The life I dreamed of

It was happening again I thought as the cityscape in front of me slowly came into focus, I have been to this city several times before, but I can’t place the scrapers, the bay, or the island that it overlooks.

               For the past three weeks, I have been drifting off after a long day of work on my sofa with Milo my dog on my lap crying for pettings. I’ve always been in a habit of falling asleep early as my brothers will attest but it’s gotten worse over the last couple of weeks without a doubt. It started slowly as I began to see the new city from different angles, the bird flying over and the newspaper clerk seller today’s paper on the street corner.

               My dreams had always been very descriptive and realistic, but the most remarkable part of them according to everyone I spoke to was how I was able to remember them more after more than ten minutes after I woke up and especially after my first cup of coffee. My friends always wanted to hear more of what I had dreamt the night before that they had convinced me to start a blog about the “Daily Dreaming’s of Dean” or my “daily dose of triple D” as some of the more avid fans have come to call my musings. My blog had blown up with over one million followers, based on how I was picked for baseball in middle school I didn’t think that thirty people let alone 100 would have any interest in my stories.

Last night’s version of this new city started the way they all did. I awoke in the silken white sheets of the overly soft bed that seemed to wrap around me like the last slurp of warm hot cocoa before the cold winter’s night when you had to leave for work before the roosters crowed. The morning ritual stayed the same of lazily dragging myself out of the too-big bed and into the heated bathroom to wake me up in a shower that felt almost as good as the first fall of snow on what you knew was going to be a snow day during school. This was followed by a steaming cup of coffee and an insight into the daily events courtesy of Channel six news and what looked like the old anchor from our local news station. It’s a weird sensation seeing you recognize in your dreams, although they say that the human brain is incapable of making up human faces and each person you see in your dream is a real person you’ve noticed before.

As the news anchor read off the local traffic reports and was about to pass the lead over to weather correspondent the banner flashed, and he held out attention as he got the latest update through his earpiece. There was a meteor storm scheduled to pass close by the earth this evening that NASA had recently announced and was now going to be visible from some of the parks and more suburban parts of the city. My dream self looked from the news banner to the window as he tried to gauge if it was possible to see the meteors from our balcony. The view from the balcony was awe-inspiring for a small-town hick like me, the jagged edges of the condo buildings along the waterfront, the murky blue of the bay, and the small island with fencing and low rise building that sat in the middle.

 I had taken to calling the city Bayswater as a way to identify it for myself and to make it easier for the blog, although I didn’t see any signs for the city in my travels – mostly because you never see a sign for the city you’re in when you’re in it. The dark blue waters lapped against the small island that I hadn’t yet figured out what it was used for or the purpose in my dreams. I’ve been told that an island in your subconscious means a place you’re looking for that can distance you from the world and everyone in it. What it means when I can’t get to the island or figure out what is happening on the island remains a mystery to me, am I trying to convince myself I need to get away from everything and spend my time in a jumbled mess?

I turned away from the window’s view and back to the news article about the meteor shower, NASA had thought it was going to be on a much wider arc away from Earth and into the sun until recently when a shift in their trajectory, or as they said more likely a miscalculation in their calculations meant that the asteroids would be considered close in terms of space– but still quite a distance away to everyone else. It was nothing to be worried about they assured but we should get a spectacular light show all the same when it passed by later tonight. I set a reminder on my phone to try and be home or at least in a place that I might be able to watch the show, but with how the accounts at the office had been looking recently it was unlikely I would be able to leave before nightfall.

As I finished my coffee and got ready to leave for the office I heard a knock at the door, it was unusual for the office to send a car for me, but they had never come to the door – they normally waited in the car, sometimes impatiently. As I grabbed my laptop bag, I gave a quick glace to the TV screen as I reached for the remote to turn it off, 8pm the meteors were going to be visible according to NORAD’s sensors. That was another strange aspect of the dreams, from what I had heard Europe used NORAD for their Santa tracking each year but their astronomical bodies usually relied on their own satellites. It was strange for my dream to be so in dept about a meteor shower in Canada when the Irish weather stations had not picked up anything. It felt like my subconscious mind was having a field day with this dream.

