- Mal’s Dream.
He looked up, eyes wide, “What’s going on?” he said.
He was surrounded by friends, by family, all anxiously waiting by his bed. “We thought you’d never wake up!” said one of the farmhands. “We was thinkin’ of calling a doctor, only you seemed to be okay. You just kept thrashin’ around a lot.
“I had…” He stopped, puzzled, as he realized that this was home, this was his own bed. “I was in the most horrible place, and the most horrible things were happening. And you all were there, and it was just so scary and…” he trailed off, not wanting to remember, and remembering anyway.
“And…you were there,” he said to his mother. One who listened quite carefully might have detected that the notice in his voice was not relief, but deep-ingrained loathing, buried beneath a lifetime of charades. “And YOU were there,” he said to the farmhand who’d once discovered him ‘pleasuring’ himself in the barn, and had never, not ever, forgiven or forgotten it. “And…and…and you, and you, and you,” and slowly, he realized that he hated everyone in this room.
But at least, here, in this context, in this world, they pretended to a certain kindness towards him. Farm life was not easy, especially in the rustic and sometimes-fatal 19th century agricultural industry, and it’s better to at least show compassionate acts even to the weirdo you despise than it is to openly berate or mock him. Farms aren’t always a family; but they’re a unit, one which won’t function without people working more-or-less together.
Whereas in his dream…
….the surreal, sociopathic world of his dream showed no mercy, only cannibalism. When we abandon the pretense of mutual consideration, we can do anything humans might do, and that is more than enough to chill any blood.
…He was seldom to ever intentionally go unconscious agin. Not for lack of ease—oh, he could slip into unconsciousness like a small still foot into a glass slipper. But he would devise trick after trick to keep himself from entering dreamland. The most popular, albeit the most forbidden, involved holding a lit candle in his hand; the burning wax kept jolting him awake, and he was careful to hold it over his own chest, where if he dropped it, it wouldn’t set the bed aflame.
There was a simple way to make sure he never mistook dream for reality again: to never dream. And there was a simple (which is not the same as “easy”) way to make sure that happened: never sleep, perchance to never dream.
He spent much of his life tired, and they say it shortens your lifespan, makes you jittery, makes the world seem paper-thin if you have enough sleep debt. But that’s not the bad part.
The bad part is that daydreams can slowly close ranks and become solid, little by little, day by day…
- Paula’s Story.
She awoke with a smile on her face, a smile that only started to crack and fade at its corners when she realized she wasn’t where she’d intended to be. “What’s going on?” she croaked, from a throat dry with dusty latenight air.
But there was no-one to reply, no friends surrounding her, no glittering palace, no Dragons and no Dungeons and no Demons.
There was just that selfsame bed, the one she’d been sleeping in for many too many years. She’d lived with her family too long, but that was the economy, and that was the job market for people with her skillset, and that was….that was just How It Was. Like Conraddin, she’d grown so accustomed to her family defining her terms of existence that she barely thought about any other alternatives.
It hadn’t been like that, a few minutes ago.
But the moonlight through the dusty window, the clothes piled semi-neatly in the same damn desk chair, all told her the simple truth: It had been a dream.
…in the coming years, she would work in the family business, downstairs, and something great happened: she complained a lot less. No more snarky side comments. Just a few extra eye-rolls…oh, and she became habitually ten to fifteen minutes late, but while her father was a martinet, he knew that a reliable, cheap, but perpetually tardy employee was better than one who had gone off to college or met boys (or was it girls? He’d never reconciled the short-haired…person…he’d seen her with, the one time, but all those things seemed to have vanished, thank Heavens).
Now, she wasn’t going much of anywhere, except back to sleep.
Always back to sleep.
She wasn’t depressed; or, really, her depression became erratic, bounced with unprecedented little nuggets of happiness and sunshine which sometimes lasted for a good hour or two after waking. She wasn’t ill. She just…slept.
She worked the cash register, and then slept.
She stocked the store, and then slept.
She at half a sandwich, and slept.
She stuck around for the first minute of a family meal, edgy, uneasy, and then, with some excuse, she’d be napkinning her plate and then she…slept.
And slept.
And slept.
Because the dream was out there (in there?) somewhere. And she would catch it again. Sometimes she despaired, but sometimes, she caught a glimpse, or touched or smelled something familiar, and for a moment, she was almost there.
That’s almost always when they woke her up, the weird, bad dreams of the outside world.
But those things wouldn’t be around forever. And they couldn’t stand between her and the place she was meant to be.
III. Theo’s story.
…and they’d travelled through so many worlds, seen so many strange things, had so many experiences, some to be cherished, some (if there are any merciful Gods out there) to be forgotten forever.
And finally, an eternity later, the alarm went off, and, in stages, they woke up.
“It was…it was all a dream,” they said, that time-honored phrase reifying itself, helping reassert the world. They looked around the dorm. “That was just a dream. It wasn’t real.”
They picked up their phone, scrolled through it. Winced.
…”This can’t be real,” they said.
But they knew it was. This was the real world, solid, mundane, ordinary, talking phones, continuous information flow, endless despair, bandersnatches, grilled cheese sandwiches.
…or was it?
How do you tell when you “wake up”?
Ever started into space for a while, thinking, and then “snapped out of it”? Maybe you were dreaming. Or maybe you fell asleep staring into space.
You can tell it’s just an ordinary dream because you end up where you started.
Unless you don’t remember getting into bed.
Or you sleepwalk.
Or your sleeping place is subtly….different.
This is the real curse of “And then I woke up”: there are dreams out there, powerful enough, vivid enough, real enough, to make you question whether or not anything else is real.
You’re in one of those now.
But don’t worry.
You’re going to wake up soon.
And this strange little story will disappear.
And then you’ll know you’re awake.
3….2….1…
WAKE UP!
And there. The story’s gone, as if it had never existed. No trace of it, no sign; it was never real.
You can’t find the words, you can’t find any blog or book or place where those words exist, and “Jeff Mach” was just a figment of your imagination.
Feel better now?
My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.
I write books. You should read them!
