Dreams // Luke Hemmings

Most people’s favourite part about sleeping is that small moment, when you are between asleep and awake. When you don't know the difference between reality and fantasy, when for just that one moment you feel with your entire soul that the dream is reality, and it really happened.

Unfortunately, I don’t have that. I’ve never experienced what it was like to dream about someone and have reality kick you back down to earth because every dream I have comes to life.

Some may say I can see the future, and I suppose I can but the tricky thing is I never know when it is going to happen or to whom it may affect.

It all started when I was in the fourth grade. It was a humid Australian night and my mother’s close friend Samantha was babysitting me. My parents explained that it was a big night for my father and that he was finally getting that promotion he had been working so for hard for. I had my first day at my new school the next day so Sam put me to bed early.

That night I dreamt of a car accident on the highway. I didn’t see how it happened, or who was in the other car but what I did see, still haunts me to this day. I watched in horror as the firemen cut open the battered up car door. I watched them weave my lifeless parents out of my car. I watched the paramedic shoot electricity through my father’s body, and then I watched them call time of death as they towed away my parents in black body bags.

I woke up to the loud knocks of the police at my door. To this day, that is still the worst night of my life.

The court case that followed was quite simple considering my only other relative was my father’s sister, Karen. I moved to Sydney where she lived with her husband and only son Michael. I remember listening to my father swear that I looked just like my older cousin but it wasn’t until I met the year older boy that I saw why. We both share the Clifford’s dark hair and green eyes but it was our same wide set nose and bright pink plump lips that seemed most uncanny.

My aunt raised me as one of her own, and spoilt me rotten. “I’ve always wanted a daughter,” she would sigh as she brushed my hair every Saturday before we went grocery shopping. “It’s just heartbreaking that this is how it happened.”

As Michael and I grew up we began to look less like twins yet a lot more like siblings in the way we acted. We were and still are to this day, inseparable. Eventually I went back to school and started worrying less and less about my past. Michael was pretty much top of the school and despite his nerd-like nature, everyone knew not to mess with him or his little cousin. Now that he has gone though, the whispers and looks I get while walking down the hallway are getting more intense.  

Michael is the only one who knows about my ability to dream the future and he’s very supportive of it. He always wakes me if he hears me struggling, and sometimes even helps me find out if it has happened yet. What he doesn’t know is sometimes I dream about people I know as well. Like when he came home half naked and drunk, he had no idea I had a dream about it two weeks earlier.

Those types of dreams are the only good things that come out of this horrible ‘gift’ of mine and I’m so thankful that I’m having them so much more often.

When we were younger, Michael never complained about me hanging out with him and as we got older it only got harder to separate us. Even when his band formed he insisted on me sitting in on practises and even gets me to film their covers. “You’re pretty much one of us Amity,” Michael always says. “You were here before Ashton was, always remember that.”

Apart from Michael, the only other friends I have are the boys. My relationship with each of them is different in its own way yet they all have something in common; I never thought I’d see any of them as more than just a friend.

But this is a story about how all of that changed.