This one was really distinct.
Most often, the images were cloudy and abstract, the colors faded, the shapes distorted. It was if he was seeing everything through a warped dome of smoked glass, the light refracting around the edges. But not this time.
The girl was lying in bed with her covers pulled up to her chin, trying to hide her body beneath the thick blankets. She was curled up in the foetal position, as if to keep herself warm or safe. Her eyes were open wide, never blinking. The soft shine of sweat was visible on her cheeks.
The girl was observing herself through his eyes.
In the doorway stood the large man. Quickly studying the face, he could see that the similarities between the man and the girl... the same high brow, the same pointed jaw, and their eyes were identical, except the eyes of the large man were not blazing with fear like the eyes of the small girl.
A father and his daughter.
But it was easy to see that there was something amiss in the thread. The look the father gave to his daughter was not loving or kind. It was angry. And it was hungry.
He hated this already. He knew what this was about to become, and he stood there helplessly, watching the father step into the room and close the door behind him. The light from the hallway was immediately stifled and it took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dim moonlight and focus on the silhouette of the advancing father.
As the silhouette passed, he could smell the mixture of cologne and alcohol. He was amazed at how clear the smells were, burning his nostrils and making him want to choke. It was hardly ever this pronounced. The only time there was ever this much detail was when the events had happened before, perhaps several times.
This was more than a mere nightmare.
This was the past presenting itself anew.
Just like the dream, her thoughts were his. He shared her terror. It coursed through him like blood.
The full force of her anguish was upon him now.
Silently, he watched.
Almost instantly the sheets were torn from the bed, exposing the small child and presenting her soft legs up to the man. He grabbed her shoulders and held her down. A quick glance of warning was enough to silence the scream building up within her throat. Bringing his left knee forward, he spread her thin legs apart and pushed his body down between them. He tightened the grip on her shoulder with his left hand and unzipped his pants with his right, harshly removing his stiff member and forcing it towards her.
"You remembered not to wear them panties," he panted into her face. "That's good, jes like I told ye."
Silently, she sobbed.
God almighty, how much longer would he have to endure this? It was excruciating, being trapped there, feeling her fear and her pain, unable to help or assist in any way. He knew nothing could happen if he put forth the effort. Nightmares were shorter and more bearable when he tried not to resist them.
And he could tell this one would be over soon.
With each pulsation of the father's pelvis, the room seemed to shake with a violent shock, as if a small grenade had gone off nearby. His groans grew louder and louder; not because he was raising his voice, but as if the sound was being amplified and echoed throughout a tiny canyon.
A final grunt, a hurried shudder, and he was finished.
He stood up from the bed, zipped his pants, and surveyed the damage. The small girl was motionless except for the tears which slowly made their trek down the sides of her face. Sperm and blood oozed from between her legs and onto the sheets beneath her. She lay there, sprawled out as if she had just been hit by a large truck.
Which is more or less what had happened, but much worse.
Just as the man turned his large frame toward the door, there was a sudden jolt and a tearing sound as everything pulled itself inward. The colors and shapes swirled and danced and disappeared, as if being rapidly sucked down an enormous drain.
And with a loud crack, it was all gone.He was lying in bed, covered in sweat.
Light poured in through his eyes and flooded his mind.
He was awake...
...It was awful.
Slowly, painfully, he rose from the bed and peeled the drenched sheets from his skin. He forced his aching muscles to cause his legs to move, to propel him forward and into the bathroom. Halfway there, he changed his mind and turned around.
The light is just too damn bright in there, he thought. I'd rather hold it in.
Stumbling through the hallway and into the kitchen required much more effort than he was accustomed to. Moving through the dreaming was so much easier than actually walking around. There was nothing to it. You just point yourself in a direction and will to move, and if the dream allowed you to, you'd move.
Out here, you actually had to find the agility to operate your heavy limbs. It was much too difficult.
Even if it meant he might end up in another nightmare, he would rather be asleep.
He chuckled to himself. Why should he care? The nightmares were never his. It's not like it was his psyche being damaged, it was somebody else's. Let them pay for the therapy, he was only along for the ride.
Drinking coffee was no easy task, either. He had trouble gripping the cup effectively without it almost slipping from his fingers. And he had to be extremely careful bringing the cup to his lips; it took him a full three- and-a-half minutes just to master the hand-to-eye coordination necessary for the maneuver.
And cigarettes tasted better in dreams, too. Dream tobacco wasn't even bad for you. You could dream ten packs a day and not develop a single cough.
He chuckled to himself again.
His chest ached as he did this.
