Yesterday morning I helped a guy named Randy get to class. He goes to a special needs school up the street, so I walked him there. When I got home, it was dark. Michele asked where I'd been all day. I told her I was helping Randy get to school; I couldn't have been gone longer than half an hour.
But it was night. How could that be? It didn't make any sense. Did I go somewhere else and completely forget about it? Had the passage of time gone wonky? I thought about the walk to the school. On the way, I ran into the woman who used to live next door to me. I used to go to school with her daughter. These days she lives in Rockland and I live underneath where she used to live (her mother lived here when I was growing up.) Anyway, she was also walking someone to the school. He was her nephew. He was probably in his mid-twenties, had long hair and was in a wheelchair. His wheelchair had fallen over and we helped him get back into it. We might have talked for a while, but it certainly didn't take all day. Something didn't add up.
Then I started to wonder what my old neighbor was even doing there. If she moved, why would she be taking her nephew to the school right up the street from my house, and why didn't she drive there? And why had I never heard of this nephew until just now? Come to think of it, there's no special school up the street from me. And who the hell is Randy? That's when I knew it. I was dreaming.
Yes, anyone reading this knew it was a dream as soon as Randy showed up, but it all seems perfectly natural when you're actually dreaming them. My parent's dining room is in my old junior high school? Of course it is! People displaying human remains on their lawns? Why not?
It seems like it should happen more often, but realizing you are in a dream is a rare and beautiful thing. Lucid dreaming. My in-dream self thought I had uncovered a massive conspiracy, which may have had something to do with my watching an X-Files marathon on Netflix, but nonetheless I was convinced that the world was trapped in a dream state, and I was the only one conscious of it. I promised myself to write down as much of the dream as I could when I woke up, and in the meantime, just repeat the events that had happened so far over and over in my head.
Later, I was at Nick's house. He had a medieval passageway with a large fireplace as the centerpiece. On the fireplace was a bust of half a face. When you pulled it, another room came out of the wall. Wah Kee was there with us, and he told me something...I can't quite remember. But it was about the room and how something highly unprobable was about to happen. I remember Nick replying "He knows."
When I finally did awake from the dream, I asked Michele what time it was. Two O'clock. Damn. There's no way I was about to scribble all this down at two in the morning, so I just continued to keep as much of it as fresh in my mind as I could until a more reasonable hour. I slept for several hours after the dream, and was awake for several more before I wrote anything down. What was once a rich, vivid world was whittled down to a few vague memories and a game of fill-in-the-blanks.
Ironically, it's the later portion, after I figure out that it's a dream, that is the haziest, perhaps due to my persistence in remembering the earlier details so specifically. The whole part with Nick and Wah Kee is fractured at best, and I can't help but wonder if the parts that I do remember weren't tainted by the several hours of consciousness after the dream ended. I'm certain that Wah Kee was trying to amaze me by showing something that could only happen in a dream. I think it may have been the weird medieval room itself. And Nick's response meant that he knew I was aware of the dream. But that contradicts my earlier assertion that I was alone in the knowledge of the dream; of The Lie. So did my brain create false memories of Nick and Wah Kee being aware of the dream after it had ended, or were they agents of the dream, disguised as people I know for the purpose of containing me and separating me from the rest of the populace, lest I tell them the Truth? I guess it doesn't really matter, but I kind of feel like I let my dream-self down.Labels: dreams
