Finding Dreamland

Sleeper

[ This is my first story on wattpad so tell me what you think!, and vote if you like it! Also, if you have any suggestions for what category this should be in, tell me because I'm just guessing. ]

********************************************************

Sleeper    (Bittersweet and Strange)

A vast forest of trees, eternal, evergreen. Wild flowers springing up from the damp earth, and multicoloured mushrooms nestled into the brown wood of the trunks. In the dim light, Eva could afford to explore a little bit – the strange lands that she stumbled into seemed to go forever.

There was only one thing this lacked, Eva thought, and that was people. She was almost disappointed that in the three months she had been going to this place in her dreams, she had never encountered a human, and not an animal. Sure, there had been insects, the pretty butterflies in some of the meadows seemed completely unafraid of her, and she could hear the birds in the highest treetops of the forests, but never someone. What is the point of all this? Eva thought often after exploring her ‘dreamland’ night after night. Do other people have such vivid, recurring dreams that they can smell the dew on the ferns in the morning, and feel the grass on her ever-bare feet? Maybe I should start wearing shoes to bed, Eva thought. So next time I can take a more vigorous walk.

At once, the oddness of what she was thinking about fully sunk in. How, in any way, could it all be possible?

But there was something strangely familiar about these lands. They seemed to cast away the boundaries of normal land-forms, with a change in the landscape about every couple of kilometres. Eva knew this because of experience, and some mornings she woke up, not puffed out or tired, but with her legs sore, as if she had walked a long distance. This wasn’t to say she was not getting enough sleep, miraculously, the dreaming only started in the early hours of the morning.

She continued walking for a while, and the earth changed to untamed rain forest. Clearings in the trees seemed to guide her, opening up where she should go and blocking her (a fallen tree, a creek bed) from where she shouldn’t. Usually the wind in the trees gave her some inclination of the best paths but in this particular forest, she could not understand them. Eva stopped in her tracks, relishing the feeling she got from the feel of the earth against the bare, soft (but hardened slightly) soles of her feet.

A strange sound hit her ears. Laughter? Running footsteps? Eva wasn’t sure if this was a good thing or not. Meeting someone, albeit someone conjured up in her subconscious, would probably remind her what this place was and why she was there. But, her brain prompted her; the person could be here, too. Eva shook her head of this thought quickly. She refused to think along those lines. The place was hers, and she did not want to be interrupted and woken by someone saying she was actually sleep-walking and hallucinating. But what is this place?! She thought desperately.

At once the very real image began to shimmer and dissolve and as it had done many times before, and she found herself horizontal and lying in her warm bed, under her doona. Her body felt invigorated and cool, as though she had just come inside after a brisk walk. But it was plainly obvious she had not left her bed. For one, her bedclothes were perfect, unruffled, as though she had slept deeply the whole night and had not moved.

Eva turned and brushed aside a frizzy blonde curl to glance at the alarm clock beside her bed. It read half past six. She smiled to herself with the thought of the best part of an hour all to herself, sitting on the sofa in the reading room playing her ukulele. Another bonus was that no one would be around to hear her. Eva’s mother, Marie, was out of the house before her daughter even woke these days. She was an emergency paramedic who, until recently, only worked when Eva was at school. Her theory was that until the age of fourteen, she shouldn’t leave her daughter in the house alone all the time, but after that it was fine. So Eva had a lot of freedom, and thanks to all of her friends except one, Valerie, living on the other side of school, St Ives Grammar, she was suddenly given a lot of alone time.

And, unlike every other teenager, she didn’t mind one bit.

Eva was a dreamer, not an ambitious dreamer, but a girl who got lost so frequently in her own head that her friends had gotten used to it.

“Eva’s in one of her dreamer dazes again. “ Valerie, a stylish muso kind of girl and Eva’s closest friend said one lunchtime when Eva had completely zoned out. The problem was, no one knew exactly what she was thinking about.

And I don’t even know myself, Eva thought, strumming her ukulele.

She had given the instrument a name, as you do to all ukuleles; Merryweather, after the third fairy that casts a spell over sleeping beauty when she is an infant. Eva had a particular liking for fairytales. She didn’t know what it was about them; the magic, or even just the fact that they were so different from her ordinary life, but she was entranced by them in a way far deeper than a childhood fascination.

***

“Ugh!” Eva muttered as the smell of burnt bread reached her nose and she heard the toaster pop. She had forgotten that the bread was in there and had been set to the hottest setting while she stared out the window into the thick trees at the edge of the garden. Eva could have sworn she saw movement there, but like every other time, she was probably imagining it. This was one of her worst habits and she was being frequently told off by teachers for going into a daze in class and being unable to answer questions about the lesson. Her new strategy was to keep completely under the radar of her teachers, especially in subjects like maths, history and especially Japanese, a random and boring choice of language that had been unexpectedly offered at her leafy private school. Marie had been impressed at the exoticness of the language, and when her daughter was unable to make the choice herself, she had insisted, saying ‘You’ll never get this opportunity again’. Marie was big on ‘grabbing opportunities’ and made sure her daughter and herself had as many as possible.

Bracing her fingers for the heat, Eva reached into the old toaster and pulled the two slices out gingerly. They were blackened with charcoal, she couldn’t eat them now. Eva looked in the pantry. Those were the last two slices, and there was neither cereal, nor any other foods suitable for breakfast. She sighed, resigning herself to the long detour to the bakery on the way to school. 

It was already half past seven, and school started at 8:30. It would take Eva at least an hour to walk the distance. Oh well, she thought, another late slip day. These were happening rather frequently lately, and her teachers numerous telling offs were doing nothing. What is so important about homeroom that I have to be there? All everyone does is chat and muck around.

With a jolt, Eva realised most normal teenagers liked to chat and muck around.

What happened to me? She thought. I used to be like that until… until what?

Tossing her hair into a messy topknot on the crown of her head, Eva grabbed her messenger schoolbag and locked up the house.