Dreams End

“I had the most incredible dream. It was one of those dreams, or whatever you wish to call it, that is so real, you find yourself questioning the genuineness of the dream itself. That ever happen to you?”

He just sat there. Didn’t say a word. Just stared at the floor as if he were expecting it to disappear, or move or something. I began to become worried, as that was not like him at all. He usually is conversive, even at times when you wish he’d just shut up and be quiet. I wasn't really seeking conversation, I was seeking an outlet, someone to confess my fears to. 

Then he says, “You remember the lyric, “You can be in my dreams, if I can be in yours,” or something to that effect. Well, I did remember, not from where or when, but that the idea is intriguing.

He continued to sit in this comatose state as I told him about the dream, or premonition, vision, whatever it was. We were on the hill, small mountain, looking down at what once was our valley, our home. The valley now filled with water. A large lake, where our house once was. 

All around us was this ominous reddish smoke, and the adjoining hills were a glowing orange. We seemed to be the only two people left. And then this voice comes from the blackening skies. I couldn’t understand the words at first, as the thunder and tumultuous winds seemed to be not only around us, but in us. 

Then he says, eyes fixed on the floor as if in a trance, “You were warned!” The voice not his.

“Yes,” I tell him. I heard it too. Then he looks from the floor to the window. I follow his gaze and in the distance the orange glow and billowing bruised clouds lift, and there is nothing. I mean literally nothing of what was just there. There are no homes, no streets, no cars, no people, nothing. Only sand and rocks. Even the cactus are shriveled and brown, their thorns now impotent swords. 

“What is going on?” he says, like I would know. He gets up from the floor and walks to the window. He stands, looking at the intense brilliance, and as I watch the glass panes begin to wrinkle, melt. I can feel the pulsating heat and the rising stream of air which seems to be singing; sounds like a hymn. “Hell, is no longer an illusion,” and other words I couldn’t make sense of. It was as if the rising waves were credits at the end of a film. Line after line of words, images, sounds, all a recital of mistakes. Mistakes I assumed to reassure me this was real, it was actually occurring, even though I believed it to be a dream.  "Waste, carbon, chemicals, consumption...trailing off to nothing.

“Did you see this?” he says, his finger pushing through the glass as if it was not there. I look out the window and in the midst of nothingness, there is a billboard. The first thing I noticed was that it didn’t cast a shadow. A dead cactus beside it, its outstretched arms casting its replica, appreciated only by a serpent coiled beneath it. But the billboard itself, cast no shadow. 

The words on the sign were difficult to read, as the waves of heat distorted its message. And then a wind flowed from the mountains pushing a wall of tumbleweed ahead of it. The air cleared. The words, meaningless, but profound being that they were in the middle of nowhere, and seemingly meant for no one in particular.

“What do you suppose it means?” he mumbles, content to stare at a lifelessness I had never felt before, or believed possible. The air felt as dead as the objects it embraced. 

I began to feel I was in a one-man play, but with two people. He could see what I saw, apparently hear what I heard. It was as if we were one and the same, but separate.

I had no idea what it all meant.  I was afraid to contemplate a meaning, as the reality was as overpowering experience as I had encountered. I stood beside him and placed my hand on his shoulder. He smiled. I could feel his essence beating as though only his heart remained, his spirit hovering above us.

I looked up into the lavender sky and could see a face. It wasn’t clear, more a fusion of an imagination and reality. It resembled pictures I’d seen of the blue-eyed Christ. Its long vine like hair flowing over a robe made of premonitions, visions, doubts, and fear. A collage of fear mixing and rolling with the bubbling clouds.

The he says, “Did you hear that.....what did you hear?” 

“Inquisitiveness,” I replied. The words jumping from me of their own accord. I had no idea what they meant, what they were referring to.

“Yes! But about what?”

I looked once again to the sign. The words had changed. They had been replaced by a picture of an apple. A glowing red apple, stem intact, one green leaf blushing shame. And the word, “CHANGE,” scratched into its skin. I thought at once of the story of the tablets on the mountain, the burning bush, the “way.”

The voice, once again coming from the billowing sky, “It is never too late to make amends: until it is.”

“What does that mean?” he whispers to me.

I was receiving something, a message, a feeling, but couldn’t understand. I looked to the sign once again and a large bite had been taken from the apple. I began to understand. Then, he says, continuing to stare into nothingness at a new arrival, a flower. And then another and another, until the parched sand had become a carpet of color. “Sins," he whispers.

I could feel the word enter me like a worm, burrowing into my very being, causing a squeamishness I had experienced once before when I had a premonition and didn’t act upon it.

The voice again, sounding like a voice I associated with the advertisement from Smoky the Bear. “Only you can prevent…and then the omission. Only I can prevent……… what?

We stood holding hands, looking out the window at the houses and streets below. The sky was its normal pale blue, smoke billowed from the stacks in the distance, steam from the nuclear plant copulated with darkening clouds, the lake in the distance reflecting a dying sky.

And then the words, his words, his voice, “You want breakfast?”