JUST A DREAM

Fourteen more minutes. Bud leaned against the sink and let out a long sigh. Fourteen. Four + ten = a teenaged four. Fore!

Why don't stove timers show seconds? Bud wondered. That sounded like a joke. "Hey, Jen, why don't stove timers show seconds?"

"I don't know, Bud, why don't stove timers show seconds?"

"Because if they did, they'd... they'd..."

Bud was never very good at coming up with jokes. He found the punchlines were the hardest to come up with. What was a joke, anyway? And what made it funny? Rhyming? Wordplay? Something out of left field? Bud had no idea, but he knew a joke when he heard one.

Still fourteen. This minute was going on and on. Maybe he hadn't set the timer right. Maybe--

Thirteen. There it was. Finally. Thirteen more minutes to go. He took a peek at his tin-foiled dinner. Should I rotate it? Turn the TV dinner a full 180 degrees? Where did I see that? Maybe on a cooking show? One of Jen's TikToks? It has to do with oven hot spots or thermal zones or something. But that would involve oven mitts, and they were buried deep in the--

Twelve?

What? So soon? He wasn't expecting that. Did the very act of bending over and looking through the grimy stove window consume time, faster? Did merely thinking about fishing the oven mitts out and risking the sticky drawer coming off its rails (again) somehow accelerate time? Was the anxiety of possibly yanking the whole drawer out (just like last time) and onto the floor (ugh) speeding this whole process along? If so, maybe I should think of fast things? What was fast? Cars, baseballs, jets...

Still Tweleve.

And what was he making again? Bud looked around for the carton the frozen dinner had come in. It was where he left it, beside the stove, instructions side up, ready to remind him when to remove the foil cover. The last two minutes? He picked up the box and checked--yes, it was indeed during the last two minutes, in aid of crisping--and then flipped it over.

"Salsbury Steak Mega Meal."

The picture is certainly inviting, and look at that font! It really popped. Yellow and blue was indeed a snappy combo. Was that why I bought this in the first place? Because it called to me from the grocery store freezer case? And who am I to resist such a bold, san-serif--

Thirteen?

Again? Did the timer go backwards, or was it always thirteen? Maybe it--

--"Floma, go to sleep!"

"Hmmm, what?"

"Fall asleep. You've been waking again. Mumbling something about preheating the oven or some such nonsense."

"Oh, sorry," Floma mumbled. "I felt really awake there. It was weird. Just this monotomous grind. So boring, but--"

"No time for that. We've got a summer camp about to go beddy-bye."

Rablo nudged his friend again, then burst into a vibrant kaleidoscope of shimmering non-Newtonian dazzle. He phased in and out of kid-friendly forms—handsome baseball heroes, huggable, squishable panda bears and loyal dinosaur friends—with a phantasmagoric flourish Floma was tiring of. He claimed the peacocking was a warm-up before REM hit, but Floma knew him better than that.

She stretched and drifted to her feet. It wasn't like her to stay awake, especially around this time, this close to the bedtimes of so many mortals. As a Dream, it was up to her to shock and awe as many posterior cingulate cortexes as she could. Her territory changed from night to night, depending on the coalescence of the collective subconscious (and the Earth's rotation), so there were always new amygdalas to depack and recharge.

"Not another pack of kids," Floma complained. "They're always so basic."

Rablo rippled around her impatiently. "You'd rather dust the condos again? All those people dream about are Crippling Debt Krakens or endless, perfectly mowed backyards. That's basic."

"Yeah, well..." Floma shrugged. "I guess."

Floma wasn't so sure. She had caught a glimpse of something else between their nightly dance of French Bulldog fantasies and forgotten passwords night terrors, and couldn't shake it. She had seen, as they weaved their magic amongst the brainstems of the residents of 385, 387 and 389 Biltmore Towers, her first glimpse of The Other Side.

Recently, she had been amusing herself by one-upping Rablo. Besting him wasn't as hard as you'd think. For a Dream, Rablo's imagination had a hard ceiling. When he'd transmogrify into a giant rubber duck, for instance, she'd manifest an entire flock. If he transformed into a Rising Sea Level Monster, Floma would bring the Moon crashing down. When he zigged embarrassing, she zagged complete, utter humiliation. And so on.

But that night, for some reason, somehow, someway, perhaps through a transfer of the tossing-and-turning anxiety of his partner, 'Jen,' Floma's attention bent out of the usual Dream-realm and briefly, ever so briefly, bared witness to the banal.

She saw him. The human named 'Bud.' He was in the food preperation nook, a pre-made frozen food product in the heating device. The meal itself was nothing remarkable—something that had repeated itself, with some comical variations, endlessly across the globe—but that was probably why Floma found it so fascinating. Here she was, tickling his thalamus with a flurry of cognitive surprises and ambiguous truths, and this poor chump had to recheck the cooking temperature five whole times. Five!

But she was hooked. All it took was a whiff of the unremarkable, of the eye-bleeding tedium. Floma had a preview into an existence not based on transcendent ebullience but, one of aggressively bland drudgery and sameness.

And it made Floma kinda hot.

To be completely honest, she had never given it much thought. Was this how these primordial apes conducted themselves when the Dreams weren't around? How was this their default, their habitual state of being? It was so opposite of anything Floma could comprehend (and this meant a lot, coming from a Being of True Phantasia and Creation) that it was like a breath of fresh air. When the very act of inception was nothing and infinite simultaneously, to stumble upon a new paradigm, however much it resembled dry toast, was, frankly, phenomenal.

Rablo would never understand, of course, but if she could only--

--"Babe, wake up."

Bud stirred. "What?" he growled. "I was having this dream..."

"Did you hear that?"

"What?"

"That."

They listened. There was always some noise, somewhere. Their condo was lined with the thinnest, cheapest drywall imaginable. Bud often thought they were made out of composted cracker meal, or just layer after layer of latex semi-gloss, each coat propping up the next.

"I can't hear anything."

...

"There it is again."

Bud listened hard, then ostriched hard under his pillow. "Just let me go back to sleep," he moaned.

"It's something," Jen said. "I'm telling you." She then launched into her usual diatribe about what it probably was--swarthy rapists, fastidiously jiggling every handle, floor by floor, praying for an open one; an army of genetically engineered rats, shimmying up the building's electrical cables, swarming their heating ducts, biding their time until they could poop in her shoes, the nice ones, with the cute straps, or it was the beginnings of a fire, a towering inferno so intense there would be no other choice but to jump from their tiny, junk-filled balcony and--

--"Floma! You're doing it again."

"Huh?"

"You were waking. Going on and on about some noise. Now, come on, we've got the seniors home tonight. Time to brush off our old-timey material."

Floma yawned as she joined her friend in the Flow. They sailed through over the neighbourhoods of their all-to-familiar Dreamscape, a place of confounding pulsating, transmuting wonderment, yada yada yada.

The two Dreams cruised past sights and sounds so magnificent no mortal would ever believe until the next impossible one bloomed. All around them, titanium-scaled Chocolate Dragons morphed into Gordian-knotted rainbow waterfalls which melted into the faces of loved ones, lost long ago and struggling not to be forgotten. Floma itched her butt, the marvels barely registering anymore.

All she could think about was that noise. What had it been? Was Bud going to investigate? He had to do something, right? And would those Salsbury steaks still be on sale--

--"Ogg, wake up. You dream again. Say funny things."

The caveman stirred on his warm patch of cave floor and wriggled closer to the dying fire.

"Leave Ogg," Ogg grunted. "Ogg comfy."