Get Out of My Dreams

by Fernando Trujillo Sanz

  “I don’t have a girlfriend,” I said after I took a gulp.

  “But there must be someone you like,” she insisted.

  “I like a lot of girls.”

  “Don’t be such a tough guy. Come on, now. There’s always someone special.”

  Indeed there was. Claudia was special, but I was embarrassed to talk about it with my mom. She was too romantic and too pure. She’d never been with anyone other than my father. She often spoke about the marvels of love and marriage, and about how everyone has a soul mate. Her ideas were lovely—but probably unrealistic for me. It’s not that I didn’t appreciate the sentiment; I did. It would be great to find someone with whom everything was perfect. But I had much more important stuff to deal with than getting myself a girlfriend. Having a relationship would just distract me.

  Regardless of what my mom said about love, I knew that, realistically, love isn’t always perfect. And I knew it all too well. Ivan’s parents were divorced when he was four years old and I saw how my friend suffered from that, how he was sometimes depressed or irritable for no apparent reason. And even though I knew why, I didn’t know how to help him through those tough times. All I could do was listen. And what I heard didn’t inspire me to ever get married. Ivan’s parents had horrible, awful arguments; they said things to one another that an adolescent should never have to hear.

  I would have loved to help Ivan with advice or suggestions but I honestly had no idea what to say. My situation was exactly the opposite. I’d never seen my parents fight. They had differences of opinion about things—like everyone does—but they always resolved them by talking things through, never even raising their voices. I had the feeling I was walking into another world when I stepped through the door of my house.

  To sum it all up, I was pretty confused about girls. But what I was sure of was that I wasn’t comfortable talking about it with my mom. I would probably end up disappointing her.

  “When I have a girlfriend you’ll be the first to know, Mom.”

  “She’ll be one lucky girl.”

  We finished eating and I cleared the table.

  “There’s a movie on you like, Son. It’s got one of your favorite actors in it. Do you want to watch it?”

  “No thanks, Dad. I’m a little tired. I’m gonna go to bed.”

  “So early?”

  “He was studying all afternoon,” my mother said. “Let him rest. Sleep well, Son. Sweet dreams.”

  SECOND DREAM

  In front of me were many girls of various ages but they were all quite young—less than ten years old. They were dressed in plain, rather dirty clothing with patches and other obvious signs of wear and tear. They were arranged in perfectly straight rows with precise spacing between them. In that space was a small mountain of cotton from which they were silently and mechanically extracting threads of fiber, intently focused on their rhythmic, automated motions.

  The first thing I did was to confirm—with great relief—that I wasn’t naked. Then I looked out over the somber workshop. It came as a surprise to me that I was once again dreaming about a place that meant nothing to me, and I had no idea how I’d gotten there. The girls’ small, almond-shaped eyes were completely absorbed in the task of drafting thread from the cotton and did not seem to notice my presence. I couldn’t tell their exact nationality other than the obvious traits that pointed to some Asian country. I’d never been able to tell a Chinese person from a Japanese one.

  The signs on the walls had a jumble of indecipherable symbols on them. Hard to believe there were human beings who considered these a language and could communicate using them.

  I stood there, looking around, not knowing what to do. Then I saw a man standing in the middle of the workshop with his back to me. He was dressed in a black coat that hung down below his knees. Down the back of the coat rested a mane of silvery hair. When he turned around it was clear he wasn’t as old as I would’ve guessed from the hair.

  He looked at me with eyes the color of ash.

  “Hello there . . . how are you?” I awkwardly greeted him. “I’m looking for—”

  “I’m looking for my soul,” he interrupted me.

  If that was supposed to mean something to me, it didn’t. It was getting harder and harder for me to understand my own dreams.

  “I see,” I said, trying to figure out where this conversation was leading. “It’s a real pain when you lose that, isn’t it? If I see it anywhere around here, I’ll let you know. Don’t wor—”

  His eyes bored into me, signaling that he didn’t appreciate my joke, but that’s not why I dropped off mid-sentence. It was because of two other details that had made a serious impression on me. The first was that the guy had no shadow. True, this was a dream, but sometimes things about my dreams scared me. The second thing was his coat. When he opened it I saw only blackness inside. The man put a hand into the darkness hidden beneath that dark coat and took out something that was too big to have been under there without making a huge lump.

  He walked away without saying another word after dropping the soccer ball he’d pulled out. It bounced off the floor. As I watched him leave, I promised myself that if my dad ever sent me to a psychologist again I’d tell him about my dreams just to watch his reaction. I’d love to see what interpretations he could pull out of them to explain away these insane scenarios.

  The ball came to rest under one of the tables between two Asian girls. I approached slowly so as not to disturb their work. I hesitated before picking up the ball, though it was obvious that’s what I was supposed to do. It had to mean something. My subconscious had introduced it into my dream for a reason.

  I reached out my hand . . .

  “Don’t touch it, you dope.”

  There were the twins, the blond and the brunette, on the other side of the table. How had I not seen them before? The brunette was the one who had spoken; the one who, of course, had the stick.

