Once Upon a Dream

You wake.  You eat.  You work.  You eat.  You work some more.  You go home.  You watch TV.  You check you tweets, your email, Facebook.  Maybe you walk the dog or pet the cat or play with your kids.  You eat.  You sleep.  You wake again.

This is life.  This is reality.  Or so they say.  I want this letter to serve as my testimony about what is real and what isn't.

I was like you once, for the most part.  I had a nice job.  A decent home.  I didn't hate my life.  I was content.  I had a cat and a fish and human friends, too.  I was good at my job.  I worked as an interior designer.  I made other people happy.  I made myself happy.  I was friendly and upbeat and my clients liked me.  I did well for myself.  And every night, I would fall into my soft, cool bed exhausted from another good day of work, and I would sleep, but what made me different was that I wouldn't dream.  Or at least I wouldn't remember it the next morning.

My friends from time to time would tell me stories of strange dreams they had, and I'd just have to smile and nod, because I had no such stories to tell.  Once time I said as much and everyone seems shocked.  It made me stop and think, to really think, to travel back to my earliest days, to my childhood.  Had I really never dreamed?  Was there really no dream I could ever remember?  It got me really curious, so I asked my doctor the next time I went in for my annual physical.  He agreed it was odd, but wasn't a sign of anything particularly wrong with me.  He said something about sleep cycles and that I probably slept better than most people, but suggested I could go talk to a psychologist friend of his if it was troubling me.  It was troubling me, so I did go to the psychologist.  Her name was Dr. Mau.

Dr. Mau first suggested that maybe I did remember my dreams, only briefly after waking, and then forgot them.  This didn't sound quite right to me, but she recommended I try keeping a dream diary, a book by my bed, and whenever I awoke, whether in the morning or in the middle of the night, I should immediately write down what I was thinking or the last thing I remembered before being awake.  It seemed silly to me, but I agreed to give it a try.

For the first couple of nights, I remembered nothing, as I expected.  It was probably because I was so skeptical.  But then, three or four nights in, I found myself writing something down.  That morning when I awoke, it seemed like any other morning, but when I pulled the diary to me to once again write something about laying down in my bed the night before being the last thing I remembered, I realized that wasn't quite right.  I did remember something else.  A cool breeze.  The setting sun reflecting off a lake.  The smell of bacon.

It seemed a strange set of things to remember.  I hadn't been to a lake in ages, and I rarely ate bacon, but with a bit of a chill of something I couldn't quite remember fully, I wrote it down.

It happened again the next morning, and the next.  The image was slightly different each time.  A trail through some forest with birds singing.  Flower beds surrounding some sort of cabin.  And then, finally, a man smiling at me, tall and gentle, and he held out his hand.  That last one was the first time in forever that I actually woke up during the night with a clear image still lingering in my mind.  It scared me, but I remembered that this was what I had wanted, and I wrote it down.

When I told Dr. Mau at our next session at everything I had experienced, she seemed intrigued.  I suspect even she hadn't expected the dream diary to be the roaring success it had been.  She especially seemed fixated on the man.  "Tell me about him," she prompted.

"Well, he was tall.  Blond hair.  I think his eyes were either blue or green.  He was smiling, showing his teeth.  I think they were a bit crooked, his teeth, but he was still handsome.  He was holding out a hand to me.  He clearly knew me."

"Did you know him?" she asked.

I shook my head.  "I'd never seen him before in my life."

Dr. Mau looked like she wanted to say something, but then she thought better of it and just nodded.  "And how did he make you feel?" she asked.

"I mean, he was just an image in my head, some repressed or forgotten thing," I pointed out.

"But how did he make you feel?" Mau repeated.

I sighed.  "I guess, safe," I said, "but somehow scared at the same time."

"When is the last time you had a boyfriend?" she asked, catching me a bit off guard.

"Hey, this isn't about me needing a man or something," I chimed in quickly.  "I don't need a man."

Dr. Mau smiled softly, not unlike the man in my dream.  Had it been pity I had read on his face?  No, I guess it didn't quite match, but I felt like it was pity Dr. Mau had for me now.  "No, of course not," she said.  "But most people long for relationship, often of the romantic variety.  You being a straight female, that the first other human you see in your dreams would be a handsome young man."

"I never said he was young," I pointed out.

