Dream of Me

November 9

            When I was barely settling into my new identity as a high school student, the truth of my situation starting falling into place. I began to have reoccurring dreams. Some were familiar places, some were in completely different worlds, some had familiar characters and some featured people I had never met before. Many times, the faces of these characters were vague and I could never quite make out the exact topographies of their faces, nor could I remember in great detail their subsistence in the morning. Have you ever had a deep, important dream and in the morning had a feeling that you were forgetting something very vital to your existence? Or maybe, in the middle of the day, you suddenly remembered the dream you had last night. Or maybe, at a random point in your day, you have a strong sense that you've seen this or done this before in another dimension or another galaxy?

Sometimes I would wake up and, throughout the day, gradually piece together the previous night's dream as I went throughout my day. I could watch a movie in class about Mount Everest and have flashbacks to a certain night of a certain dream as if I had actually climbed a mountain. Sometimes I would see a person in my school that I thought I had never seen before, but recognize them instantly as if I knew them somewhere else. It became hard for me to determine whether I knew people in real life or if I knew them in my dream life. I began to record my dreams, especially in the morning when some were still extremely vivid. I started a journal, a "Dream Log" I guess, and documented the happenings of each dream. Some nights, I would still see my mother in the swirling, living park. I called that life "August day." It was only occasional, twice a month if I was lucky, and became less and less as I grew older. I would write down everything I remembered her saying to me, though, as a means of keeping her alive in both worlds. Another dream was a reoccurring overabundance of slight variations to my reality—sometimes, Irene would die. Sometimes, she would come back to life. Sometimes, Addy would get married. Sometimes, I would come home to a fire in the kitchen. Sometimes, I lived in a different country with all the same people as I knew here. I called this life "Warped World"—original, I know, but this journal was only for myself so I had complete creative control to be as cliché as I desired.

I didn't tell anyone about this. I didn't know if it was normal. I didn't know if everyone experienced this and it was just known that no one would talk about it. I was worried—if scratches from kittens carried over to my actual life, what else would transfer? And how permanent would it be? I started to even doubt that my assumed reality was in fact the real world. Maybe it was another dream that occurred more often.

Chapter 6w

The bulging eyes continued to survey, at great speeds, the dull territory outside of the once sunken car. They continued to dash back to the water. There was no sound, only the flushing and heaving of breath struggling to fight its way through the waterlogged lungs and tracheas. My family was present, but I didn't hear their thoughts or feel their existence in the usual way. I had no thoughts of my own. The only thing that filled my senses was the sight of the living drowned. It was terrifying, but in one's right mind should have been understood to be clearly impossible. However, at that moment it was real, and I was standing there, uneasy, anticipating... something. A sea monster, probably. Maybe the Ogopogo slithering beneath the surface of the steam. Something was there, something had held these passengers under the water to drown eternally. Still they sat in the car. Maybe they were dead, but their movement suggested otherwise. Still no movement. The air around us was warm, stuffy even, a sense of tropical atmosphere in the mountains that resembled Western Canada.

From the corner of my eye, I caught a movement from the waters. Something was about to happen, I could feel it, but no one, not one of us, moved. I didn't feel stuck, or unable to run, but I still didn't' shift from my place. It's as if my brain was not my own and only my eyes were functioning as a witness to the coming conflict. I waited, we waited, the line of us facing the water, fog wet around us, for whatever it was that threatened us from the depths.