As I walked towards the door it opened with my real-life roommate reminding me that work started in one hour and I’d best hop into the shower as the hot water was about to run out when Harry woke up after his night out before he had to be back to university. I think that having to share an apartment and bathroom with three other guys is part of what leads me to dream of having a luxurious apartment, shower, and bed all to myself. Although it’s not all bad, I get on well with my roommates and my family is on the other side of town for when I need to visit. But the real dream is to move to the big city two hours north of here, I haven’t been since I was in elementary school, but they say there are more prospects in the city than in a town like this.

Every day at the video shack is the same, a few clients come in and grab a movie for the night then come back the next day disappointed with what they chose. I can’t really blame them when all of our movies are at least five years old if not more, but to a select few it’s an escape and those are the people I can relate to the most. The best part of the job is that there is always a movie screening on the store TV as the manager’s selection and it helps me pass the time. Normally I would get to chose the movie being the only person working but today the owner was in the back office and chose a movie he said he loved from his childhood.

Oddly enough it was a movie I hadn’t seen before about a cataclysmic impact on the earth that only one person could save, and part of the city populace could be saved in a military bunker. He was an average guy who worked some dead-end job or another but spent most of his time playing video games where he could pilot ships and destroy alien invaders on this obscure website he had found. It seemed like a regular disaster movie with the typical cliches and tropes you would expect but the only difference was that I felt I had seen it before. It was an unusually busy day at the store with people renting movies for the long weekend so I didn’t pay much attention to the video playing in the background.

As the day began to wind down and the store grew quiet, I began to wonder about the movie that had been playing earlier and went to the main office to talk to Bruce, the manager on duty, to see what it was and potentially finish watching it tonight. As I approached the back office the air grew warmer, and the sounds of a gunfight leaked through the door and down the hall. I slowly approached the office as I knew from the sounds Bruce was watching a movie, but as I opened the door I saw him asleep on the office chair and the movie playing on the small tv that was in the office.

I grabbed a bowl of popcorn and settled in for what I thought was going to be another predictable story of harry meets sally, saves the world, and lives happily ever after – what I got however was something completely different. It started as it had in the store but when I got into the movie I began to drift into sleep, the warm embrace of my comforter dragging me deep into the realms of an early night. But when I jerked awake what felt like five minutes later the room looked different. The walls had turned to a shade of grey that looked familiar, the bed wrapped around me the way mine never did and the distant sound rapping on the door didn’t seem like my regular fight for the bathroom routine.

As I rolled over in bed and pulled the luxurious comforter up around my shoulders and wiggled more into the bed to get comfortable, I could overhear the news article of the meteor shower coming closer to earth than what the experts had spoken about previously, as I slowly awakened from my dream-like state I could hear the news article change. The anchor introduced the local correspondent who was talking to the mother of a local boy from a small town not too far away that had fallen into a coma when a part of the meteor shower landed close to the house. As I slowly began to pull away from the dream state, I realised that it was my mother talking on the news I rushed out to find her talking on the news about how I hadn’t woken up that morning. As I tried to make sense of what I was seeing on the TV the tapping on the door grew louder, and I realised it was the front door to the apartment.

I rushed over to the door in hope that it might break the dream scene that I was experiencing, but as I rushed through the hall, I passed a body-length mirror and was able to see a glimpse of myself for the first time. Part of what I had experienced in my dreams before was that I could not interpret my dream self in anything but a pair of hands when exploring. This time was different as I saw a tall muscly body that I had not seen before, the mirror seemed to strain to incorporate the muscles of my arms as the close-cut crop of hair on my head made it seem smaller than was normal. As I opened the door there was someone, I vaguely recognised who stood to order and informed me of the approaching meteors and the fact they were going to impact and not simply pass us by.

It was at this that I willed myself awake by pleading with myself to snap out of the dream state but as I cursed my name and that of my parents for making me that the officer at the door overheard me.

‘Jericho miller?’ he questioned, ‘Wasn’t that the boy from the next town over affected by a local landing of the meteor? Why are you talking about him?’

And at that moment, I realised it wasn’t a dream anymore, I was rather starting to experience the life of someone in that town I had always dreamed of moving to, and that life may be coming to an end.