The Secret Life of a Hidden Dream

Trigger warning: Suicidal ideation, medical coma.

Waking up from a coma, sucks. My eyes felt like they were stuck with tar and coated in sand. My throat felt like I’d swallowed a spoon of gravel, and my muscles were simply gone. Lifting my head was like supporting a bowling ball on a toothpick. Yet worse than all the pain that wracked my body was the disorientation. My vision blurred, the world spun, and my mind tried to make sense of the stark white room that settled into existence, grasping at some kind of recognition of where and who I was. It all stilled for a moment when a familiar voice echoed off the barren walls of the sterile space. It was one I knew but had not heard in a lifetime.

“Oh my god! OH MY GOD! Arien!? He’s awake…SOMEONE HELP ME! MY BROTHER’S AWAKE!”

I could not lift my head to find her, but my little sister’s face bobbed helpfully into my view. If my throat was capable of a gasp, it would have let one rip at the sight of her. Levora was still so…young.

“Arien? Can you hear me? It’s alright…everything’s alright…you were in a car accident. You’ve been in a coma for over a year, but we never gave up hope. You're home now, it all going to be okay. Everything is going to be okay.” She spoke with such joy and conviction, and at such speed that I don’t think she noticed the tears streaming down her cheeks.

The thing was though, nothing was okay. I tried to form the words, but the weakness of my body betrayed me. When the hordes of doctors and nurses burst through the doors and started poking, prodding and hooking me up to machines, there no longer seemed to be any time. So I was never able to explain. I hadn’t been lost. Nor had I been unconscious. I’d gone to bed the night before in my own home, my wife breathing softly beside me and my infant son in his crib in the next room. I’d been living the most wonderful life, in a world of possibilities, for the entirety of the past twenty years. I had been happy. Until I awoke into the broken body of a nineteen-year-old boy.

I remembered the accident of course. How could I forget. My best friend, Riley Wilkinson, had been so confident with his freshly printed drivers permit, but the truck had come out of nowhere and he had not been able to react. His funeral had been one of the hardest days of my life. But I’d moved on, built a life in his honour and explored a world that we had never fathomed existed at such a young age. So it was rather surprising, to say the least, when I was finally propped up in bed and told by my parents of his death, for the second time. They explained that I had been asleep ever since that day, a grand total of nineteen months, and always in the prayers of the town. It didn’t make any sense, they were talking in riddles that defied my own experience, and all I wanted was to see my family. But when I asked for Madeline and little Oscar, they simply looked at me like I was speaking a different language and told me I might be confused for a little while until I completely recovered.

When they finally left me alone that first evening to rest, I stepped from my bed on shaky legs and hobbled over a mirror in the attached bathroom. I stood there for a long time, staring at my younger self. Just like my parents, the greys were gone from my hair and the lines from my face. I was frail from the hospital bed, but I could see the youth in my own eyes.

“What is this…” I mumbled, sounding insane even to myself, “time travel, another dimension, an epic prank or some hallucination? I already lived past this age, so long ago…”

I considered every possible explanation, except the one that I knew was probably true. The one that I dared not admit. The one that would mean my life and my loved ones were forever gone, or had never existed. The idea…that the past twenty years had been an invention of my comatose mind, a complex dream, and that this emptiness was the true reality. I could not accept that. Instead I shuffled back to my bed, laid down and closed my eyes, hoping the next time I awoke, things would be back to normal.

They weren’t. The nightmare continued for days. The doctors checks, my concerned family encouraging me to act like my old self and the time warp of a world that I though I’d left behind decades ago. I tried to engage as little as possible and sleep my way back to my real life. I always woke to the same room. The same loss. Day after day. They all knew something was wrong. The doctors would smile and assure me that it looked like I should make a full recovery. My sister would hold my hand and tell me to just give it time. My mother would grin through red tinged eyes, her intuition screaming at her that something was different. My father would tidy what little was in the room and stand with his hands in his pockets, trying to hold his perception of normality together. When each of them asked me what was wrong, I lied. I don’t know why I did. Only that it felt right to keep the secret of my true life, to protect it from them. I would not let them dismantle it with their disbelief.

One lonely evening, I stood with my forehead pressed against the cold glass of my upper storey window. It was a long way down. I had cried myself dry over my inability to do anything to return to my wife and child. Our little house and garden, the car we still owed payments on, the daily grind of a job I didn’t completely hate. I felt powerless and alone. I wondered if I hit the ground hard enough, would I would wake up right this time? Would my eyes open to find my dirty clothes strewn on the floor and the curtain rail I’d hung crooked over our bedroom window? Would it be just another work day morning, running late and having to dash out the door to the office? So many times had I done that, kissing my little boy on the forehead, as I grabbed my keys and rushed to my car. How I wished I had just taken the day instead, spent it with them while I could. I wondered how they were doing, if they were still panicking and looking for me, or if they had accepted that I was gone. Perhaps they simply ceased to exist when my eyes opened. The windows were locked. So none of it mattered.

