Seeing Double

Who am I?

I'm nobody important.

No, really. I'm not important.

I'm the kid who skipped Mrs Peterson's class the other day so he could vape outside of the locker rooms in the empty gymnasium by himself.

I'm the kid who missed the bus three days this week already (and we're only three days in) because he can't remember how to work his alarm clock.

But... I'm also the kid that just saved the world as we know it.

You see, about two months ago I started having these dreams. These dreams were so vivid and imaginative that I woke from them all dazed and sweaty, breathing way too heavy and shaking like crazy, as if I had been on a five mile run in the middle of summer.

The first time this happened, I was like, "cool", and continued on with my day, thinking it was just a weird nightmare. As I said, though, these dreams were something else.

They had recurring characters, plots, a mission. I was a spy. I mean, I was scaling buildings in the middle of the night. I was turning over a "business" card with my secret employer's name on it. I was listening to long-winded monologues from crazed fascists whose apparent intention was to take over the world as I hung upside down at the end of a rope from the ceiling over a vat of electric eels, only to make my escape at the last minute.

Eventually, I had to assume that they were someone else's dreams since I wasn't very creative at all and real-life-me spent his days just skipping class and vaping. Which, you know, isn't very conducive to being innovative or smart.

I thought this until dream-me ended the mission (by performing some cool martial arts moves and kicking butt) and decided to come back to their home country - my home country. I recognised the accent first. Second, the traffic.

Suddenly, dream-me's waking hours were my waking hours. Now it was like I was seeing double. The image from dream-me's eyes overlapped the image from my eyes. I started getting headaches every day. They would throb in my temples, growing steadily worse until I felt like vomitting. On top of all of this, I was running into things at school - nearly face-planting a locker door in front of Stacy Walsh was a fine achievement - and more than just my face was taking a hit.

Everyone at school was starting to notice. The captain of my basketball team became really concerned and teachers started pulling me out of class to ask how things were going at home. I mean, everything was fine at home.

But when I began telling them about the dreams and the double vision, the school counsellor made a face, the one parents make when they don't get the answer they were thinking in their head, and she handed me a questionnaire to fill out. It was asking me to rate myself over the last two weeks on things like "I found it hard to wind down" and "I tended to overreact to situations".

I mean, how was I supposed to know? I was too busy off with dream-me saving the world.

They called in my dad next and my dad explained about the fights that had happened a few weeks ago. But this meant nothing. This meant absolutely nothing. Everything was normal then and I only saw one world. Now, everything was different and that was a far off memory.

They sent me to see people. They took me out of school.

In the meantime, dream-me returned to the field. He left all his troubles behind. I dreamed of him every night, waatching his every move.

I caught a glimpse of him in a mirror, hardened, muscled, focussed. It made me feel empty, honestly. I wanted to be him, to stay in my dream where I was him, instead of returning to the never-ending line of doctors trying to diagnose me and prescribe me medications I would pretend to take. I left the medications under my mattress and thought about them being crushed to fine powder as I sank into bed every night.

I was in a bad way.

Not in the way that everyone thought I was in a bad way, but in the way that I knew that I was coming to the point where I could no longer be the person that I was before. This thought dragged me down into the suffocating depths of my mind and left me there to piece together the new me.

It wasn't long after this began that the dream-me got himself into some trouble. He was strung up again, captured, tortured by to proverbial bad-guy when I realised something.

I knew who dream-me was and what he was doing. I knew. I knew where he was, who he spoke to, his secret identity, his real identity. I knew which company he worked for, too. I knew everything.

I mean, I'm not a smart person by any means, really. But I can remember some things. I can remember a lot of things, apparently.

I closed my eyes during the day and, through the swell of dream-me's own dreams that now crowded the back of my eyelids, I envisioned the "business" card my spy friend had turned over. I wrote down the numbers and I called the number as soon as I had it.

It was a long shot, but I was going to take it.

"Hello, postal service, how may I help you?"

"I know you're not a postage service and I have some information that might help you."

There was a pause on the other end of the line. Static crackled for a moment. I hurried to add, in one gust of breath, all of the information I could remember off the top of my head. Every last detail. The phone was still silent.

"Who is this?"

I hesitated, suddenly unsure. "I'm nobody important."

"I don't think that's entirely true."