  “Isn’t it my ball?” I asked. “The one Eloy almost stole from me?”

  “And what difference does that make? You stink at soccer.”

  “And how would you know that?”

  I was totally perplexed. The blond girl took the stick from her twin.

  “Don’t pay any attention to her. My sister doesn’t understand sports. So, do you like this place?”

  The blond girl was definitely the nicest.

  “I don’t know where I am,” I confessed.

  “It’s all right there on that sign,” said the little girl, pointing at the wall. “It’s very clear.”

  It would have been clear if I understood Chinese, or whatever language all those scribbles represented. The Asian girls kept working on their cotton without even looking up.

  “I wanted to ask you something. Remember that painting you showed me in the museum—the one about World War II?” The blond girl nodded, a sweet expression beaming on her face. The brunette, obviously irritated, was watching us impatiently. It felt ridiculous to bring the topic up but, after all, this was just a dream. “I actually had a test about exactly that battle. You knew that, didn’t you?”

  I was hoping to find some logical explanation for something so absurd as one of the twin girls giving me—via a dream—the answer to a test I would have the next day. It was my only hope for holding on to my sanity.

  The blond girl opened her mouth, about to answer. But before she could say anything, the brunette ripped the stick out of her hands.

  “You did it to show off, eh?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The shot at the goal, during the soccer game,” said the brunette. “You wanted to impress your girlfriend. That’s why you didn’t pass the ball to the forward who was wide open.”

  The sisters had to have been some kind of manifestation of my subconscious. That was the only way I could explain them knowing my deepest feelings. I decided to approach it as if I were talking to myself.

  “What’s wrong with wanting to impress a girl? I wanted to b
e the one to win the game for us, and an opportunity presented itself. It was just a stroke of bad luck. I was the one who set up the play and—”

  “And you blew it,” the brunette interrupted. “Little jerk.” She kicked a pile of cotton that one of the Asian girls was working on. The cotton broke apart into little white flakes that danced through the air, floating and mixing together into different shapes until they created an image made of thousands of little white dots. The image hanging there in mid air was Claudia’s face, looking very disappointed.

  I looked away. Even if the girls were a part of me, this brunette was really annoying.

  “Hey, nice little girl, why don’t you give the stick to your sister?”

  “I don’t want to!” The brunette raised the stick over her head. The blond tried to grab it, jumping up and down and reaching up her arm. “I said no . . . Get away! . . . Don’t be such a pain in the butt.”

  They struggled for a few minutes. I was just about to step in to take the stick away from the brunette and give it to her sister, but in the end I didn’t need to intervene.

  “Got it!” the blond girl triumphantly declared, twirling the stick around in her hand. “She can be quite irritating sometimes, you know.”

  “Who are you two?” I asked, happy to not have to talk to the brunette.

  “Your friends,” replied the girl, surprised. “Didn’t we help you in your last dream?”

  “Uh, yeah, kind of . . . you did.”

  “You see? C’mon now, let’s read the sign and then we can play.”

  The little girl skipped off, passing under Claudia’s floating head which apparently was not going to disappear. She gestured for me to follow her.

  “Wait! I want to know—”

  I was going to ask how she knew I was going to have a history test the next day, plus a million other things. But I suddenly realized that there might be something new on the sign that the girl was insisting I should read—the same way the picture of the Normandy landing had provided me with incredibly valuable information. That sign surely held something of vital importance.

  I walked silently among the Asian girls who were still focused on their work. I followed the little blond girl’s tiny hops. Her golden hair bounced on her back as she skipped.

  “I don’t understand this language,” I complained.

  The sign was huge. It took up a large part of the wall of this decrepit factory where the Asian girls were working. It had no pictures on it; only symbols that I guessed were letters or words.

  “Are you sure? Look at it closely.”

  The dark-haired twin pushed her sister and snatched the stick from her.

  “Give it here. You are so clueless,” she grumbled at her sister then turned to me. “You, dimwit, come here. You can’t see it right from that angle.”

  I took a deep breath, trying to arm myself with a dose of patience.

  “I prefer to talk with your sister.”

  “And I prefer to be in Brad Pitt’s dream.”

  “What difference does it make what angle I look at that mess of gibberish from? I don’t understand that language.”

  “There are a lot of things you don’t understand.”

  I sighed again, angrily. “I don’t much like you, you little snot.”

  “Well, suck it up. I have the stick. Maybe you prefer my sister and I go away. I don’t think you appreciate our help.”

  “No—stay. Show me what it says.”

  The dark-haired girl smiled widely. “That’s more like it. Now hurry up, fool. You think you can stay asleep as long as you like?”

  The thought hadn’t even occurred to me. Time was something I never paid any attention to in my dreams. I had the feeling I’d been in that place for less than fifteen minutes, but I was sure that wouldn’t correspond with how long I’d been sleeping. Normal dreams didn’t take up the whole eight hours of sleep, but these dreams were, of course, a long way from normal. I’d read some things about REM and other phases of dreams, or maybe I’d seen it in a documentary on TV. At any rate, I obviously knew little or nothing about dreams. So I made a mental note to do a little research on the topic—then quickly dismissed the idea. No book would ever explain the relationship between dreams and the real world, unless they touched on it in esoteric terms—like the load of crap mediums and spiritualists dish out. And I didn’t believe in that stuff. Or did I?

