~ Awake ~

His heart was still racing, pounding with the occasional off-beat rhythm it sometimes did when he was under stress.

Her gentle but firm grasp of his head and shoulders helped tremendously, and he could feel his heart starting to slow and fall back into its normal pattern.

Still, the tears streamed freely down his unshaven cheeks, dripping from his closed eyes onto her silken nightshirt.

“Shhhh,” she murmured softly, adding the very very light rocking motion she had employed with the children when they were younger, “shhhh… it was just a dream, it’s ok…”

He sighed heavily, calming himself now, but didn’t disengage his middle-of-the-night grasp on his wife.

“You can’t imagine…” he started, then halted as the terrors threatened to envelop him again.

“No rush, my heart,” she whispered softly, “no rush… talk when you’re ready, share it when you can.”

They held each other for a long quiet time.  He ventured out with a single sentence after collecting his thoughts.

“We had – you had decided to leave me.”

She was taken aback.  “What?  No never…!”

“It was hell,” he continued now, wanting to purge this thought from his mind, “you left and the children were traumatized.”

“I left you and the kids?  What?”

“No – you left and took the kids.  I was stranded so far from home, alone.  No one would tell me what was going on at home.  And the kids went through their own versions of hell through our court fights and…”  He stopped as his mind and heart recalled the other things he’d experienced and seen what his previously-loving dream-wife had put all of them through.

“…and it was just too much.”  He finished weakly, not wanting to share with her the thought that he’d even imagine her to act in such a way.  What would she think of him then?

“O God, I missed you so much,” he continued more strongly, as this was so true.  He had experienced years’ worth of being away from her in the span of less than a few hours’ – or perhaps minutes‘ – sleep.  Dreams have a funny way of altering one’s sense of time and place…

As she reassured him, his mind and thoughts swirled back into the darkest places in his dream, as one would use one’s tongue to poke the spot where a recently pulled tooth had been.  Like a missing-tooth gap, it hurt, but there was more to uncover, he felt.

The loneliness, he recalled.  The dark dark moments of self-doubt.  Certainly he couldn’t have just come up with that on his own.  Maybe a recent movie or story had impacted him more than he thought it had?

Then came the sweetly bitter after-taste of whisky and the dangerous memories of  standing just a little too close to the train as it rushed its way into the station.  Dark and murderous ice fell on his heart again, just like it did back when…

“No no no no nonono…!”  He shouted, and this was out loud, as he pushed back hard.

And with that, he wasn’t in his bed any more.

~ Awake ~

His wife wasn’t there.  He wasn’t married; he was something else.

He fought to get an understanding of where he was, of what he was experiencing, of who he was.

“Back out” came the cold, tinny voice somewhere in the left side of his skull.

“Wha?” came his confused, spinning reply.

Things became clearer now that he’d time to feel his real body now, stretch his hands out and slowly shake his head.  The wires connected to the backs of his arms, his hands, and on his skull tugged a warning as he moved about.

…”Hey, no, listen….”

He couldn’t believe he’d been so careless.  That was just too close.

Now his head cleared nearly fully, but the tears he’d shared with his dream-self still clung wetly to his cheeks, dampening th sides of his face.  Some had worked their way into the corner of his mouth and he tasted the saltiness, like the taste of the sea when he’d taken the plunge months ago for the first time.

The experiment was thrilling and heart-wrenching at the same time.  To experience another’s life was almost too much to bear.  But like eating potato chips,one can’t consume just one.  How many times had he immersed himself, he wondered.  And wondered what these experiences were doing to his sanity.

“Back out” came the cold, tinny voice again.  His head started throbbing.

Confused for a moment, he gave this warning some further thought and examined his situation.

Ah. Ok.

He was still in there, in the experience.  Just a tiny bit, but still there, nonetheless.

His heart was still in there and was aching from the pain his dream-self was enduring.

Like a fisherman working a stuck lure from a tree, he carefully mentally tugged, felt something give way, then pulled sharply, to fully dislodge himself from that place.

He could feel his consciousness retreating, gaining speed, coming back fully to him now.  He was awakening.

But something changed, and the feeling of free-fall enveloped him as his mind retreated too far, and shot past him.

“Gaaa” was all he could say.  The sobs from his heart shook him as he opened the eyes of his mind yet again.

Again his heart started pounding – and the now-familiar feeling of confusion racked his mind.

“No no no nonononooooo….”

~ Awake ~

It was dark and quiet, save for the fan he had turned on before going to sleep.  The familiar whirring of the blades helped him sleep, and the slowly-oscillating fan also kept the mosquitoes off him every night.

“Ah what a dream,” he murmured, “I actually dreamt I was in a dream.  Haha, so weird.”

He rolled over to see if his wife was still sleeping.  If not, he could share his dream with her before it ran off, forgotten in the night – which happened often.  She was used to his nocturnal story-telling by now, so he reached out.

…and was a little shocked to feel the flatness of the sheets next to him.

It wasn’t just the flatness of the sheets that shocked him, as she often awoke in the middle of the night to visit the toilet.  Usually this is what would wake him in the middle of a dream like this.

The bit that shocked him was the fact that the side of the bed was cold.

He felt upwards, to check the pillow.

There was no pillow.

Then it hit him.

She wasn’t there.

She hadn’t been there for years.

As a matter of fact, this wasn’t even the bed they had shared o so many years and nights ago.

The sickly feeling of loss came down like a hammer.  Again.

It was him in the dream-within-a-dream he had experienced.  With one major exception.

All those things he couldn’t believe had happened, had indeed happened.  There was no wife of many years to comfort him in this place.  The woman who had replaced her, but occupied her too-familiar body had indeed done those things his dream-self had dreamt, said those awfully painful things, and was sleeping somewhere far away, or perhaps out even now with those new friends she had taken on to replace him.

 

 

 

The fan whirred on nonetheless, even as his blood turned to ice in the hard, distant bed of his.

 

The morning took a long time to arrive that night.

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