Dejá Vu

Nothing is as it seems.

I have woken from another dramatic dream and the world is different. Again. The pills I took last night did not keep the future from creeping into my thoughts, from morphing and altering the outside world into a demented version of what used to be.

Just last week, I walked the streets of my town, waving at friends and neighbours. It was my hometown. I was welcomed by all. I sat in their homes, shared meals, laughed and cried and lived as a part of their society. Not today. Not ever again.

For I have seen behind the veil. I have been shown what happens when the world is an illusion and all you believe to be real is nothing but a dream. A sequence of thoughts strung together to form the basis of what you believe to be your reality. Until it isn't.

It was subtle at first. A shimmer at the edge of my vision. Fairy lights, someone called them. Nothing to worry about. Until the shimmer was always there. Better get that checked, I was told. Could be retinal damage. Nothing mysterious about that. You age, things change.

Watching the flicker of fireflies in the daytime made me happy. The delicate bending of leaves as an unseen being stepped upon them, a clear path marked through the garden. No one else seemed to notice. It was like I alone was being granted access to the realms we cannot see.

Then the hum started. Like the low pitch of a fan coming out of balance. Searching for answers led to the usual. Lots of people have tinnitus. It's nothing serious. The medical opinion seemed valid. After all, doctors are trained to know these things. The frequency modulations became a harmony to the birdsong and daily chatter that surrounded me. I found myself humming along, singing a song without words, filling in segments that seemed to be missing. A new language of sound.

Soon the hum became a buzz. When no flying insects appeared, I took it as yet another manifestation of my progressive loss of sanity. Still not treatable. And then the words started. They were low at first, tucked beneath the other sounds, the pitch of the fan modulating with the intensity of the message I knew I was supposed to hear. And couldn't.

More tests. More machines. More experts. And in the end, nothing changed. Take your pills, the experts said. And the herbs. Don't forget your water. Oh, and yoga. That will make it all better.

Except it didn't.

It wasn't the big things that caught my attention, made me question their diagnosis. You would think I would notice things like meadows of tall green grass with wildflowers magickally growing behind my barn. Nope. Or the murder of crows nesting in the pines beyond the meadow. Nope. Not even the brilliantly coloured sky—that matched the one I painted in my imagination—grabbed my brain and shook it.

I was so wrapped up in the buzzing and humming and shimmering that I overlooked all the obvious signs. The small signs that things were askew finally sunk in. I'm talking about the cat who walked up to my front door and knocked. Unusual enough. And then the cat's eyes sparkled like diamonds in the daylight. A blink and he was gone. Then came the lizard in my car that changed colour with the music on the radio. Things that made me go “Huh. That was strange. I think I have seen that before.”

You might think me to be of slightly less than average intelligence that it took months to put the clues together. Truth is, brain power has nothing to do with knowledge and how to use it. Between the external alterations and the internal overload of sensory information, I simply tuned everything out to simply get through each day. Feeling powerless, out of control, I wallowed in my own pool of self-pity. The noises grew in intensity, the light show impeding my waking hours. Sleep became my refuge. And in sleep, I entered the realm of infinite possibility.

Childlike wonder grew to delight as I encountered the unseeable, animals more intense than the Cheshire Cat, more dynamic than the lizard. Things that could not be real, yet were. I began recording the snippets of memory recalled in the early hours of the morning. Deep within my brain, a pattern emerged, not yet a full thought, but more than a think. What if I dreamt about purple pandas, I wondered one night. I discovered it's not that easy to think about purple pandas, even if you mean to. I somehow managed to conjure up pink poodles though.

The parade of pastel-painted pooches brought a smile to my tired face as I watched their owners prance along the sidewalk. They mimicked my dream perfectly. Amusement at the premise of modifying my neighbours led to silly pranks and harmless hairdos. The world outside my window became a living cartoon series, each day more comical than the last. Occasionally, a darker world would emerge to scare me. They were often the result of drug-induced nightmares and parsed thoughts creating incoherent images and discordant reality. A quick nap would put things to rights.

A short fourteen hours ago, I could still pretend life was flowing along normally. Restricted to staring at the immobile ceiling fan of my wardroom, I lay there wishing I didn't know now what I didn't know yesterday. Blissfully unaware that every little thing I thought of affected the fabric of my existence. All of the experts convinced me it was imaginary. That the crazy, mixed-up creations I was describing were all figments of an overactive brain. My own internal chemistry was responsible for the images that bordered on hallucinations. New drugs should take care of that. And a short stay in their facility for monitoring. In truth, I was happy not knowing that my choices, MY decisions in the dream realm made actual changes in the real world.

And then today happened.

With a loaded shotgun in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other, I stood looking out over the wasteland that used to be my town, on the lookout for zombies. All because I just couldn't think of fluffy bunnies last night.