Echoes of Waking

Veda counted heartbeats instead of seconds while the ferry crossed the strait toward Ithaka Island. Thirty-seven days since the fever dreams began. Eighty-three nights since she last slept without jerking awake, gasping from visions of a lighthouse.

Rain pelted the deck. Other passengers huddled inside the cabin, but Vedas stayed at the rail, letting droplets blur the boundary between sea and sky. The odd crescent scar on her wrist—appeared the morning after her first dream—prickled beneath her watchband. Her doctor called it a stress reaction; her best friend blamed it on her new medication. Veda knew better.

The island emerged from mist like reluctant truth. No tourism brochures mentioned Ithaka. No maps marked it properly. She'd found it only through obscure maritime records and fragments of diaries from the 1940s, describing a place where "the edges of things don't hold."

The harbour town sprawled haphazardly—buildings assembled from driftwood and salvage, streets that curved when they should run straight. Dogs with peculiar spotted coats watched her disembark but didn't bark. Children paused their games to stare, then whispered behind cupped hands.

A woman selling smoked fish pointed wordlessly toward the northern headland when Veda asked about the lighthouse. No one else would meet her eyes. She walked along the shore, following a path that sometimes disappeared beneath tide pools only to resurface yards away. The island felt wrong in subtle ways—shadows falling at impossible angles, birds flying in formations that strained the eye.

The lighthouse appeared after her fourth hour of walking. It stood impossibly tall, its architecture defying perspective—seeming both immense and intimate depending on how she squinted. No light shone from its pinnacle despite encroaching dusk. Its weathered stone surface bore no windows, no door that she could see.

Veda circled it three times before spotting the entrance—not a door but a vertical seam in the stonework that shifted when viewed from different angles. She pressed her scarred wrist against it. The stone parted like curtains.

Inside, spiral stairs wound upward. Veda climbed until her legs burned and her lungs complained. The top chamber held no lamp, no lens, only a single wooden chair facing a circular window. She sat down.

The window framed not the expected view of sea and sky but a bedroom—her bedroom—where a figure that was unmistakably herself lay sleeping, chest rising and falling in the rhythm of deep dreams.

"Disorienting, isn't it?" said a voice.

A man stood in a corner that should've been empty seconds before. His face held the strange quality of seeming simultaneously young and ancient, like geological formations carved by millennia then polished smooth yesterday.

"You're the lighthouse keeper," Veda said.

"And you're the dreamer who won't stop waking." He approached the window. "Most never make it this far. They dismiss the dreams, or medicate them away, or convince themselves they're metaphors for ordinary anxieties."

"What is this place?"

"The threshold between sleeping and waking. The place where dreams go when dreamers wake."

"That doesn't make sense."

"Truth rarely does." He gestured toward the sleeping figure visible through the window. "Is that you dreaming this, or is this you dreaming that? Which version wakes and which continues sleeping? The questions themselves are dreamed."

Veda touched the glass. It rippled like disturbed water. "The dreams led me here for a reason."

"Yes. The lighthouse needs a new keeper. I've held this post for three hundred years of borrowed time."

"Why me?"

"Because you question the texture of reality. Because you noticed the wrongness in ordinary things—how sometimes objects aren't quite solid, how people occasionally glitch mid-sentence, how memories sometimes rewrite themselves overnight."

He extended his palm, revealing a crescent scar identical to hers. "The mark of those who exist simultaneously in multiple states of consciousness."

Through the window, Veda watched her sleeping self stir restlessly. "If I accept, what happens to her—to me—out there?"

"She'll wake believing she dreamed an island and a lighthouse. The dreams will stop. She'll live conventionally, never again bothered by glimpses of what lies beneath reality's thin veneer."

"And if I refuse?"

"The dreams intensify until you can no longer distinguish between states of being. Your mind will fracture, trying to reconcile irreconcilable realities."

Veda studied the lighthouse chamber—the stone walls that sometimes appeared translucent, the stairs that defied euclidean geometry. "What exactly does a lighthouse keeper do here?"

"Guides those caught between dreaming and waking. Prevents dreams from bleeding too deeply into the consensus world. Maintains the boundary."

Outside, thunder growled across impossible distances. The sleeping Veda in the window twitched at the sound.

"I need to think," she said.

"Time works differently here. Take all you need."

Veda descended the spiral stairs, this time counting steps. There were exactly forty-three going up, but eighty-seven coming down. The entrance now opened onto a different part of the island—a small cove where the sea folded into itself like origami.

A boat was pulled up on shore, ancient wood somehow still seaworthy. A figure hunched inside it, face hidden beneath a hood.

"Another choice?" Veda asked.

The figure looked up. Its face was not a face but a mirror reflecting her own features. It spoke without moving its reflected lips.

"The keeper offers false dichotomies. There is always another way."

"What way?"

"Remember the nature of dreams. The dreamer creates the dream, not the other way around."

Understanding bloomed like ink dropped in water. Veda returned to the lighthouse, climbing stairs that now numbered exactly sixty-five. The keeper waited, expression unreadable.

"I've decided," she said.

"And?"

Veda approached the window. Her sleeping self lay unchanged. "Neither. I reject the premise."

She pressed her hand against the glass, pushing until it gave. Reaching through the impossible window, she touched her sleeping self's forehead. Both bodies trembled. The lighthouse keeper lunged forward, but too late.

"What have you done?" he demanded, voice fracturing into multiple tones.

"Reconciled what was falsely separated," Veda said, as reality buckled.

The lighthouse dissolved. The island folded inward. Colours inverted, then shattered into prismatic fragments. Veda fell upward, downward, inward, outward—

She woke in her apartment, sun streaming through blinds she'd closed the night before. The crescent scar on her wrist had vanished. So had the dreams of the lighthouse.

But something had changed. Objects in her peripheral vision moved when she wasn't looking directly at them. Sounds carried emotional resonances never present before. Words on pages occasionally rearranged themselves into new meanings.

On her nightstand lay a small stone, worn smooth by water that had never touched this world. Carved into its surface was neither a crescent nor a lighthouse, but a simpler symbol: a circle, incomplete, waiting to be closed.

Veda smiled. She hadn't rejected the keeper's role after all—she'd simply redefined it. The boundary between dreaming and waking remained, but now she straddled it consciously, belonging fully to neither state but inhabiting both.

She placed the stone in her pocket and stepped outside to greet a world that was both familiar and entirely new—a world where dreams and reality weren't opposing forces but complementary aspects of a spectrum she now navigated by choice.

Somewhere distant yet intimately close, a lighthouse that never existed continued not existing in exactly the right way, guiding those caught between states toward shores of their own making.