"Wasn't he though?" Dr. Mau asked.

"Well, he was about my age, I suppose," I said.

Mau gave a slight knowing nod.  She stared at me strangely for a moment and then said, "Well, I'm glad you are remembering things from your dreams now."

"Yeah, that is why I came here," I said.

"What else would you like to talk about today?" she asked.

I realized in that moment that Mau had served her purpose.  She had gotten me to remember my dreams, but I really didn't want more from her.  I didn't want to understand or interpret the dreams.  I just wanted to have them.  Why?  I suppose she would want to talk about why, but I realized I didn't.  That was something I had to figure out for my own.

"Nothing, really," I said.  "I think I'd actually like to call it early."

"Of course," she replied.  Of course she said of course.  She got paid either way.  I realized in that next moment that I didn't actually like Dr. Mau that much, even though she had helped me with what could be called a breakthrough.  "What date looks good for your next appointment?"

"I'll have to check my calendar and get back to you," I said, having no intention of scheduling another appointment.  And I didn't.

I did keep dreaming, though, even without Dr. Mau's sessions.  The dreams started to get more vivid and memorable.  There were lots of images of the outdoors:  the lake again, the path through the woods, a clearing filled with wild flowers, birds and rabbits, a deer.  It was strange to be dreaming of nature so much.  I lived my life indoors.  I was an INTERIOR designer after all.  Why would I dream of the exterior to such a degree?  It was almost as if my dreams were taking me to another life, one that was not my own.  Dr. Mau would have had her theories, I'm sure.  I was more interested in figuring this one out for myself.

My friends shared their strange dreams with me still, from time to time, but I never shared my own, even though I had them now.  They felt strangely private, simple as they were.  Besides, I didn't really want to talk about them with other people until I knew what they meant, until I understood what they really were, because slowly, over time, they were starting to feel like more than dreams to me.

It is strange how the waking world's environment can creep into your dreams, or so I thought at the time.  In my dreams, a bright ray of sunshine would hit my face and I would awaken to the sun shining in through my window.  I would hear birds singing, and a rustling in the bushes of my dream, and then I would wake up and see my cat playing with a crinkly toy shaped like a bird near the foot of my bed.  When I got thirsty in my dreams, I would wake up thirsty in real life.  I wondered if this phenomenon was quite the same for others, but I didn't ask about it, not yet.  I wanted to explore it more first.

And explore I did.  I found in time that I could control the things I dreamed about.  I could choose the paths to take through the woods.  I could look up and see the birds when I heard them sing.  I could decide to turn the handle to open to door to the cabin, or to linger a bit longer.  The cabin intrigued me.  It was here I had seen that man, that man I had never seen before, but yet still felt strangely comforting to me.  A part of me hoped to see him again and then, one night, I did.

In my dream, I was standing near a window inside the cabin, tending to a plant.  I seemed to enjoy plants and animals quite a bit in my dreams.  More on that later.  I heard a knock at the door and I went to open it.  And there he was, that man, looking at me with a sheepish grin.  "Forgot my keys," he said.

I looked at him, totally stunned.

He laughed, and then reached over to the side of the door to take a set of keys from a hook that I somehow hadn't noticed before.  Then he leaned over and kissed me on the cheek.  "See you tonight," he said, and the next thing I knew, I was awake.

My pulse was racing, my palms were sweaty, and after trying to dry my hands on my blanket, I reached up and touched my cheek were he had kissed me.  It still felt damp.  Maybe it was just my hands sweating again, I tried to tell myself, but I knew it was more than that.  I knew I had really felt something just now, something that wasn't a dream, and that was when I first started to realize the truth about what was going on.

I hoped that the next night, I might pick up where I left off the night before, but I didn't, not quite.  This time, when I started to dream, I was sitting on the couch in the cabin reading a book.  Something about the medicinal properties of herbs or some such thing, and he was there, already there, sitting on the couch next to me.  I didn't notice him at first, but then he nudged me with his foot, and I looked over, again startled to see him.

He grinned.  "Sorry, didn't mean to scare you," he said politely, "but it's Saturday.  You don't have to work on a Saturday.  Let's go for a walk."

"Work?" I asked, puzzled but strangely comforted.

"Yeah, work," he said with a chuckled as he pointed at the book.  "Don't you know all there is to know about that stuff already anyway?"

