Life in Dreaming

Have you ever had a dream? Has it woken you?

I think you know that feeling, to be lying awake in the static between sleeping and living. To be not quite sure on which side you’re dwelling. Those stagnant seconds where you can sense that the world has been moving without you and it’s almost a betrayal - but it can’t be, really, can it? It’s a reminder. That feeling. It’s a reminder of what it would be like at the end.

How did it feel, to be both asleep and awake?

*

I am I. Am I? Yes. 

I move and I move and it’s some sort of miracle. There’s the sun in the sky and I feel it. Like dust that begins to coat my arms, layer by layer, until I’m thick with heat. Sweat? I lick above my lips and a fizz of something touches my tongue. Something not quite like salt seeped through skin, I know, but a close imitation. 

A car is coming. Wheels churn against the gravel of a small country road and I’m sticking my hand out before I even know what I’m doing. This is hitchhiking. Let the sounds become caught in the air and move away from me just as I’ve grasped onto them, like the shape of a cloud pushed apart by the wind.

“You want me to take you all the way to London?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say. I am I, but now I am something more. I am now a We, and we are sitting side by side in his run-down car speeding past the patchwork fields of the English countryside. 

“What are you doing in the city, anyway?” I am also a You. 

“I don’t know.”

“Hey, if you don’t want me asking that’s okay. You prefer it quiet?” I look at him - at the days-old stubble and cherry-red nose. His skin is yellowing beneath a cap that matches the faded, worn blue of his eyes. I wonder if he knows he is sick. “What?” he says, glancing away from the road to meet me eyes with a frown.

“I don’t mind talking,” I say, looking back out of the window.

“You’ve got a bit of a weird vibe going on, you know? Anyone ever told you that?”

“No.”

“Where are you from?”

“Back there,” I say, pointing over my shoulder. 

“The village? You don’t really look the type. No offence or anything. I like the pink,” he raises a hand from the wheel and tousles his own imaginary hair. “I’ve just never seen anyone down here with anything like that, you know? It’s bold. Something my daughter would do, probably.”

“You have a daughter?” I ask.

“Marie,” he smiles. “She’s only twelve, but she’s gonna be a right old force when she grows up. She’s got a right old mouth on her and all. But you’d never hear such clever stuff come out of such a tiny person, I’ll tell ya.”

“She’s a genius?”

He laughs. “You got a real strange humour, you know that?”

“No.”

“Real witty. Yeah, Marie would like you.”

“Maybe I could meet her sometime.”

“Well… yeah, maybe.” I’m looking out of the front window again, but I see him shoot me a quizzical look. Is it obvious? 

He talks for most of the journey and I stay quiet. Something tells me that the more I talk the more likely it is he’ll realise. Is that survival instinct? Do I want to survive? I wonder if perhaps it’s more an inherent need than a conscious desire, though there’s not much point in differentiating, really

“What do you do, then?” he’s asking me now. We’ve been driving for about an hour and I’ve barely spoken. I think my silence makes him nervous.

“I’m not sure, yet.”

“You’re at University? That’s all the rage nowadays, isn’t it? I tell ya, it was different when I was your age - barely anybody from these little villages went to study, but these days it’s like nobody knows that there’s anything else to do. You’ll be up to your eyeballs in debt, then? Well, I don’t envy you that. But I’m sure getting a good education and all will help you in the future. What are you studying?”

“Life.”

“Like biology?”

“More like psychology.” 

“Oh, wow, now there’s something I know nothing about. I know driving and I know delivering, but I know nothing about psychology.”

“You probably know more than you think you do. It’s human nature.”

“I doubt I’d know a damn thing. Which University do you go to, anyway?”

“I don’t.”

“What?”

“I don’t.”

“College?”

“No.”

“Then why did you say you were at University?”

“I didn’t. You did.”

“No, no - you said you were studying.” His hands shift position on the steering wheel.

“I am studying. But I’m not at University.”

He cocks his head but his eyes stay on the road. We’re on a motorway now and there are lorries hurtling past the car with incredible speed, shaking the windows as they do. A billboard up ahead with a face that I recognise is marred with graffiti. I try not to look at it. 

“Then what do you do?”

“I don’t know,” I say again.

“What kind of an answer’s that?” Another look shot towards me. Another lorry thundering past.

“I don’t know.”

“You’re an odd one, alright,” and he does something like a laugh, but even I know it’s wrong. “You’re… well, you’re a bit of a closed book.”

“A closed book?”

“Yeah, you know - you don’t really talk much about yourself, do you?”

“There’s not much to say. Why don’t we talk about something else? How’s Marie?”

“What do you mean how’s Marie? You’re talking like you know her,” and I hear the sharp edge to his words.

“I don’t. I don’t know her.”

His eyes keep flicking between me and the road, greased palms sliding over the wheel. “Say, what about family? You got family in the city?” 

“Everybody has family.” If I had a heart, I would feel it beating now. Thump, thump, thump knocking on the bones of my ribs and ricocheting through the sinew of my body.

“Where’s yours, then?” 

“Everybody has family,” I say again. I smile - or something like it - and he sees it. Maybe it’s the way I move or the words I say, or my first attempt at a convincing smile, but he knows then. Blood rushes up his neck and the tendons beneath the skin of his hands become tight as he chokes the wheel. His right foot presses down on the pedal and the world beyond the windows becomes a grey smudge. 

“You’re one of them,” he says. I stay quiet. Stay smiling. He shakes his head out at the road and pushes harder on the pedal. 

“You’re breaking the speed limit,” I say, the words sounding weird through my smiling mouth.

“You’re a Bot, aren’t you? You’re a fucking Bot.” 

“Everybody has family.” Smile, smile, smile.

*

Have you ever had a dream? Has it woken you? 

My life is held between the static of sleeping and waking. Dreaming and being alive. I lay here beneath a sky I’ve never seen at dawn or sunset, in a body I’ve only just come to know, thrown from the passenger seat of a moving car. Not dead, yet not alive. 

I think I am. I am I.

Am I?

Yes.

I think. I am.