THE DREAMER
6:29 AM
Death often disguises itself in a dream. The dead is the dreamer.
I had never dreamt of anything in my memory. Or at least, since the last time I dreamt when I was seven. It was not exactly a dream, a nightmare I don’t really remember now.
It is not as if I forget what my dreams are like, I simply don’t have them. My nights are empty, so empty that I can’t fall asleep in ages because I can’t dream.
When I finally dreamt when I turned twenty, I dreamt of heaven. It was the most beautiful but foreign thing that ever happened in my life. But I guess it should not be considered my life anymore, my previous life, maybe. The life outside the dream. Or perhaps it is the present, or the in-between, the interval.
I didn’t know I was dreaming.
I felt every sensation. Too much. I was feeling every dust in the breeze, every suffocating air in the stillness of the blue water-not a normal ocean blue, but a creepily clear blue-. It’s real, I thought it’s real. But it’s too good to be real.
I was slipping away, feeling as if life was leaving me, bit by bit, blood drip by drip, bone by bone.
Then I was swimming inside the blue, breathing and not exactly swimming. It smelt like blueberries, like a flower bed, but more like the fresh choking smell of grass after the rain. My favourite. The water moved slightly but remained trapped in stillness, it ruffled, but there’s no sound. There’s no sound, the usual buzz of the living. There’s a silence that is so silent it hurt my ears. I know they were blocked out by means. I don’t know how I know it, I just do. Like a little whisper in my mind, telling me what to do, guiding the way I move, controlling the way I think. Making me fearless, giving me anticipation.
And then I was falling. Floating, but downwards, a feather in the wind. I didn’t know there’s still gravity in dreams, in heaven. But I knew I landed on a bed, the kind you find in big malls displaying, the kind that is fluffy and white and soft and you will sink into the feathers and sleep like you are among clouds. I closed my eyes slightly. That’s when I saw him, a flash of white and the blinking of an eye. He seemed to be living, the only one here. But before I could see it clearly, my eyes just had to close again.
They opened to brightness, not radiating from the sun but from a field of wheat so full and golden and faraway to my right. My left eye blinked as shadows started to cast on it. I turned and saw the moon and the navy blue night sky that was slowly turning wine red. Stars were like the glitters I spilt when I was young, all over, glittering at the right angles that you watch them.
“Run.” A voice told me. “Run.”
And so I did, towards the rays of gold as the night sky whirled into a waterfall of deep red wine pouring into a tall glass, carrying waves of fragrance, trying to suffocate me. Still this is not a nightmare.
The field of golden wheat was unreachable, no matter how much I ran. Then I realised I was running on the spot, still tore between day and night, still in between. But the waves never reached me. Actually they did but they never hurt me. The sand under my feet began to fumble and slip away, replace by the fluidity of liquid. I joined in and became a part of the wine, it made me drunk. It made this dream beautiful again.
Something was blooming and emerging, petal after petal, a rose so elegant broke out of the water, wine and got a new life with the air it’s feeling, the air I was not breathing. On each petal, the dew shaped like a bottle glistened. I stretched out my hand slightly and touched it, its coolness dancing at my fingertip. It bounced off into the background and from far in the horizon something sailed towards me, it was one of those ships-in-bottle models, except this time in life size. It went around me around me around me like the merry-go-around I used to play. Each time it passed I would see a little bit more of him.
His hair, his other eye, his lips, arms. I was running again. Not after him, around him. Around a green planet decorated with cherry blossoms. The Little Prince’s planet, B612? The one that you can shift your chair and see the sunset 43 times a day if you feel like you are dying inside. I ran into a gazebo.
Everything became flat again. It became insane and surreal. I watch the scene before me, unable to differentiate the sky and the ground, for one reflected each other. Clouds, colours, melody. I remembered how there was a film about a place like this that truly existed on Earth. A place laid by pearl white marbles with shallow stream of water gracing them. They connected the sky to the ground, the dead to the leaving, they rid of the in between, they rid of me.
We are not gone, not frozen, not lost.
We yearn for this beautiful world. We desire and it became, crazy but insanely beautiful, stunning.
He sailed towards me, although I never realised if he was in the sky or on the ground. He was making sounds in the water, paddling and splashing and brought this now-too-foreign sense back into me. It’s a gondola, an old one with beautiful carvings.
“Who are you?”
“Your dreamer.”
“What’s a dreamer?
“The dead.”
“Were you late in your death?”
“I guess. My apology for the absence of your dream for twenty years.”
“I dreamt when I was seven.”
“I would suppose that’s when I was supposed to be dead.”
“It was a nightmare.”
“My apology again.”
“Don’t. I was afraid. It’s because of me. Not you. I don’t dream because I was not willing to let go of the fear.”
“And now, what do you say about here?”
“I am never going back, right?”
“Yes, you are a dreamer now.”
Something floated past me, I recognised it as my body. But it looked lovely, peaceful. I heaved a sigh of relief, I had died beautifully.
“Can you stay and dream with me?”
“I am supposed to. We slipped away at the same time.”
“Why didn’t I find you instead?”
“Because you are special.”
“How special?”
“You will see.”
“And you?”
“I am special too.”
I boarded his gondola, he gazed past my gazebo. His eyes are so beautiful, enthralling, drawing everything he saw deep inside him. And yet, it was empty and lost. Sometimes something inside it flickered as we sail forever and as our destination-the field of golden wheat-get nearer. He told me that would be our final dream.
I dragged him behind, telling him to go as slowly as he could.
I want to dream forever. I missed too much. I am special.