"I, I don't know," I said.

He shook his head and continued to grin.  "Well I do know that you do," he said.  He reached for my hand, and I found myself giving it to him as I set down the book.  "Now let's go take a walk," he said, gently pulling me upwards.  "There's more plants and animals to study out in nature than in a book anyway."

And that was the last bit I remembered before I woke up the next morning, but I was left with this feeling that there was more.  There had to be more.

After that, I started pondering how I could remember more and more of my dreams upon waking.  I kept more detailed records of exactly what I remembered and how much time I felt had passed in my dreams.  The time I felt had passed while I was actively dreaming was never more than a couple hours, but still, it was surprising to me that it had increased from zero to that in less than a year.  And still, I found myself wanting more.  More and more.

It was so beautiful in my dreams.  The cabin, the forest, the man, all of it.  I just kept referring to him as "the man" in my journals, because he hadn't said his name yet, but I always had this feeling like his name was right on the tip of my tongue.  Which was ridiculous, I thought.  He was just a dream man.  Why should he need to have any name?  That thought was my next step towards discovering the truth.

It went on like this for several weeks, me trying to remember more and more.  Writing it all down.  It got to the point where I started going to bed earlier so I could wake up earlier so I'd have plenty of time to write it all down before going to work.  And that was when I noticed that time in the dreams seemed to shift as well.  The moments that I remembered from the dreams started to seem earlier in the day when I went to bed earlier at night.  It was another example of things in the dreams being linked to real life.  That was when I decided to try something.

I normally follow a rather consistent sleep cycle, at least before I started shifting it intentionally.  Even on the weekends, I go to bed about the same time and wake up about the same time as during the week.  But one weekend, close to a year after I started all of this, I decided to stay up all night and sleep the next day, just to see what would happen.  What did happen was the final piece of evidence I needed to really push me in the right direction in figuring out what was going on.

Thanks to caffeine and some light exercise, I managed to stay up until nearly 5am, at which point I passed out on the couch.  This wasn't much earlier than the time I would normally wake up in the morning, and this time, when I went to sleep, I woke up into my dream at a time later than I normally remembered.  It seemed to be evening, and the name and I were eating supper together.

Now I'm not that much of a cook in my waking life.  I do okay, but don't really go all out or anything.  I had already seen evidence that my life inside these dreams was different from my normal life, so it was conceivable that I could have cooked the delicious meal that my supposed subconscious was now consuming, but yet I knew I hadn't.  I knew he, the man, had cooked it.  And that was how I learned his name.  Because I heard myself saying it as I spoke up to say, "Darren, this is delicious."

He looked up from across the table and gave me another one of his now familiar smiles.  "Thanks, baby.  It's the herbs you grow that really make it great."

I felt my pulse quickening, and I must have blushed because he asked, "What?  I'm sorry if I embarrassed you, but it's true."

And then all too soon, I was awake again.  I glanced at my phone and saw that less than two hours had passed.  I also felt my face.  I felt hot, and when I got up to look at myself in the mirror I saw that it was still red from blushing in my dream, or blushing in real life, I wasn't really sure which was which.

And that was when it finally struck me:  These dreams that seemed so really, that I never used to have but now vividly graced my mind every night, what if they were real.  What if they were real and my real life was just a dream?

The thought seemed crazy at first, so crazy that I tried to convince myself I had never even thought it.  But trying to convince yourself you don't think something just makes you think it even more, and I soon found I was on a quest to experiment more, to find the truth.

I tried sleeping at different times more often, and sure enough, I found myself in different times in my dreams.  Breakfast, lunch, dinner.  It seemed I could jump in whenever I wanted.

I also found that if I could sleep longer, I would remember more of my dream.  The night would be a more cohesive narrative.  Even though I knew it probably wasn't that wise, I started taking some sleeping pills, on weekends only, to see if I could stay asleep longer.  I was concerned the pills might keep me from remembering the dreams, but I still remembered them all, in even more vivid detail.

Even apart from my intentional experiments with different sleep times and durations, I started to notice a change in my waking life.  I started to pay more attention to my cat and my fish, and to the office plants at work, and even to the trees and flowers I saw in nature.  What was really bizarre is that I started feeling like I knew what some of these plants that I had never seen named before were called.  I started feeling like I recognized the bird songs I heard when I increased my frequency of outdoor dining for lunch.  And then I started looking these things up as best I could, and I found that I was right.  Things I had never learned before, I was right about, and I started to question what I really knew and what I didn't.

