Gabe Santiago had been having a conversation with his father right before The Dream started. Their conversation inside the bedroom had also been part of a dream but not yet The Dream. And so, as Gabe stared at the bedridden old man, he did not recall the fact that his father would pass away just two months after the events of that day.

In real life and in that dream, the two talked about how his father wished for either Gabe or Julien to manage their small, already-failing construction business. At this, Gabe felt a not inconsiderable amount of guilt. He had after all already said yes to the offer of a friend to go back to his old teaching job in the university. There would be no time to juggle both teaching and the family business and, truth be told, he and his father knew he had no interest in the business anyway. He'd already made up his mind to pass the responsibility to his younger brother long before that afternoon.

That moment with his father would be the last time Gabe would ever be able to talk to the old man because in the dream to come, the one that would be shared by everyone, dead men could no longer exist.

His father had a coughing fit and was about to get back to the point he was making. He was going to ask Gabe to move back in when, in the middle of a sentence, he simply stopped talking. Gabe found this odd and asked his father what was wrong this time. The father opened his mouth to say something but no sound came out. Realizing it was useless, he simply looked at his son with sad eyes and then… he began to disappear. To Gabe’s eyes, his father simply became more and more transparent until he could see the wooden headboard behind the man. After ten seconds, he had completely vanished leaving Gabe befuddled and staring at the empty bed.

Right after the sudden disappearance, Gabe's memories of the past three years came back. It felt like the first few seconds of waking up, he thought. But only if you woke up still inside a dream. He wondered if that even made sense. Nevertheless, he was aware now of things he didn’t remember just a while ago. Jaime Santiago, his father, already long dead; the family business, gone; relationship with his brother, Julien, still heavily strained and quite possibly irreparable. He remembered the things he'd done since that summer three years ago, all the memories rushing like air to a vacuum.

So, this visit to his father’s house had just been his mind replaying a memory after all. It hadn’t been the first time he’d had that exact same dream. He had several recurring ones set in this period of his life but this was one of those his subconscious repeated most often. And in fact, this was still part of that same recurring dream not counting the evaporating father part that happened just now. Most likely he was in bed himself in his own home two cities away. He wondered if he would be waking up soon.

He took a look around, as if seeing details about the place he hadn’t noticed earlier. It felt like no dream he’s ever had before. It felt real now. Compared to when his father had still been with him moments ago, this felt really real with the kind of consistency only waking life possessed. He could feel the rush of air passing in and out of his nostrils as he breathed in and out. He felt the weight of his body on his feet. There were sounds from outside-- cars and motorcycles in the distance, birds atop the mango tree in the yard-- he could notice these through the open window. The room had a bit of that musty smell mixed with the lingering scent of rubbing alcohol. And on the bed, there was still that deformed space where his father had been sitting but unencumbered the mattress was already rising. All this sensory input had a consistency that didn't seem to be limited to what his mind could focus on at any given moment.

Still, maybe it was just a really strange dream, though? He knew that for the most part, in dreams, you wouldn't even be able to tell it wasn't the real world. Even with the rare occasions that he'd had lucid dreams, he'd only managed fleeting moments of clarity before the realization of things only being made up was itself forgotten. It's possible all the things he noticed that clued him in were themselves simply parts of the dream itself. The very act of noticing it was all a dream was in itself part of the dream—something his his subconscious mind came up with to serve as plot.

He sat there beside his father's deathbed thinking for a couple of minutes about what was happening. That too, felt strange. The passing of time seemed too real. If he'd stayed put like this for a long enough time in a normal dream without doing anything, he'd either already wake up or something new and strange would happen—the subconscious again introducing a new plot element into the mix to keep him interested. But now, he was simply sitting. And thinking. The thinking felt real. He could think of something, move on to another line of thought before coming back to a previous thought without the usual sluggishness thinking in dreams had. It felt like he could continue this indefinitely.

He felt a warm tear roll down his cheek. He hadn’t realized it but he was on the verge of losing it earlier when his father had still been around. That hadn’t happened in real life. In real life he’d been more composed. The subtle barbs from his old man’s words filed away for later once he got back home. But here, he had been considering telling his father what he really thought of the old man. If it actually came to blows, that’d be fine. Yeah. That’d even be welcome. Damn, what is wrong with me, he thought.

"Dad," he suddenly shouted. "Are you still here?" He suspected it wouldn't work but he might as well try. Nothing. Moments passed and his father didn't magically rematerialize on the bed, or anywhere else in the house. He remained alone.

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What seemed like ten minutes passed and still he hadn't yet woken up. He looked out the window and thought he could hear some neighborhood kids making some noise. He thought about going outside but decided he could always do that later.

A thought popped into his head. He got up from his chair and took a look around his father's bedroom. In real life, this house had already been sold for cheap in order to quickly pay off their hospital debts, then sometime later had been demolished along with three other houses in the block to build a fastfood. He'd been content with Julien getting most of the furniture as Julien had ended up paying a larger portion of the substantial hospital fees. Another thing big brother had been disappointing about.

The room, just like the rest of the house contained little in the way of furniture. Here it was just a bed, a cabinet for his father's clothes, a couple of chairs, a desk and a small 3-tiered bookshelf affixed to the wall. Bingo.

