

            “Hmmmn,” he said. 

“Aren’t you going to tell me?”

“No.”

“Okay,” I answered, relieved for some reason.  “But what is it you want to know?”

            “Everything.  Right now, however, I’ll settle for your secrets.”

            “I don’t have any—at least, I don’t think I do.  Other than the boring kind, I mean.”

            Amused now, the dragon told me, “That’s where you’re wrong.  Your secrets are the type I find most interesting.”

            “Why?” I demanded.  “Because,” the dragon said, “they aren’t the kind you keep from others—they are the kind you keep from yourself.”

           “And what are those, exactly?”

            “That you don’t love them.”

            “Don’t love who?”

            The dragon shook his giant, scaly head.  “You’ll have to answer that question for yourself.  But when you do, remember this: love is a gift.  Not a right.”

            “What are you talking about?” I said, only to find myself in a field of flowers.  The dragon had gone.  When I looked up into the sky the sun nearly blinded me.

            In the morning I didn’t remember this dream until I was sat at the kitchen table, having a cup of coffee.  As I tried to figure it out I wondered what on earth had gotten into my psyche.  Whatever it was, I’d hoped my subconscious had worked it through, because I didn’t want to see that dragon again.  Ever.