I started to question what I knew about interior design.  What made me good at it?  I realized I didn't know.  It seemed like people just loved what I did no matter what I did.  And who were these people anyway?  How did they find their way to me?  I started to realize I didn't really know.  I started to realize I couldn't remember how I had met my friends, or certain details about how I came to be in the profession that I had chosen, or in the city where I lived.  And the scariest of all:  I started to have to stop to think about where I lived.

But the dreams!  The dreams on the other hand were becoming more and more real.  In my dreams, I started to know and understand it all.  I remembered distinct moments from my childhood that hadn't happened in my waking life.  I remembered how I had gotten interested in botany and zoology and how I had written papers on both subjects.  And I remembered how I had met Darren.  How I had been a grad student and he had been a visiting professor for the philosophy department.  He was only three years older than me and even though our fields didn't have much overlap, we ran into each other when a notable speaker came to talk about the concept of animals having a soul.  There was that overlap.  We both had our piece to say on the subject and we ended up talking to each other about it at the cocktail hour that followed the presentation.  And the rest, as they say, is history, a topic neither of us cared a particular lot about.

I remembered the year we continued to spend at the college together, and then how we almost had to be apart due to an offer he had to teach elsewhere, but how he stayed, for me, and ultimately went full time while I started working in the private sector.  And the cabin in the forest clearing by the lake, that came to help me do particular kinds of research and it was only an hour from the college, so Darren and I stayed there together.  Now, it was years into our relationship, and I was hoping that he would ask me to marry him soon.

To marry him.  I don't need a man.  I always told myself that when I was awake.  That was one thing I felt while I was asleep as well.  My research, my papers, my accomplishments in the private sector being able to protect precious plant and animal life.  I didn't need Darren for any of that.  But I wanted him to be a part of it.  I wanted to share it with him.  I was better with him, better in our life together, in this life that only existed in our dreams.  But those dreams... they were more real than life to me now, and I started to realize that I didn't want to wake up anymore.

But just the feeling that they were more real wasn't enough.  I had to know.  If Darren was just my idling mind's idea of the perfect man, if that cabin was just my silly brains projection of a perfect place, I wouldn't give up my real life for all of that.  That would be foolish.  I had to know if it was really real, so one night, while I was sleeping, I got really crazy and do the thing you're not supposed to do even if you're in a lucid dream like I seemed to be:  I asked Darren if I was really dreaming.

It went something liked this.  We were sitting on the couch together, hands intertwined, his head on my shoulder, listening to a podcast and watching the fire crackle when I just suddenly turned to him and asked, "Do you ever wonder if this isn't real?"

He paused the podcast and sat up straight to look at me.  "If what isn't real?"

"This," I said, and I gestured around me.  "All of this."

He laughed.  "Well of course I wonder that," he said, "all the time.  The ol' brain in a jar and all that."

"I didn't quite mean that," I said.  "I mean, what if there are two realities and one is real and the other isn't."

"You mean like dreams or something?" he asked.

I felt a bit nervous about that.  It was too on the money.  But I just said, "Yes, I suppose that is what I mean."

He took a deep breath and then said, "Yes, I suppose it is strange sometimes, the tricks our minds play on us.  I mean, I usually dream I'm somewhere else entirely, know completely different people.  I think it's the minds way of experimenting, seeing what another life would be like."  He sighed and frowned slightly and said, "But honestly, I'd rather just be here with you."

I felt giddy at that and it was all I could do to keep myself from laughing.  "Yeah, me, too," I said.  And then, a truly crazy thought dawned on me.  "Pinch me," I said.

He laughed.  "What?"

"Just pinch me," I said.

He shrugged.  "Okay," he said, and he pinched me right on the elbow.

"Ow!" I exclaimed.

"You said to pinch you," he said with a laugh.

I laughed, too.  "We'll see whose pinching who!" I said, and the next thing I knew he was trying to tickle me, and the next thing I knew after that, his lips were all over mine.  There was a bit more playful pinching after that, but through none of it did I wake up.

