The Dream Weaver

Flinn soared across a purple sky, his long coat snapping against the head wind and his dark hair alive amid the current. An intense light rained down from a tapestry of white stars, back lighting him in an ethereal glow. His mastery of the night realm bled from his powerful form in flight. If anyone could see him, he would look bloody awesome. Unfortunately, as usual, everyone else in the world of dreams was asleep. He sighed at the wasted effort he always put into his dramatic arrival, and slowed to hover over the town of Lunar Bay, ready to make a start on his night of story forging.

Over the years, he had transformed the town below from a mirror of its daylight grey-brick and cement, into something more fitting for the realm of dreams. There were Gothic towers emerging from castles, chateaus with abundant walled gardens, mansions wrapped in vine covered balconies and beautifully paved streets to knit them all together. Fountains erupted from every square and ornate iron street lamps ran down each road. It was a thing of beauty and imagination, lit by the soft glow of a mauve sky that made everything fall gentle on the eyes. But his task for the night was not one of architecture. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes and stretched his hands wide from where he floated above the town. In each of the homes he had glamorised, slept a resident whose unconscious thoughts called out to him. He seized on one, finding a strength in its loud need. A young girl. She had spent her day studying, exams were imminent and she was filled with anxiety. He knew just what to do. He took those memories, twisted them in his hands like strings and wove them into something new. He sent them shooting back as a story of hope rather than fear. The sweet child would spend the rest of the night as her future self, successful and brilliant as a graduate girl boss, managing a towering office that supplied paper shredders to schools. Another questing thought found him immediately, and he turned to accept it into his open arms. A older man. He slept fitfully, assaulted with worry over his failing car engine. Flinn spun those thoughts around his fingers, braiding them into strong cords and threw them back. He would spend the hours of darkness tearing through the streets in a monster truck, crushing old cars under his tyres. Only to look back and see them rebuilding from shattered parts into brand new, shining examples of what they used to be. Everything could be fixed. The process could even be satisfying. They kept coming. The people of Lunar Bay reached out with their most honest thoughts, catapulted through sleep into Flinn’s welcoming grasp. He found inspiration in each, transforming their scattered ideas into a story worth telling. His night bound duty was one of tale spinning, message sending and hope lighting. He was a dream weaver.

Flinn slammed a violent hand down on his evil alarm clock.

“I hate you” he mumbled from the pillow that embraced his head with an insistence he remain just where he was. When he awoke again to the screaming bitch that was his second alarm, he hit it harder, told it right where it could go stick its morning and dragged himself upright. Despite his body having rested, his mind had spent the entire night threading dreams for his fellow townsfolk. He regretted not stopping earlier to get some true sleep. Despite his night-time adventures in a world above the physical, he still had to eat, which meant he had to work. So, he got dressed, grabbed some toast and shuffled to his car in the rising light of day.

After hours upon hours of processing data and producing graphs that Deborah could understand, Flinn felt like a shell of the man he had been upon waking. The endless tap tapping of pointless keys into worthless charts sucked the life out of him through his fingertips. Did anyone really care that sixty percent of children preferred cartoons to live action shows? Or that only eleven percent of adults wanted their childhood movies remade? It was, he admitted, slightly interesting that twenty percent of men wished they could have one robot arm, and that ninety-nine percent of their partners would allow the surgery, as long as there was a vibration function included. He had originally chosen the statistician job, as it felt like a form of story-telling. A narrative on the lives of the masses. It paid the bills better than any creative endeavour ever could. But it had soon become stale. Dry numbers could never replace the intricacies of the people that they examined. There was far more to being than a statistic could ever relay. So he stumbled through every day, yearning only for the night, where he could express his true skills in a craft that actually meant something to the people who felt its touch.

Flinn noticed through the high rise windows that the sun was tracking across the later part of the sky. He was almost there, almost clear. One hour to go, according the clock that ruled this part of his life. Then Deborah called him into her office.

“I wanted to talk to you about your performance,” she said, while Flinn groaned as obnoxiously as he could. Silently. In his thoughts…at least he hoped he hadn’t done it out loud, “You come in late, you look like you’ve barely slept, your work is always the bare minimum. Is this something I need to be concerned about? What do you do all night?”

“Nothing nefarious, Deborah,” He said, “I…like to create stories. Sometimes I lose track of time. That’s all. I’ll be more mindful of it.”

