A Dreamer`s Guide To Reality
Page 4
report on the same urgent project which he closed a few minutes earlier. This wasn`t something unusual; his wife was used to getting such late arriving phone calls a few times a week, preparing the dinner to be reheated when needed.
But this time he didn`t have anything else to do at work. He wanted a few minutes alone, without the stress of working on something urgent or that of driving home at rush hour with tens of cars heading the same way.
He leaned back on his chair and simply closed his eyes. He didn`t want to think about anything, just let himself go and purge all thoughts from his mind. Soon, he fell asleep, a deep, care free, quiet sleep with no one around to bother him or noises to scare it away. He woke up startled by a familiar but yet strange voice. It was that of his mother who, now, looked at him scared like she was getting ready to give him some terrible news. Gregory was sitting in a wooden, paint scrapped off chair near the window. From behind his mother, his father appeared saying to him a simple word: “Hello”. Gregory froze, eyes trying to refocus. It was something that even in his darkest dreams, which made him sweat and not being able to go back to sleep, he didn`t seem ready for. They both started telling him how this happened and why, but Gregory wasn`t listening anymore.
His mind was still shocked, trying to make sense out of it, to rationalize if it was real or not, and what should he do next. Suddenly, one of his friends came in, urging him to get ready to go for their trip. He already packed the night before, throwing in a small carry-on bag both jeans and t-shirts, but also the mandatory black tie suit which he kept for special occasions such as this.
From the ground floor 30 square meters room with its walls painted a boring, hospital looking beige as all the others, he saw the cars being loaded with all the bags and his friends waving to convince him to move faster. He turned around and saw that his mother now left, leaving him alone with just his father. Looking around, he saw that the bag was missing, eyes looking frantically in the room to find it. His father stood there, with no intention of helping him. Scouring all corners, closets, under the table, behind the door, the bag wasn`t anywhere to be found.
Disappointed and red-faced furious, he told his friends that he won`t come with them right now, but that he`ll surely be there in a day or two. He turned. Seeing an arrogant, victorious, gloat on his father`s face, Gregory realized that the bag was nearby, but he needs to go through the anguish of discussing with his father in order to retrieve it.
The resolution
The discussion didn`t take too long, but it was as disturbing as he imagined. His father didn`t just disappear without saying anything; his death was not covered in mystery. He began to feel tormented, like his soul was being ripped out and thrown away to the dumpster. He knew he heard and saw too much and his mind was not ready for all this. Frightened, he got up from his chair and turned around.
That panoramic view of a sleeping city appeared; the lights of a setting sun in the horizon we`re quickly fading, being replaced by the simmering office lights which we`re still lit in the office buildings nearby. He was full of sweat, with his carefully ironed shirt now wrinkled and coming out here and there from his pants. The first look he took when turning around was at the clock on the wall. It was now 11 pm. There were no parents around, no bag, and no wooden chair. It was just him, behind the same annoying, bluish, metal looking desk on which a phone was trying to tell him something. In the past 6 hours, his wife tried calling him a dozen times, getting nervous of why he wasn`t picking up. An alarmed voice was at the other end of a voice message he just received; his wife saying to call her as soon as possible and that she was on her way to his office. He called back, catching her just when she was leaving the house, reassuring her that nothing was wrong and that his phone was mistakenly on “Silence” and he didn`t see her calls because he was working too hard. The argument worked; he was the kind of guy which used to make this mistake now and then, swamping himself into work, not hearing anything else around but the sound of the keyboards being struck hard.
Now he still had time to think about what happened. There was no evidence of anyone besides him entering the office in the past few hours. He was sure that those college friends weren`t here waving at him as they were doing earlier since he hadn`t seen them in years.
That ground floor room was the one in which he used to live when he finished his Bachelor, convincing the university to let him stay for a few more months, during the summer break, a few months which would allow him to scrape up some money to be able to rent at least a one bedroom apartment with running water and electricity, to have a place to stay and call it his own.
The conclusion was obvious: it was all a dream.
But something was not quite right even if he realized it has all been a dream. He remembered that day when his friends left because he couldn`t find his bag. It was the last day of college and everyone was going back home now. Their yearly getaway trip was cancelled because none of them had money to do it. He waved goodbye and saw them leaving.
That was the last day he ever saw them. Of course, he talked on the phone with them once in a while, but, as the years passed, the calls became more rare, only on birthdays or Christmas, and now they didn`t call each other anymore. He remembered his mother coming and leaving from his room on that day, being there just to pick up some of his things to take them home, because she was passing through the city on her way back from visiting a relative on the other side of the country.
He called his mother from the car, but there was no answer. It was midnight after all. All sane people are sleeping, Gregory repeated this in his head, letting the phone down and trying to concentrate on driving. The road was empty, the side-of-the-road lights and the white blue strip in the middle of the road being the only companions that he had right then.
Attempting to justify to himself what happened that day, he began rolling in all the facts, putting them together piece by piece, adding bits of old dreams that he had since his storytelling swinging childhood. All the déjà vu feelings, all the moments which scared him and made him freeze, they were all coming together.
Waking up in the middle of the night sweating and foraging for food, sleeping at his desk, recollecting childhood friends, there were strange things that had nothing to do one with the other. It all looked like a 3-hours movie trying to depict the life of a person, but ending up like a mixture of frogs` eyes, birds` wings and other strange things which would go into a witch`s cauldron.
Like the leaves of an old, tall, hollow tree that would have provided a safe haven for people during a storm, the slabs of memories and dreams were giving him the answer that he would have never thought about.
He didn`t willingly recollect segments of his life, but his dreams were capable of mining the deepest places of his subconscious.
Linking with those places and throwing in the solutions his conscious gave him for each of his worries, problems, nightmares, a tunneling effect darkened his vision. From side to side, pictures, sounds and touchable memories bordered his fast moving, cleansing pass. It was a baffling feeling which made him wish to move faster through this concoction of the mind. Touching bits and pieces from the tunnel`s walls, he became more aware than ever of what was happening to him and where was this leading him to. He wanted to reach that place, believing it would bring comfort and peace.
The answer was simple. The day he got the news of his father`s death he simply froze. It wasn`t a déjà vu, it was not him trying to rationalize. It was the mind trying to handle the situation in any way it could. His subconscious decided that it needed more time to help him go through, even if, for him, this wasn`t such a big deal. The mind caught glimpse of something that would possibly endanger its existence and shut down.
Several hours later, moving as fast as a man could do, he reached it. It was the solution of a threatened, petrified, panic fueled subconscious: transforming reality into a dream, a dream that could replace pieces of reality in order to make it better.
And then he woke up.
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About the author
Codrin Paveliuc-Olariu was born in Romania in 1984 into a middle-class family. As a little boy, he showed great interest in writing, beginning with school essays, literary competitions` entries and slowly moving towards poetry and fiction.
With the aid of his high school professors, Codrin developed his writing style, integrating his interests in philosophy and history in his work and trying to integrate different writing techniques in it. An important step in his evolution was blogging about a diverse range of topics including philosophy, politics, economics, social media and others.
With a PhD level education in agricultural economics, Codrin`s works include both fiction and non-fiction, based on his experience and knowledge of certain subjects.
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To be published
Crisis