Dreamstuff

by Joannie Milligan

She left work at precisely 3 PM. She took a turn down the street and went home to change her clothes. At 3:15 PM she was entering the gym and spent the following hour huffing under weights and rubber bands. At 4:15 she had an uneventful lunch with a friend who chattered endlessly until she was tempted to hit him. She passed by the library at 5:30 and took a book about seafaring and olden days voyages, filled with colorful descriptions and outmost escapism. At 6 PM she was home. She collapsed on the couch, semi-passed out, and drifted away.

She was patting a big orange tom without a head that chirped constantly in demand of attention when it occurred to her that she was dreaming. Then she stood up, in spite of the cat's protests, and she summoned him.

He appeared, white as a ghost and very much staring.

"This is highly unusual," he said.

She shrugged. "It's my lucid dream. I get to call the shots."

"Nevertheless, I am not one to be summoned by the likes of you," he pointed out. "I am the lord of this realm, and - "

"Aw, you're not even the real Dream. You're just a figment of my imagination," she said carelessly, surveying the smooth featureless background of her strange hallucinations. Purple-blue, faint mists began to gather, and she toyed with them in her mind like clay as they took shapes of mountains and dragons and faraway lands just like that.

"I am not following you," Dream said calmly by her side.

She turned back to him and the lands fluttered to smoke and ash. "You're not real. You're a fairy tale, a comic book character, a guy I read fics about. I got you here because I'm dreaming. It's like in the holodeck."

"The holodeck..." he gave a little nod. She was wondering if he understood the meaning of the word. Dream cats shoved themselves between her feet, their tails towering. Mice formed unconsciously in the blue ashes on the floor-of-rings-and-roses. She took hidden pleasure in the substance of this new reality, letting it shape itself, as if independently, out of her mind. Finally, Dream spoke.

"If I am imaginary, as you say," he replied, not a hint of disbelief - or trust - in his strange, ivory voice, "then so is this dreamscape, so are the cats..." remotely he picked one up, scratching the empty space where the head was supposed to go. The car purred contentedly. "All a dream..."

"Terrible, isn't it?" She whispered.

He eyed her. "Terrible?"

"Well, this world I'm living in..." she turned around herself, as if wanting to turn away but undecided. She looked around and spread out her arms. Out of nowhere a globe formed in the silly putty of dreamstuff. It revolved slowly, pacified. "We never get any action."

Dream looked at the world for a moment, more considering than puzzled. The revolving quickened somewhat, and the dreamscape abruptly darkened in a whimsical effect, leaving his eyes to sparkle. He stuck out like a pigeon in a coal mine, and she felt a memory of a different, darker man rise in her like a fever.

He didn't say a word.

She frowned. Stars appeared in the dreamscape darkness, then with a whoosh a starship passed above their heads. Phasers flashed, then blasts of cosmic power, in the stars there appeared a face. She wasn't imagining, she thought, she was shaping.

"I know a world where men and women travel this cosmos at the speed of light, and one where gates open to the farthest reaches of the galaxy," she said, her voice boomed and echoed gracefully in an endless darkness. Whispers could be heard from afar, and a star went nova as Dream shielded his face. "I know a reality quite close to ours, where good fights evil and always wins, where there's great power to some, and great responsibility to fewer. And the few triumph over the many. I know worlds where there's no shame in doing what's right." Epic struggles in a blink of an eye. She saw colorful flashes and gave them faces and names. She shaped men and women and lives, all without thought, all without blinking. They were there all along.

"I know places, Dream King," she concluded. "And none of them is here."

Dream seemed puzzled. "But all we have seen now..."

"Isn't real, damnit!! It never was!!" she broke in tears, stumping a leg against the nonexistent surface. Blink, and a blank whiteness enveloped them again. "All dreams and shadows and stories and escapism. I can't take it anymore!" A sob, and then she began to cry rivers on the metaphorical nowhere. "I can't take those dreams..."

He looked at her, struggling to comprehend, then frowned.

"Did you summon me to see you crying?" he asked severely.