The next day, my pulse was still racing as I wondered... I decided to wait until I was at work to test my theory, do it when I was in the presence of someone other than my cat.  I went all out, and waited until I was with a couple of clients, and then, with my elbow under the table, I pinched myself.

I didn't really expect it to work.  Even after all I had seen and experienced, I was still skeptical, but after this experience, I was skeptical no more.  I suddenly sat bolt upright, in my bed, the bed not in my waking home, but in my dream home, the cabin.  I gasped and looked over to see Darren laying there beside me.  He slowly rolled over and I heard him mutter, "What's wrong, baby?  You never wake up in the middle of the night."

"Just a bad dream, I guess," I said.

"Well go back to sleep," he muttered, and then I heard him snoring softly, and I felt my own eyelids closing again as well.

Back in my office, my not quite so real anymore office, I opened my eyes to a worried client shaking me.  "Are you okay?" she was asking.  "You passed out or something.  Should we call an ambulance."

I smiled the biggest smile I had smiled in a long time.  "No, I'm fine," I said.  "I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to reschedule this meeting.  Something just came up."

But I have no intention of rescheduling that meeting, because those people I was talking to earlier today, or rather last night while I was asleep, they aren't real.  None of what I thought was real is.  Somehow, I've been living life in this strange waking dream, forgetful and unaware of what's real, what's right in front of me.

Now I honestly don't know why I'm writing this all down, why I'm righting at all.  Anyone who is reading this, you are part of the fake reality.  You aren't real.  But just in case you are real, just in case we're in this shared state of subconscious, I want you to know that the reason you feel off, the reason you can't remember certain things, it might just be because those things aren't really yours.  Your life could be completely different than it is now.

If you want to stick with what you've got, if you're truly happy, that's fine.  Some of us would rather live in a dream world.  But if you're like me, you'll one day realize that real life is better than anything we can dream up.

You might think I'm crazy, if you're even real and can think.  I thought I was crazy, too.  But I just can't deny the facts.  And honestly, even if I am wrong, even if my mind is just playing cruel tricks with me, the life I found in what I thought was sleep is the real life I was meant to live.

With all the sleeping pills I'm planning to take, some might think this is intended as a suicide note.  It's not.  It's a life note.  You can try to revive me if you want, and maybe you'll even succeed, but I'll just go to sleep again.  I'll do whatever it takes to get to my real life, that reality that I first discovered once upon a dream.  And the first thing I'm going to do when I get back there is stop waiting and ask Darren to really make my dreams come true and marry me.  And I know him.  I know he'll say yes.  And I know we'll be happy together, once upon a dream.

Gone - Part 7 (final)

It's been six months now since my mother left.  She's gone.  But Peter stayed.

"What reason would I have to go anywhere?" he asked me.

I've tried to ask him questions about the future, about where he's from, about his own family as well as what he knows of my own, but he won't answer me.

"I didn't dig into your lineage," he says.  "I'm glad I didn't, because no one should know too much about their own future."

I know what he means by that.  He wants to be a part of my future, my current future, not just my distant future.  Peter has fallen in love with me over and over again.  I felt I owed it to him to see if I could fall in love with him, too, just this once.

And so far its good.  I can see why another version of myself nearly married this man.  He's smart and funny and handsome, all the typical stuff you look for.

But his intelligence is more than just knowledge.  It's this awkward sort-of intuitiveness that came from living the same life a dozen times.  That makes him unique in a way that no other human could claim to be.  Sometimes its intimidating, but there is so much I can learn from him.  How often do you get a literal second chance multiple times following a failure?

His humor is odd.  He sometimes makes references to things I've never heard of, things that won't be invented for a hundred years, but he doesn't mind that I don't get it.  It doesn't make him sad.  And he doesn't try to explain it unless I want him to.  And he gets things from today, too.  He appreciates his past, which is now his present, in a way that I'm not sure I could.  He appreciates me.  He finds me just funny enough, and I feel the same way about him.

His interests are sometimes peculiar, but he also takes an interest in things I love and he teaches me to love new things.  That's a quality that transcends time, I think.

So yeah, it's pretty good.  I started out feeling this strange obligation to give it a shot, and now I think I might really be falling in love.

If he were gone, I know I could survive, I know I could go on.  I lived for decades without my mother.  I've learned not to rely too heavily on any one person.  But it's nice having him around and I think, that for the foreseeable future, I would really like for him to stay.