I should eat something, he thought. The doctor said my malnutrition was severe, I should take care of myself or I could die. (As if that would be worse than being awake like this.) Where are those aspirin?
He clumsily fumbled through the cabinets. Bottles slipped from his hands and fell to the floor when he tried to grab them. One bottle managed to shatter upon impact, spilling its contents all over the kitchen.
Good, he thought, now I don't have to mess with the child-proof cap.
He clumsily grabbed a handful of whatever they were and gulped them down, followed three-and-a-half minutes later by a wobbly cup of spilling coffee.
"I hope those were valium," he muttered aloud.
The sound of his own voice rattled loudly through his head and made him wince in pain.
He tottered into the living room and dropped down onto the couch. With great effort, he lifted his legs up and sat back in a reclining position.
He took a shallow breath and released a pensive sigh.
He hated being awake.
Moreover, he hated being alive.
Nothing he had felt for the last two years had been real. Every thought, every emotion, every experience had been imagined. And what was worse, it wasn't even taking place in his own mind.
It was in other people's dreams.
Maybe that's my nightmare, he thought. Maybe I do have nightmares after all, and this one never ends. I'm in a coma in a hospital somewhere and this is one long, exhausting dream.
But he knew that wasn't true. Being awake was too painfully real for him to imagine. His eyes were burning from the dim incandescent lamp across the room. The smell of his cigarette tortured his nostrils. Its heat seared his fingertips. The muscles in his chest struggled to push the stale air from his lungs and fought even harder to draw more back in again.
He could feel himself relaxing again. The small journey from the bedroom to the kitchen to here had taken away whatever strength his body had cruelly pretended to have. Soon he would sleep again. Soon he would hitch a ride on a dream.
Why it happened, he didn't know. It just happened. It had been happening for a couple of years now. Whenever he slept, he had other people's dreams.
Or rather, he joined them.
And he never entered the same dream twice.
At first he thought they were his own dreams. But he had never had dreams before -- not one in his entire life -- and when they started happening it scared the hell out of him.
And although the dreams were never the same, there was one constant that was always there...
He was always a spectator.
After the first few weeks, he became aware that he was somehow leaving his own mind and entering someone else's subconcious. It was like astral travel, or an out-of-body experience, something like that. He had read a few books on the subject back when he could still read.
His body was throbbing now. His body couldn't stand the waking world. It coughed and shuddered and longed to be asleep. His mind cried out to be linked with another in a daydream.
Soon, he told himself.
It wasn't always nice, however. He knew that. This last one, the girl's dream... that was no delight. And the helplessness was the worst part.
What he despised most about nightmares was being trapped within them. Once he entered a dream, there was no way out until the dreamer awoke. And trying to interact was futile. He had very little power, very little control over any aspect of the dream other than his own presence. He could move around within the dream with ease, but he couldn't travel far. He was always linked to the dreamer by an invisible thread.
He was a passenger and a prisoner.
But not all dreams where so bad.
The nightmares were few and far between compared to the routine dreams and recollections.
Sexual fantasies were his favorites. He only wished he wouldn't ejaculate quite so much during them.
Occasionally the voyage was downright strange. People dreamed of animals that do not exist, talking creatures that should not talk, and experiences that human beings from this planet should not be having.
There are a lot of creative people out there, he thought. A lot of insane ones, too. It's a shame I don't have an imagination of my own.
His eyes were closed now. His entire body seemed heavy and comfortable, even in its aching condition. Sleep was waiting for him.
And he was ready.
He hoped the next dream would be a good one. He needed a break. He was feeling rather nauseous from the last one.
The nausea suddenly left him as quickly as it had come.
The sound of the air conditioner faded.
He exhaled--
There was a sharp twinge behind his eyes
As his mind and his soul
leapt upwards
...and he was gone.
His body went completely limp.
Fade in.
A bright day. The smell of summer.
He was sitting on a bench, looking out over a field. The field was relatively flat, with only a few gentle slopes, and a lone tree standing solemnly off in the distance. A small stone wall stretched out into the horizon.
Sheep lazily grazed at the short, green grass.
The scene was simple, without a lot of detail, but it was very serene.
This is nice, he thought quietly to himself.
A soft song rose up to his ears. He turned and looked at the young woman sitting next to him on the bench.
She hummed a quiet little tune as she gently stroked the cat lying in her lap. The woman was also admiring the pleasant view, her eyes slowly roaming every inch of the simple countryside she had created in her mind.
The man was invisible to her, as was always the case.
They sat there for a few moments, observing and admiring their peaceful surroundings. After a while, the womand stood up. She placed the cat on the bench and turned her attention toward the distant tree. Then she started to walk towards it.