She sniffled and looked up, pulling a bit of space to wipe her nose. "I thought you could help..."

"Being a figment of your imagination?"

A shrug. "It's the best I have... no one else understands..."

"And what was it that you expected me to do?"

She thought about that a moment.

"I was hoping you could take me perhaps back with you," she said, her voice growing quiet as a beautiful, proud castle formed in the clay of dreams. "I thought you could get me out of this world for good. It was stupid. There is no "Dreaming", there's me and real life."

"You do not sound as if there is only 'real life'," he stated patiently, studying the shining city that was taking shape in a miniature gilded cage, with all its busy traffic rushing about, unaware.

"There's the dreams. They're the problem."

"You don't want the dreams?"

She stopped.

"I don't know," she whispered, looking down.

Her gaze shifted. Castle, city. Dreamstuff, cage. "I don't have anything to do with then. All they're good for it reminding me how cold everything is. How hard and real. They're just hurting me. I don't want to dream that I can fly and that I won't die. I'll end up crashing. It hurts."

"Fire hurts," he said evenly as fire burned around them. "However, it can also keep you warm."

"Hmpf," she looked away from him, crossing her arms. "Fire..."

Glowing embers coated the floor now. She bent to pick one up.

"I thought it was supposed to toast me," she whispered, almost to herself. "It won't because it's a dream. I can't expect you to understand if I don't. You're a part of my imagination, you know. When I'll wake up, you won't even exist anymore."

"Really?" He asked, and threw the dreamscape into utter chaos.

She sat, staring, as flowers in ten billion colors leaped from the whiteness, three mechanical birds went ka-boom, a fish got its doctorate and several rocks found the employment of razor screwdrivers fascinating indeed. She blinked several times, struggling to put order in her rebellious thoughts.

"I'm not sure," she said finally. The rocks all moaned in disappointment, and she shot them a death glare.

"You're not sure?"

"Yeah, I mean..." Getting up, she looked around her. The dreamscape seemed very real suddenly. "You'll still be in my head, for sure, and in at least two graphic novels, and who knows how many fics. Not like you can ever be completely gone. You know, 'so long as men can breath or eyes can see'..." She gave a little shake to her head. The cats reappeared, blinking into existence just as everything else blinked out of it. A single flower remained in an annoyingly symbolic fashion. "I never thought about that."

"No," he said with a smile. "You never did."

He reached out with one thin, pale hand and touched her cheek.

In that moment, her head dropped back and her eyes closed, and something was awakened, stirred from its slumber deep inside of her.

In that moment, she felt the fire burn.

Then the moment passed and he stepped away. She opened huge, moist eyes and looked around her in a gaze entirely new.

"Is that what you call inspiration?" she whispered.

He nodded.

"Be careful," he said. "It can 'toast' you."

Somber but whole silence ensued, interrupted only by the purring of dream cats, as the unreal reality around them began to melt to a colorful true place. She grabbed his arm just as he began to walk away into nowhere.

"In the apartment next to me," she said quietly, "lives a happy automate. He never once pondered the emptiness of this world. He's content with watching football and drinking beer along with his friends. He doesn't need his mind, in fact, he'd be better off without it. And yet he's happy, happy in a way I don't think I could ever be..."

He looked at her with those star-eyes of his, for a moment, as if expecting her to answer her words. There was fire in those star-eyes, echoed somewhere in her... her fire, all of it.

"We can not change who we are," he said.

She breathed in sharply, a painful breath.

"No," she smiled sadly. "No, we can't."

She woke up with a start, looking at the ceiling like she never saw its utter whiteness before, and her strange, powerful dream still vivid in her memory. It was etched there forever, she knew. She felt transformed.

There was nothing different about her world, and she could bring herself to acknowledge that perhaps, there would never be. But there was something different about her, that burning, searing fire that could hurt and scorch, but it could also be a shaping, fusing fire, a fire to light all the dark places and burn inside souls as well as on paper, on the lips and in the mind. And twenty years later she could say for certain that this was the moment she first felt like a writer.

--End--

back to Joan Milligan's stories | Miscellaneous archive | comicfic.net