I tried to dream myself awake
The alarm’s robotic birdsong laser-beamed through his brain, lighting up every memory attached to the sound.
It was Thursday, and he had requested Friday off. His job was fifteen minutes away in what had once been a grocery store, its blue sheet metal roof a remnant of the age before Wal-Mart. He worked on the phones in the back floor, an area of cubicles where he and twenty-something other people spent eight to ten hours a day making calls to clients, providers, agents, and anyone else connected to the vague field of “healthcare solutions.” He had been there for four years and in this apartment for three. His car had three oil leaks and he had two hundred dollars in his savings.
Other things, his rank on a shooter, the lack of eggs or milk in his fridge, the ignored text messages from the girl he had been seeing and why he was ignoring them, lit up in his memory, like his life was arranged under rows of warehouse lights coming on in sequence.
Stuck in the middle of it all, like a jeweled crown wedged in with the groceries, was the memory of last night's dreams. The shared dreamworld, or whatever it was. The gas station. The other half-remembered characters; The guy with a spaceship, the pale girl in all black, and the strange trip through someone else’s memories. That other apartment, like an alternate flavor of this one, with another office job right down the highway, similar in feel to his current job, just with different tasks and people.
It felt like a dream, had all the qualities of a dream, but was more fleshed out than any dream he had ever had. He lay there thinking about it with the alarm going off, but couldn’t decide if he was really having a crisis of belief or just looking for an excuse not to get out of bed. The alarm snoozed itself then went off again five minutes later while he was running his mind across the fractured memories of those other worlds, trying to find something that stood out as illogical and unquestionably made only of dreams.
As he got up and got ready, his mind slipped into thoughts of tardies and write-ups. He stopped in front of the door, hand on the knob, remembering dreams of other doors leading to other places, and one final door that lead somewhere he couldn’t recall. The dreams had faded, but when he reached for them, they were whole and vibrant, just below the dark surface of waking. A strange ambiance rose out of them, vibrating the air, the light, his breath. It hummed in his chest and struck adrenaline on his tongue. It was possibility, anticipation, promise. He saw the world through it, changed.
The room floated, and he felt that when he opened the door, there could be anything on the other side, like the apartment was falling through dreams. Everything about it, the pose of the couch, the rhythm of the flickering kitchen light, the sag of the thumb-tacked posters, were only vaguely familiar. It didn’t feel like his life. It felt like something that had dropped in to fill the void where his life should have been, a stand-in while he groped for reality.
The dreams, however, still felt like dreams, no matter their energy, no matter how bad he wanted to believe. Lost in thought, habit took over his movements, and he reached for his keys, sighing at the possibility soon to be butchered by work. A voice, echoed through a dual filter of dream and memory, stopped him.
“Do something drastic.”
Like what?
The first thing that came to mind was work. He took out his phone. It was seven forty-five and he had to be in at eight. He was on a written write-up, and if he called in, that would be ten points and put him on a final. It wasn’t guaranteed termination, but the thought of a meeting, groveling for his job ( things have been tough lately, it won’t happen again) made him sick. He grasped at the fluttering dream fragments for courage.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
“This isn’t my life. This isn’t real.”
A car honked outside and the noise ripped through everything. It was all real. The tone of the horn, the sound of the ac, the sweat on his forehead. There was nothing else beyond it but a dream of joining a team of dimension-hopping weirdos, exactly the kind of delusion his mind would create out of stress.
But, he remembered their voices, their smiles, even their insults and glares, and missed them.
He looked at his phone. Seven fifty-seven. Fuck it. If it came to it, he could probably avoid getting fired. At least this way he could prove to himself it was just a dream, and move on.
He found the attendance line in his contacts.
“This is Gradie Hernandez, in the physician follow-up unit, my manager is Casey Lewis, I work the day shift, eight to five, and I won’t be coming in today due to personal issues.”
He hung up and stood there in the silence. A voice whispered in the back of his mind, his own voice.
“Calling into work isn’t drastic.”
A fear grew out of his delirium. What if it was real? What if Michael walked out of the haze somewhere outside and told him he failed? No retries, no membership, just keep doing whatever it is you’ve been doing for the rest of your life. But what else could he do?
“Do something that makes it impossible to return to your old life.”
He imagined transferring all his money into same-day-expiry stock options, or driving his car into a police cruiser, or walking into work and writing down every credit card number he could pull up.
He could imagine all he wanted, the rest of him wouldn’t cooperate. It was all he could do not to drive to work right now and try to explain the call in as a false alarm.
He checked the time again. Eight o clock. According to the dream, he had to call the mysterious number at nine am on the dot. Then he would find out if he was insane or just stupid. At least he had the day off now. A different kind of excitement jumped up at the thought like a battered dog, pathetic in comparison to that earlier energy.
His stomach growled. Must have been all the stress. He usually had about three cups of coffee for breakfast.
He went out the door and found the same overgrown courtyard and black tarred parking lot he had seen every morning for the last three years. The feeling of floating evaporated, leaving him grounded with hunger and regret. His favorite restaurant was a Vietnamese cafe about fifteen minutes away. Remembering he had a favorite restaurant reminded him that this was his real life, and brought on a panic as he got in his car.
Something shook loose from memory, and he saw two neon eyes glaring at him from the passenger seat, but when he looked over, there was nothing there but the glint of dust in a sunbeam.
He backed out and headed to the street. The apartment looked across a wavering wood fence at the plaster-colored back of a strip mall and Gradie found he knew every business front connected to the peeling doors. Some girl stood around a squat set of steps and gestured with a cigarette while talking into a phone on her shoulder and he remembered seeing her do it a million times.
He stopped at the edge of the lot and waited for a chance to turn. Across the street was a steak house with an L-shaped storm drain on two sides of its parking lot, the creek that gave his apartments their name. He remembered slabs of grey sirloin and the highlighter colored garlic bread. Next to it frowned the dead face of an abandoned node of a southern style cafeteria chain, bankrupt for a decade. Scraps of his childhood flowed out through the slivers of windows behind the boards, and he remembered all the Sundays and chocolate pies. He missed three gaps in the traffic sitting there thinking about it. Someone honked and he rolled over the curb and down the road.
The scenery slid by with a merciless familiarity. Strip malls of renal care facilities and twenty-four-hour urgent cares with slanting parking lots the dim grey color of thirty years. Fast food restaurants in the trademark shapes of other chains that had built them twenty years ago and left them to lease after ten. Hotels that looked over the highway with clean faces free of water stains and ages measured in months. His feeble mantra of “this isn’t real” got fainter with every square of sidewalk. This was the most real place on earth.
When he got to the overpass, the world around him glared through the windows with a realness that couldn't be questioned. The red light bouncing above him was as obvious as the spit in his mouth and the haze at the edge of the sprawl.
So he was crazy.
But he had already called in, so he took the highway onto the loop.
He had accepted his insanity and the inescapability of his life, when the view from the highway stirred something in the back of his mind.
It was like laying in bed all morning trying to remember a dream, then having it sneak up and grab you hours later.