Ice Dreaming

"Are you afraid?"

Aisling looked down at the little girl who asked the question, the top of her jumpsuit still hanging around her waist. "What?"

"Are you afraid of going to sleep?" She looked over at the pods, then up at Aisling again. "What if you don't wake up?"

"I'll wake up," Aisling promised, patting her head. "It's just a long nap."

"But it'll be cold."

"I happen to like the cold."

The girl frowned up at her. "No one likes it that cold. It wouldn't put you to sleep if you liked it."

Aisling sighed. There was no arguing with a kid like this. She had been just like her when she was that age and drove everyone to distraction with her questions.

She had hoped to have a little more patience when she met someone who was like her, but apparently not.

"What about the dreams?" the girl asked. "It's not really supposed to be like falling asleep, but some people have dreams."

"I read up on ice dreams before I signed on for this colony. Apparently, only one in ten thousand people experience ice dreams." Aisling knelt down to look in the girl's eyes. "There are five thousand people going into stasis, so I suppose there's a chance that one or two people might have ice dreams, but they aren't real and they can't hurt you."

"But you won't wake up from them," the girl whispered, clutching at Aisling's hand. "Not for a long time."

"It'll be fine." Even though she didn't recognize the girl, she pulled her into a hug. "Everything will be alright when you wake up, no matter what."

-

Ice dreaming is a phenomenon when a person in cryogenic stasis achieves a state of brain activity characteristic of REM sleep. The phenomenon is fairly uncommon, but scientists have not discovered any observable reason for the people who do experience it. Those who experience it are typically confused upon waking from stasis, as they sometimes do not remember entering stasis at all. Some say that their dreams were so real they could have sworn they actually experienced the years they thought they lived.

-

"What would you do if you knew you weren't going to wake up?"

Aisling turned to stare at the man who sat beside her. "Sorry, what?"

"That probably wasn't the best way to start this, was it?" The man winced, embarrassed, before holding out his hand for her to shake. "Hi, I'm Allan. Not a great conversationalist, obviously, but the question just popped into my head. If you were going to sleep and you knew you wouldn't wake up again, what would you do? Hypothetically, of course."

"I don't know. Probably try to keep dreaming as long as I could. Time feels infinitely longer in dreams." She paused. "I'm Aisling, by the way."

"Nice to meet you." Allan looked off into the distance and frowned. "What if it wasn't a very good dream, though? Not like a nightmare, but just things you do all the time."

"I'd try to change the dream, I suppose." Aisling admitted. "If you know it's a dream, you should be able to nudge it wherever you want it to go."

They were sitting at a table in the cafeteria on the ship, looking at nothing in particular. Unlike all the shows about spaceships people made before actually getting into deep space, there were no windows in the public sections of the ship. It didn't matter as much when most of the people on board would spend the journey in stasis. The ship's crew was split into four groups and would spend a year out of stasis and three years in until they arrived.

With an investment of billions of dollars and thousands of human lives hanging in the balance, no one really wanted to trust the journey to a computer program, no matter how sophisticated it could be. Human error was human error, but it was rarely so catastrophic as what a failure in the computer systems would lead to.

"Where is everyone?" Allan asked suddenly, looking around.

Aisling looked up, too. They were alone and she couldn't recall if she'd seen anyone before she sat down. Allan had come to her, and perhaps that was why. She was the only other person there.

"I don't know," she admitted. "Working, maybe? I don't think we're allowed in the crew portions of the ship though."

"No, probably not." He shook himself. "Anyway, what would you dream about if you knew you were dreaming?"

Aisling tilted her head until she was staring up at the ceiling. "I don't know. I want to say a garden or something equally beautiful, but I don't just want to sit and look at things, you know? I want to do something. I want to be something if everything is supposed to be limitless." She turned to smirk at him. "Maybe get up the courage to start more philosophical discussions with strangers."

"Make friends?"

"Yeah." Aisling felt the smirk soften into a smile. "Make friends."

-

Although there is no real evidence to back up the claim, some people believe that those who die in stasis on longer journeys experienced the phenomenon of ice dreaming. Those who suggest this possibility cite the apocryphal belief that dying in a dream equates to dying in real life. They imply that, while experiencing the ice dreams, people enter a hyper-realistic state of being that can trick the brain into believing everything is true, up to and including death. They further add that, because cryogenic stasis is not a natural form of sleep, the body is incapable of employing its usual method of escaping dream-death, which in turn reinforces the reality of the dream.

As these deaths typically occur on long interstellar voyages where there is little information kept on the state of the body in stasis other than vital signs, it is difficult to prove one way or the other, as few people would willingly submit to spending years in stasis for scientific study and fewer would experience ice dreaming in the first place.

-

"What do you think you're doing?"

Aisling paused and looked back at the woman storming her way. "What's wrong?"