He walked towards the bookshelf and noted the titles. Just as he'd remembered them. Exactly as he'd remembered them and more. He had a good memory but it had never been this good. He found himself surprised by the existence of this or that book--titles he'd never read but he now remembered he must have at least glanced at back then. Book sizes. Book covers. How tattered one is or isn't. All seemingly authentic. Of course, he thought, he was only comparing something from this collection to his memory and he couldn't really say if some part of his mind was now simply giving him false memories of these books.

Jaime Santiago had been a prolific reader and the books in the room were of all types-- most non-fiction but some fictions, classics, were in the mix. There were books on mechanical engineering, books on photography, some on Philippine history, horticulture, painting, even unsolved gruesome crimes-- his father had an eclectic set of interests and he was sure there are some other book stashes in the house.

He took a random book from the middle shelf, an old issue of the Today Electronics Magazine from the 90s about computers and electronics, and opened it somewhere in the middle.

The spread had more detail and verisimilitude than he could have imagined. The left page mostly contained the continuation of a review of a mini component stereo system kit written by a certain James Lidfield. On the top were four images showing various graphs detailing test results on amplitude versus frequency, distortion plus noise versus frequency, etc; all things Gabe knew he had no business knowing about enough to recall vividly years later. On the side of the left page was an old FCC ad about enroling to be a licensed electronic technician. The right page had a continuation of the same article, a pair of schematic diagrams for a car light alarm system and a VCR repair technician certification ad. Huh, he thought.

He quickly flipped through the rest of the magazine and found the rest of the pages equally convincing.

He placed the magazine back in its position in the shelf, changed his mind, flipped through the magazine's contents again and found nothing seemingly inconsistent with the earlier glance at its contents. Not that he really suspected he'd find it inconsistent this time, he thought.

He looked at the titles again. From the bottom set, Gabe picked out a book, a Taschen art book on the complete works of Caravaggio.

All the pages were blank and not even white blank just simply blank-- Gabe frowned, he couldn't even tell what the color of the paper was, his mind simply was not filling in any of the details. Why is this one blank and not the electronics magazine, he wondered. He'd surely be able to fill in at least some of the art book's contents as he had a good enough familiarity with Caravaggio's works. Even knew some details about Caravaggio's life.

The answer, he realized, was because this was a newer book and he'd already left home years prior to the time his father bought it. He'd seen it on the shelf when he visited but had in fact never even held the book. At that, Gabe realized that he also couldn't tell the book's weight. He lifted it up and down with his right hand, then passed it to his left hand and repeated the test. It was hardbound and likely had a thousand pages, at least 800, but this... dream he was having now wouldn't even dare make a guess about the book's weight.

The electronics magazine, though, it was highly likely he'd given it a cursory thumb through in his teens. But not enough to remember all that detail, he realized. But maybe just a glance was already enough to make a lasting mark somewhere in his memory.

He grabbed more books out of the shelves and quickly flipped through these as he continued his experiment. Empty. Complete. Complete. Empty. First few chapters complete, the rest mostly blank. That last one was a local novel he'd tried reading when he was taking care of his father right after the first set of chemo. He hadn't managed to slog through more than its first couple chapters. Level of interest was irrelevant, apparently because the pages that had text were complete, no faded sections or anything. He only needed to see the text once to remember the content.

Curiouser and curiouser, he thought. Another experiment. If he could actually remember the text well enough to populate the pages in the books, shouldn't he also be able to recite the text from memory?

He closed the novel that had only several chapters-- it was a horror story entitled The Wastrel-- and placed it on the desk beneath the shelf.

"So, let's see," he began. "The Wastrel. "Chapter 1." Gabe closed his eyes. Pictured what the text would look like on the page, what it would feel like to read those word. And then he opened his eyes. Nothing came to him.

He picked up the book and took it with him back to his chair. He sighed, opened it and leafed his way to the first chapter and began reading. He managed to read till the end of the printed pages at page 37, and found himself mildly curious this time about its story. Part of him had hoped that as he got to the last page, the book would begin to populate the blank pages with print as if by magic but no, the text really did stop mid-paragraph.

Maybe when he woke up he'd find an ebook of The Wastrel to read the rest of it. But before that, he should make some notes about what he could remember from the chapters he read and see how much of it was really from memory and how much of it was his brain embelishing the text to come up with something more interesting.

He considered the prospect of going out and exploring the old neighborhood but quickly nixed the idea. It was already getting dark outside. Geez. Does this dream also progress in realtime?

With the room also darker, he thought about turning on the fluorescent light when something caught his eye. A hardly noticeable red glow inside The Wastrel.

He opened the book again and found it was one of the pages of the book emitting the light. The first blank page, what would have been page 38. In the middle of a page was an image, a roughly 2-inch symbol drawn in red, luminescent ink that looked like a diamond with elaborate curlicues spiraling through its outer perimeter and around the lines that intersected its vertices. The symbol rotated as the lines that determined its structure shifted and reshifted. It was a 3-dimensional shape and Gabe noted the first truly dreamlike object he'd seen in the dream.

Gabe touched the symbol with his right forefinger and like a blade, the rapidly rotating lines drew drops blood that immediately splashed all over the empty page

At that moment, in The Dream, Gabe immediately lost consciousness, body slumping forward to collapse on the floor.