Snow Dreams of Allorah

Prologue

"Close your eyes and show me everything."

-

It was the coldest I had ever been. I was lucky to have been wearing two pair of socks, a thick sweater and my grandfather's old dusty trench coat. I would like to have imagined myself as some bad-ass guy draped in black, solemnly marching snow blanketed fields, but to any passing stranger I was sure I looked like the misplaced shivering teen that I really was. Then again, I had been marching the same trek for two months, night after night, and had never seen another passing soul. It was funny how I still measured the passing of this world in nights, seeing as it was always daylight when I arrived.

This place was but a cold and lonely realm deep within my mind. A world that seemed to be vacant, save for the snow powdering the ground as far as the eye could see. There were no trees, houses, people, animals or anything else save for the six inches of snow on the ground. However, it never actually seemed to snow. Not one flake ever fell from the sky. Every now and then the wind would kick up, sometimes with enough force that it brought me to my knees, yet it never snowed.

It could have been worse. At least my footprints recorded evidence of my long journey, my trail miraculously never covering up. I couldn't say exactly how many miles I had traveled, only that I had been traveling in the same direction since the first week of my arrival. The week of my first snow dream.

-

I wasn't the smartest seventeen year old in the world. In fact, my friends at school liked to call me things like dummy or block head, and unfortunately for me, they were right. I was always cast as the typical jock. Thick arms, thicker head, they used to say. When people would first meet me, their reactions told me that I wasn't exactly what they were expecting; because, apparently I was the only dumb asian kid in America. So, I wasn't surprised nor proud of myself that it took me three nights to learn this dream world's most important and obvious lesson. Always go to bed wearing warm clothes and shoes. It was ludicrous to think about, but it had also saved my life numerous times. Every night when I went to bed, I would wake up here in the freezing cold, garbed in the exact same attire I fell asleep wearing.

In those first few nights, I was only wearing my boxers and fortunately draped in my blanket. I hadn't yet pieced together the absurdity that my dreams were affecting my physical health. What was worse, both my sister and Doc Evans, the local physician, were worried about my seemingly spontaneous hypothermia, especially in Crockett, Tennessee, where the weather rarely dropped below the seventies that time of the year. In retrospect, I was lucky to have survived at all, and had it been as cold as it was tonight, I wouldn't have.

The last couple of months had brought a strange new routine to my nightly rituals. Every night before bed I would dress in my warmest clothes, put on my shoes, toss aside my blanket, which had proven to be a hassle to drag about in the snow, grab my backpack filled with water bottles and saran wrapped sandwiches and wait for sleep to hit me. My eyes would close and I would try and remember how dreams used to feel. Before all this, they were like a mirage of otherworldly oddities, miracles or sometimes simply a mundane fog soon to be forgotten. Slowly, I would fall asleep, my thoughts sinking into the gooey quicksand of the tired mind. Then I would wake up, as I did in every snow dream, gasping. My chest would pound in frozen pain, not from the cold but as if from a fear I had never been able to recall. It had always felt like I had just awoken from a nightmare or something. I would then take a few moments to compose myself, gather my surroundings and return to my seemingly endless adventure.

-

A strong gale whipped at my face, forcing me to sling my left sleeve over my eyes. My shivering lips whispered to the snowy abyss, "Man, I hate the cold." After a moment the wind died down and I continued forward in what I had begun to refer to as the single most boring chore of my day-to-day schedule. For other teenagers it may have been washing the dishes, babysitting or even taking out the trash. I, on the other hand, had been blessed with the ever uneventful task of walking through snow, for hours and hours at a time, in my dreams. That mindless exercise had given me plenty of time to brood, enviously longing for a return to a normal life.

Lazily I stared ahead, gazing at the endless fields of white, ready to take yet another moment to question where I was heading and why. Then it happened. My heart stopped, the raspy winds quieted and all light seemed to have been drawn to a precise point in the distance. I had to rub my eyes to make sure I wasn't day dreaming, which was actually quite possible, even in the dream world. Yet there it was. A small orange flicker of light danced along the horizon. As I examined it further, I noticed several similar lights dotted the landscape off in the distance. I had spent so much time inside my own head, revisiting and bemoaning my situation, that I had neglected to notice these foreign lights. Warmth returned to my gut, an eager anticipation bubbled through my chest. Was this civilization? How far were these lights, what could they be, who could they be? I had so many questions and -

Suddenly, the lights began to move, and they were moving towards me!

I picked my feet up and sprinted as fast as the snow allowed me, waved my hands in the air and yelled, "Hey! Over here!"

As if answering my prayers, a loud booming voice carried through the wind with enough force to vibrate my entire body. It was oddly familiar and knew my name.

"Shen!"

I tripped, toppled forward and turned to land shoulder first into the snow, sliding several feet before coming to a halt. The voice came again and I lost control of myself. I couldn't move a muscle! It sounded like God was talking to me and my ears couldn't take it.

"Shen get-"

My eyes closed, a migraine threatened to split my head in two and as quickly as everything had hit me, it all disappeared.