"You're not supposed to be down here! You're not a member of the crew. I would know if you were." The woman crossed her arms and tapped her foot. "Who are you and what are you doing here?"

With a sigh, Aisling dropped back down to the floor. She'd almost been close enough to see, but apparently the universe was conspiring against her. "I wanted to see the stars. And I'm Aisling, by the way. I'm a passenger."

"Passengers are supposed to be in stasis."

"Oh." Aisling glanced down at herself, at the silver jumpsuit she knew was zipped up all the way to the nape of her neck, the top of it hidden under her black braid. "Am I? I think I am. But I'm not. That's weird."

"Did your pod malfunction or something? None of the passengers are supposed to wake up for at least another fifty years. This is only my sixth shift out of my pod."

"Oh," Aisling repeated. "We should check on Allan then. I haven't seen him in a while."

"Allan?" The woman arched an eyebrow.

"He's another passenger. We met in the cafeteria."

The woman muttered something under her breath. Aisling probably wasn't supposed to hear it, but it was amusing to listen to a member of the ship's crew complaining about idiots who don't even know they're supposed to be asleep. "Fine. Let's get you down to medical and make sure there's nothing wrong with you before we try to put you down in stasis again."

Aisling paused. "I want to see it first."

"See what?"

"My pod. I think it's important."

The woman rubbed her face and sighed, but Aisling felt only a flash of guilt for causing such a disturbance. It was important that she saw her pod, but she couldn't remember why. Maybe there was something wrong with it?

"Fine, we can go find your pod first, but then I have to take you to medical. And your friend, if we can find him." The woman turned to leave. "How did you get to Navigation anyway? I was under the impression that passengers wouldn't be able to access the area at all."

"I don't actually know," Aisling admitted. "I just wanted to see the stars, and I knew there was somewhere on the ship where I could look out and see them." She frowned. "I never did get to see them."

"When we get to Voria 47C9, there will be a whole new sky full of stars for you to look at. You don't need to do it from my workstation."

"You never did tell me your name. I told you mine, but you never said what yours was."

"It's Tamira. Navigation Specialist Tamira Malan." She sighed. "Maybe I can take you back and show you the stars before you need to go back into your pod. After medical, though. Now, do you remember your pod number?"

"362-D. It's towards the middle of the bay."

They walked through the corridors in silence, Aisling certain that something was going to happen when they reached her pod, but she couldn't think what it was. When they reached Pod Bay D, Aisling felt a shiver travel down her spine. She didn't remember walking by the sleeping passengers, and it was strange to see them now, silent and unmoving in cryogenic stasis.

Then she looked down at pod 362-D. It took longer than it should have to recognize her body, but she had that time as Tamira stared at it in mute horror.

"Oh," Aisling whispered. "I think I'm dreaming."

And as she said it, the room faded away.

-

Another unusual phenomenon reported on long interstellar voyages is the presence of what people call space ghosts. These 'ghosts' do not appear on any security footage, but the same figure is sometimes seen by multiple members of the crew, suggesting that there is some common factor in the phenomenon besides the location.

It is interesting to note that those who experience the phenomenon often point to a passenger or another member of the crew as the person they saw, and this person experienced the ice dreaming phenomenon.

-

"I was wondering when you would figure it out," the little girl said as they sat side by side on the hull of the ship and watched the stars. "It isn't normally that difficult for us to tell dreams from reality."

"Most dreams I had when I was your age were more interesting than that," Aisling retorted. "I know the signs were there, but everything was so normal that I didn't even think about how I had gotten somewhere. I was just there. You could have told me."

"You wouldn't have believed me yet." The girl leaned back until she was laying down on the hull and staring up at the void. "You needed to put the pieces together for yourself."

"So, Allan—"

"That was me. Or you, if you want to be technical." The girl waved her hands around vaguely. "This is all you."

"What about all that stuff about being afraid, or not waking up?"

"That's how you process fear. You give it to someone else, make it their fear and not yours, and then you rationalize all the ways it isn't as scary as it really is." She sighed and pulled Aisling down until they were both laying flat against the hull. "You told yourself that you would be fine until you start to believe it. It's the ultimate fake-it-til-you-make-it because it works."

Aisling felt the swooping feeling of relief and confusion mix in her gut. "I thought I'd be going on adventures with magic or something when I figured out I was dreaming. I said I wanted to do something."

"There's plenty of time to do something later. But you wanted to look at the stars, and here they are." The girl shifted until they bumped shoulders. "Just lay back and enjoy it."

"Tamira was real though, right?" Aisling asked after a moment. "I should probably apologize to her when I wake up."

"That's a problem for later. Right now, you've got the stars."

"Right. Stars." Even though she knew it was a dream, Aisling smiled. Not even Tamira would get this view. But the younger echo of herself was right. Everything else could wait.