  The important thing was that I didn’t want to wake up before I found out what the twins had to tell me. They’d already more than sufficiently proven they were capable of predicting what would happen in the future and preparing me to get through it.

  “You win, little girl. Teach me about the sign.”

  “Come here and stand right beside me. No! Don’t go that way! Walk over toward the right.”

  I didn’t understand. The two sisters were just a few feet from me. There was nothing between us. The blond girl was looking at the poster. What could I see from there that I couldn’t see from where I was? If, for someone unknown reason, I had to see it from their vantage point, the most logical thing was to walk straight over to the brown-haired girl. So why had she ordered me to stop and turn right? That would be a roundabout way to get there—and totally unnecessary. Besides, I’d have to walk between two tables where the Asians girls were working. It didn’t make sense.

  But, whatever. I obeyed. I walked between the tables like she’d told me to.

  “I’ll be able to see better from here?”

  “Much better,” the brunette assured me. “Just go straight a little farther.”

  “Toward the wall? There’s not enough—OUCH! What the—”

  I felt a horrible pain in my shin and heard the sound of something hitting the floor. My leg was killing me. I grabbed it with both hands and gritted my teeth to keep from swearing. Instead of screaming, I held my breath and gently kicked out in front of me with my other foot. I stood there, confused, looking for whatever it was I’d tripped over, but there was nothing there. The two tables I was standing between were too far away from me for me to have tripped over one of their legs. And there was nothing else there. But my leg was aching and you can’t hurt yourself by running into air, so there had to have been something solid there.

  “Are you going to stand there all day?” scowled the brunette. She was pointing at me with the stick, waving it around to signal me to keep going.

  “I tripped on something and smacked my shin,” I answered crossly.

  “Stop whining and come here right now.”

  It occurred to me there might be something invisible there. That seemed absurd but my dreams were pretty strange, after all. I again felt around in front of me with my foot, making slow circles in the air, expecting to meet with some resistance at some point. But there was absolutely nothing there.

  I finally made it over to the girls, going around the table via the path the dark-haired girl had indicated.

  “I could have walked straight up that aisle way,” I grumbled.

  “Slowpoke crybaby!”

  “And I still don’t understand that stupid sign.”

  The blond girl took the stick after gesturing to her sister that she wanted it.

  “Maybe you can’t read the sign because you don’t have your glasses on. You wear glasses, right?”

  It seemed obvious enough that that wasn’t the problem, but I couldn’t bring myself to be cross with the blond twin. She was looking at me with such an adorable expression—exactly the opposite of her sister.

  “I’m sure you’re right, but I didn’t bring my glasses. And I’m a little too far from home to go back for them.”

  “That’s true!” The little blond girl fidgeted continually with the stick. “So, I’ll give you mine. Here. Take them.”

  “I don’t think that’s going to work. I—”

  The girl burst into tears, first whimpering and sniffling and then, finally, sobbing.

  “You don’t want my glasses . . . You don’t believe me . . .”
She snuffed the snot back up her nose. “I only . . . wanted . . .”

  The brunette patted her sister and glared at me.

  “Wait, sweetie,” I said, hurrying to take the glasses. “It’s all right, see? I’m putting them on. Come on, don’t cry. Look. How do they look on me?”

  The little girl blinked a few times and tears ran down her cheeks. “You look v-very h-handsome,” she stuttered between sniffles.

  “And I really like them—they’re so comfortable.” I moved my head in circles. “I can see great out of them. Thank you. Everything is—”

  I went silent when I looked at the sign. I now understood every word on it. According to what it said, I was in Taiwan, in a cotton thread factory. The sign detailed the schedule of the workday and a bunch of rules that had to be strictly followed.

  If I could read Chinese, my dreams were stranger than I’d thought. I took off the glasses and the Chinese characters were indecipherable; I put them back on and could once again read the sign normally.

  My confusion mounted when a song started playing throughout the factory. It was a decent song by an English group that was currently really popular. But it had nothing to do with Taiwan. It gradually was getting louder and louder, loud enough to be annoying—even unbearable. I saw no speakers anywhere, nor anything else the music could be coming from. And from what I could tell, no one else seemed to be hearing it. I, however, heard it loud and clear . . . so loud, in fact, that I covered my ears with my hands. But that didn’t help at all. The music persisted, thundering in my head. It was really getting on my nerves.

  And I soon figured out where it was coming from.

  Music was blaring from my alarm clock. I reached out my hand, still half asleep, and turned it off. The song finally stopped piercing my eardrums. I stretched out under the quilt which was in a heap, like I’d been fighting with someone under it. I closed my eyes.

  I wanted to go back to the dream, back to the factory in Taiwan, to unload on those twins the millions of questions I had bouncing around in my brain. I didn’t know if it was possible—if I could fall asleep and just appear there again as if I’d never left.