He would pretend to try, a little more convincingly, is what Flinn meant. He had zero intention of changing anything about his routine outside of work. He had seen Deborah’s sleeping thoughts, they were all about her precious office. She really, truly loved what she did. Which would have been admirable, if what she did had not been statistical analysis. She thought of numbers, surveys and the marketing of both even while she slept. Flinn had tried once, to give those percentages muscle bound bodies and charming smiles. Turn them into something a woman might find more interesting than spreadsheets. He had even dipped them in chocolate. But Deborah, it seemed, had a very strong sense of self. A lucid, exacting mind that had some how managed to override Flinn’s dream thatching. She dissolved his perfect specimens back into their numerical forms and had smiled at the result. He had never tried to tell her a story again. She could revel in her tedium.

With the return commute done, and evening obligations complete, the sun finally set on the never ending day. Flinn watched it flash its last light from his bedroom window, as it dipped below the horizon and allowed the time of creation to reign. He laid back his head on a welcoming pillow, that had definitely missed him, and closed his eyes.

Superhero landing onto the roof of the tallest tower in the alternate Lunar Bay, Flinn rose into a pose that silhouetted him against the starry sky. A ripple surged outward through the purple canvas in response to his arrival. Damn it if he didn’t wish just one person could see how cool he looked.

A few hours later, he was halfway through crafting a character driven love story between Mrs Edgerton, the local secondary school teacher, and an imaginary version of one of her students single fathers, when a piercing scream made him fumble the last turn of her thought cords. They knotted in the wrong place and the subsequent episode of their invented relationship saw him take up an interest in painting miniatures. Without the time to start again, Flinn shrugged and sent the dream singing into the night, hoping the mans new hobby would not ruin the fantasy. He turned and looked down over the opposite edge of the tower, hoping to find the source of the shout. It was a sound that absolutely did not belong in his dreamscape. He spotted it immediately, red threads of clotted yarn flailing from the house of the young girl that he had reassured about her future the night before. It was a sight he had banished from Lunar Bay a long time ago. A threat he had squashed into extinction. It was…a nightmare.

Horror stories were one thing, they usually had a turn to the light by their end. Plenty of people enjoyed delving into the darkness, knowing they would emerge from the other side renewed. But tales that broke people? Ones that abolished all hope and told of nothing but a dark future, where every aspect of their ongoing life would be ruled by despair, offering no escape? Those were nightmares. Flinn steeled himself, then opened his hands wide and pulled the vile strings of filth through the air and into his grip. He held them tight, their greasy lengths trying desperately to slip free while he ran them through his hands, shedding the coating from the thoughts of the tormented girl. He caught images of what she had been experiencing, as the slime coated his hands. She failed her exams. Her parents kicked her out. She lived on the street, begging for coin, unable to find work. She failed to claw her way into any kind of life. She was cold, afraid and defeated. Flinn ripped those imaginations from her night-tale and wove them back into a story of comfort earned through hardship. He put her on a cosy couch after a hard day of testing. She felt confident in her performance, relieved it was over and hopeful for the future. He reset her dream.

Disgusted with the grime that now covered his hands and arms, Flinn created a sluice gate in the side of the tower, opened it with an oversized lever and leapt from the edge, falling to the ground amongst the torrent of water. He stepped out, clean as a whistle and shook himself like a dog to become immediately dry. He was about to congratulate himself on a job well done when he heard a second roar of terror pierce the air. Crimson snakes of cord that pulsed with venom erupted from a nearby castle, blasting stone from its walls. Flinn narrowed his eyes and set to work. The old man with car trouble was telling himself a narrative of disaster. His car was shedding pieces as he was driving down a fast highway, unable to brake but incapable of holding the vehicle together. He knew he should have just paid the money, gotten it fixed. So what if he had to go without food for a few days to recoup the cost? It was better than dying in a fireball in the fast lane. Flinn’s hands scraped those thoughts clean. He had almost finished restoring some positivity and capability to the man’s self-belief, when another home exploded with rotten tentacles.

It was too much. It wasn’t right. Something was going wrong in the dream realm. The only thing he could reason is that someone was causing it. There was an invader in his space. But Flinn was struggling to keep the pace up, he could not afford to be distracted searching for someone that might not exist. It took focus and energy for him to wrangle the dreams of others. Usually it came easily, when he could go at his own pace, jump on inspiration and creativity when it struck him and take time to search it out when it didn’t. But this was a race, a sprint to fix what was broken and it was draining him. Halfway through repairing the third persons narrative, he heard a cackling laugh from the next rooftop. He finished up a rushed change to a mothers fear soaked imaginings of sickness finding her baby. He left her with the soft steady of breath of her child filling her ears and the strong hand of her husband against her back, a dream of peaceful rest, and turned to investigate the source of the nights torment.