On the day they told me I could go ‘home’, I was afraid. I had still told no one of the life I had left behind and they attributed my grief as simple infirmity and confusion. They expected me to return to my life, start again, from a point that in my mind, I had long ago left behind. How could I just move on, reset my life and forget all I had achieved, all those I had loved? My parents and Levora were strangers, people I’d known once but I had not seen in twenty years. They were not the people I had shared two decades of memories with. I did not want to face the new world that lie beyond the white door. I did not want to leave the room at all, in case my way home lie within it. But I hadn’t the strength to fight them and if I protested, they would want a reason. One I couldn’t tell. They wheeled me down the corridors to the front desk and then the parking lot. Where I automatically reached for my keys and aimed my wheelchair for the drivers seat. My father laughed. He didn’t understand. I’d always driven, every day of my adult life. I was more surprised, when seated in the passenger side and waiting for the ion engines to lift us off the ground, that the vehicle instead pulled forward onto the solid tarmac.

Dinner that night was a surreal experience. I was seated at a table from my childhood. I ate food that was my mothers recipe from when I was a boy, my favourite apparently. Though I’d forgotten. I smiled as genuinely as I could, over and over, thanking them and reassuring them I was happy to be ‘home’. All the while missing the life I so desperately wanted to get back to. It wasn’t until dessert was being served that my father finally dropped the facade.

“I thought once we got you home, once you saw your room and your things, that you would be happier. That you would come back to us, son. Arien, what is wrong? The doctors tell us you are physically fine, hell your body healed six months ago! But you are so distant and just so…different. When you woke up I thought…” he shook his head, defeated, “I don’t know…I thought you’d be as glad to see us as we are to have you back.”

My mother held her fingers to her lips, denying her sobs their freedom. My sister sat looking directly at me, daring me to reply. I just sighed and looked at the table. How could I tell him he was right? That I wasn’t happy to be there. That I didn’t trust them. That I felt like a stranger and dream or real, I wanted to go back to where I felt safe. To where my true family was. To where the food was synthesised to be both delicious and healthy, not the cobbled together organics that were left on my plate uneaten.

“I just need more time, Dad. I’m sorry, I know it must be hard for you all. It's going to take a while for me to adjust, I am not the same nineteen-year-old boy that I was when you last saw me.”

There it was, as close to the truth as I dare let them hear. All of their shoulders sagged in unison. I was breaking their collective spirit, and I knew it. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that these were not my loved ones. That perhaps I was the victim of some insane experiment or abduction. No matter the explanation, I would never give up on Madeline and Oscar, I would never forsake all that we had built. I just had to find a way back.

Days of fake smiles and play acting followed. I went through the motions and made certain to act like I was improving. My life was becoming a lie upon a secret and very difficult to maintain. The days melted into weeks and I could find no way to go back, no way to prove it was anything but a vivid, lucid coma dream. In fact the longer I was away the more it slipped into blurry memories, rather than the present I had been so sure of, and the more the world I found myself in cemented as reality. It was unbearable.

So it was that I found myself behind the wheel of my father's car on a Friday at five o'clock. Parked at the side of the road, trying to muster the courage to accelerate to the intersection ahead where the busy freeway was full of commuters passing at speed. If I could just recreate the same conditions…if I could somehow not die but get back to that hospital bed. Then maybe, maybe I could go home. But I was a coward. I didn’t want to hurt anybody, or myself. It’s just that I would have done anything to be able to walk in the door of my house and tell my wife and child that I was back and never leaving again. So, I sat still, knuckles white on the wheel, trapped between living with this secret forever, in an alien world and always in a lonely pain, or risking it all for chance to return.

As I contemplated my choice, I could hear Oscar’ voice. He called for his mother, and they played and laughed, as they so often would. When the voices didn’t stop, I cocked my head in realisation. Those sounds were real. I looked to my right through the passenger window and found a play park. There, climbing the bars…was my son. Standing beneath him, arms raised, was…Madeline? I would recognise her anywhere, even with her back to me and in the strange nurses uniform she was wearing. I had never known her in that profession...as she turned, I caught her smile. One that I could never mistake, for I had seen it every day of our lives together. My shock astounded me. Why was I so surprised to see them? Deep down had I always known it had been a dream? An incredible one, that spanned decades of a life, but a lucid dream, nonetheless. I wasn’t sure if I could accept that. Yet somehow, despite it all, there they were, right in front of me, on this side of existence. Had my sleeping body heard their voices and constructed a life with them at its core? I sat very still, watching them and deliberating. What if I was right, and this was some elaborate trick? Which reality was real, and which was the dream? I felt like I knew. That I had always known, but refused to accept the loss of my perfect world. Otherwise, why would I have held my tongue for so long? I decided, after what felt like an eternity, that I no longer cared. They were right there. So, I opened the door, stepped outside and walked over to introduce myself to the real versions of the family I had likely imagined in my sleep. Those were the first steps I took, to finally begin existing in the reality I was stuck with and to rebuild the life I had supposedly dreamed.