The cat on the bench vanished into nothingness.
The man quickly rose to his feet as the bench vanished.
He proceeded to follow the woman through the field.
After what seemed like hours, she arrived at the tall tree with her clandestine companion in tow. The large trunk was gigantic in appearance and seemed to tower over her.
He looked closer and saw that she was now a small child.
She had jumped back in her mind and was now remembering herself as a little girl. He reflected on how regularly he had seen this happen in people's dreams. For a brief moment he almost wished he could remember his own childhood but resigned himself to the notion that this was better. He enjoyed the happy dreams of others much more than unhappy memories of his own.
It took mere seconds for her to climb the tree. She scurried out to the end of the widest branch at the top, sat down and dangled her legs over the side, softly giggling to herself.
She seemed happy.
The dream continued for a long time. He followed her over rocks and under bridges and through streams as she played and laughed and sang, and he laughed and sang along with her, but only in his own mind so as not to disturb her in the privacy of her subconcious euphoria.
She was so very happy.
And so was he. For the first time in years.
If only his reality was like this.
When she came to rest at the newly restored bench, the cat was waiting for her once again.
They sat down and relaxed, though they were not tired.
She was no longer a child.
Somewhere in the last few moments, she left her past and began to see herself as a woman again. The cat didn't seem to notice this as she stroked his thick fur and scratched behind his ears.
He sat with the woman for a long while.
Then she stood and drew her attention to the stone wall. He also rose to his feet...
Then something else happened.
She let out a stifled gasp, and everything suddenly came to an abrupt stop. The birds stopped flying, the sheep stopped grazing, the cat stopped purring.
Everything froze.
Then it was gone.
The field had bucked and shifted and dispossessed itself of its own existence in a swirling frenzy, as if someone had pulled the stopper out of a massive drain. There was only darkness now.
He waited for conciousness.
And waited.
Still he waited.
The darkness was still there.
Something was wrong.
The woman was still standing beside him, in the void where he usually found the waking world. They should both be awake.
She turned and noticed him for the first time.
"Hello," she said.
He watched her in the empty darkness.
"Hello," she said again.
"Hi," he said with a puzzled look.
They both stood in the nothingness, looking intently at each other. "That was relatively easy," she said with relief. "I thought it would be... unpleasant."
He regarded her with uncertainty for a long moment.
She looked at him quizzically. "Well?"
"Well what?"
"Well where do we go from here?" she asked impatiently.
"I... I don't know," he stammered. "Wherever you would normally go, I guess." His voice sounded strange to him. It had been so long since he had tried to speak in a dream. He had forgotten the slight echo and strange harmonization that clung to his words.
She studied him for a moment, then turned away to peer deeper into the surrounding darkness.
He also began looking around in the darkness.
She brought her attention back to him.
"You're not here to take me, are you?" she said, crossing her arms with a disapproving look.
"Should I be?" he asked.
"Well, it doesn't look that way." She twisted her face into a frustrated frown. "In that case, you really shouldn't be here, you know," she said. "It's not right."
He stared at her in silence.
"How long have you been there?" she asked.
"Quite a while."
"Well it's time you should go." She tried to wave him away. "Go on, it's my time now."
She looked around for a moment, and let out a sigh.
She looked back at him.
"Shoo!" She was waving her arms and clapping her hands wildly at him. "Go on, shoo!"
"I would if I could," he said meekly. He looked around, trying to find something in the darkness. His eyes found their way back to the woman and rested in a level gaze upon hers.
"It's not up to me," he said. "I'll leave when you wake up again." He gave a light shrug of his shoulders.
She raised her hand to her lips and touched them slightly. "Oh my," she said.
"Is something wrong?" he asked.
She looked away from him, down at the darkness beneath her feet.
"I'm afraid so," she said in almost a whisper. Her eyes travelled back up to his. "I don't think I will be waking up."
"What do you mean?"
She looked away, her eyes unable to meet his. Turning her back to him, she took a few steps into the darkness. Her head hung low as she said, "I mean I took a lot of sleeping pills and I think I'm dead."
There was a long pause as he considered this.
"You mean on purpose?" he asked.
"Yes."
Another pause. "Why?"
She took a deep breath and released it with a sigh.
"I wanted it to just be... over."
She looked back up at him and he could see imagined tears welling up in her eyes. "I've been so alone for so long, and everything was falling apart around me. I had no will of my own, no life to speak of. You wouldn't understand."
He moved to her and took her hand in his.
"Yes," he replied. "Actually, I do believe I would."
Then the light came.
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