It was fucking Deborah.

“I’ve been dreaming of you doing this for awhile now,” She cackled, “I thought it was just a nonsense fairy tale. You know, silly dreams coming out of my worry over your commitment at work. But what you said today got me thinking, kind of lined up. Which was crazy, until I fell asleep tonight and woke up here!”

“What are you doing here!? You can’t be a weaver! It’s not possible! You have to be born with it!” Flinn snapped.

“Well apparently not, I’ve never done this before tonight. But after watching you for a bit, it looked kind of interesting, so I thought I’d give it a go. I’ve been having a great time!”

“You’ve been seeding nightmares, Deborah! How is that fun!?”

She pushed her large glasses up her nose and sighed. She raised her eyebrows, gesturing around at the world Flinn had built from the foundations of Lunar Bay.

“This is all a little childish, don’t you think?” She said, shaking her head, “I had thought that things at the office had gotten a little out of hand. There were far too many jokes, casual chats, larking about, that kind of thing. I heard Tina and Jeff might even be dating! A workplace romance? How unprofessional!” Deborah scowled.

Flinn had taken great pride in nudging the two of them along to that end. He had done his finest work in offering up glimpses of all the futures they could have together while they slept. His shoulders bunched in annoyance that she would suggest it was wrong. But she didn’t notice, and continued her tirade.

“Then there was you! Always exhausted. Always dismissive of everything we tried to do. Everything I tried to build! But now it all makes sense, you’ve been spreading your little stories, planting all your fantasies and breeding this…whimsy!”

“So you think the answer is to replace it with fear!?” Flinn roared.

Deborah just laughed at his anger, “No, dear. Reality. That girl, she needs to pass her exams, its the only way she will get ahead in life. No use sugar coating it. That man, he needs his car, relies on it. He should get the thing fixed, its not hard! This one, shes right to be afraid. Sickness can take a child, she should be vigilant. Where is the harm in enforcing a little diligence? A little focus? You could benefit from watching the details of your own life a little more closely, Flinn. Rather than spending all your free hours on this make believe and illusion!”

“Details are for the day, Deborah. Can’t you see that? I am not trying to take away from the reality of these peoples lives, I am attempting to enrich them. Dreams, stories and the night itself are for analogy, emotion and exploration! You cannot sweat the details in your sleep, it is the time to find the messages hidden in your experience. The meaning behind all the hardship. It is the fundamental reason why stories exist and always will. We all need that gentle discovery of ourselves through relatable fiction...”

“PAH!” Deborah scoffed and launched into her counter argument. Luckily, Flinn had never believed he could convince her with words alone. He had known her too long for that. All the while she had been ranting, he had been slowly coiling up threads of her thoughts. Drawn from her sleeping body, she had not noticed a thing, and Flinn was finding some very juicy ideas for a new web of fantasy. He let her talk on, her own voice fuelling itself, until he all at once, slammed his covert dream into her waking mind.

He wasn’t how that was going to go, if he was honest. It could have killed her for all he knew. But fortuitously, it pushed her back into her sleeping body at speed and dropped her deep into his inspired dream. She would find herself as a young child, presenting her extensive mathematics work to her mother. The daily sheets of equations were the matrons own design and failure to complete them with full marks would result in a switch for every missed answer. That was in the reality she remembered, the one Deborah clung to so hard, as if letting go of it would plunge her into chaos and danger. Tonight, she would present her work and be met instead with a warm, encircling hug and praise the likes of which would make the most spoiled child blush. She would be loved for the entirety of the time she slept. The arithmetic would be discarded and she would be flown in her mothers arms like an aeroplane, sat down to play games and puzzles, and bundled into blankets in front of the fire. She would understand, Flinn hoped, that her work was not what earned her love. She was enough, and complete, as she was.

When Flinn slumped at his desk the next day, thirty minutes late, he noticed Deborah was missing from her office. He wondered if he had gone too far, if the story he played for her had caused something unforeseen to happen. That was until he jumped out of his skin at her lawdy cackle coming from the break room. He leaned back on his chair, looking down the corridor into the open door, to see her smiling and talking with Tina and Jeff. She caught his eye, nodded once and went back to wasting the morning away, by simply being.