I was wrong. I was so, so wrong.
I don’t know why I was so resistant to the idea this whole time, that I could be Atypical. I think, deep down, I didn’t even want to entertain the possibility, just in case it wasn’t true. I’d made my peace with that never happening. I didn’t want the old fantasy dangled in front of me.
Last night, I was back in high school. At first I thought I was just in the same old anxiety dream that’s been cropping up ever since freshman year and, I was horrified to discover, did not go away when I had my diploma in hand. It’s a standard dream: I’m late for class, I show up only to discover that we’re giving class presentations about a book I’ve never read and I’m first up. I get up in front of the class, no notes, no knowledge of the book and then, you know, horrible sweat-inducing nightmare. Nothing earth-shattering.
So when I woke up inside Dream High School, I expected the beats of the story to follow the same path they always have. Except … I wasn’t rushing down the hall to class. The hallway was busy, instead of the usual eerie emptiness of a school hallway five minutes after the bell has rung. This time, it was bustling, full of people I only vaguely recognized. Not the kind of recognition where you can place their name, or even remember their face, but the kind of knowing that prickles the back of your neck, speaks to something deep in your lizard brain.
And then: the humming. That faint inhuman chorus that I heard in the black space. A dream that now makes a lot more sense to me given what happened next.
Just as before, a familiar figure was in the distance, just down the hall, on the other side of a sea of people. My brother stood, not in the strange, still way he stood in the void space, but like he was himself, in school. Backpack slung over his shoulder, looking down at his phone, a slight smile on his face like he was texting one of his dumb high school friends he’s since lost touch with or flirting with a new girl. I just watched him for a moment, as he slid his phone in his pocket and started to walk down the hallway. That was when I noticed the hallway was different than my usual Nightmare High School. It was wider, more spacious.
That was because it wasn’t mine.
“Aaron!” I called out, like I somehow subconsciously knew I was in his high school. Like I wanted to ask him how he made the hallway wide.
He didn’t respond—why would he have? Should he have? If it had been my dream? UGH okay I am getting way ahead of myself.
I called out. He didn’t respond. So I started to walk toward him, but there were so many people and just the feeling of being back in high school with all those people who never liked me and never even tried to like me, I was starting to get overwhelmed, like this was the anxiety dream I always have, but with a different flavor, the crush of people creating the claustrophobia, not the narrow hallway, and all I wanted was for everyone around me to go away so I could talk to my brother, for them to just vanish into thin air and then—
They did.
Just like that, every single person in the hallway faded into wisps of vapor, immediately dissolving into the air like spun sugar. Like they were never there. Aaron and I were still a whole locker block of space apart but he stopped walking, looking down the hallway like he was seeing it for the first time. His brow furrowed, lightly confused, as if he sensed that something was off instead of seeing that a whole hallway of students just disappeared.
“Aaron!” I called out again, jogging toward him. “… Hi.”
I didn’t know what else to say. It felt like we were meeting each other in a place we were both surprised to see the other person, despite the fact that we went to the same high school and are sixteen months apart, so we passed each other in these halls all the time. But there was something wrong—we weren’t supposed to be here.
I was partly correct. One of us wasn’t supposed to be here.
“… Rose?” His body was half-turned to me, his phone still in his hand. Something in his face flickered, like the image of him was glitching and for a moment I was looking at Aaron as I know him now, before I blinked and he went back to Aaron of a few years ago.
“Rose?” he asked again, his voice shaking.
Then, suddenly, everything around us shook and we were in the black void again, the air pressing in around us. There was a bright flash of light, like the sun exploding, and then we were in our living room.
Aaron, with no backpack, no phone, none of the youthful glow he’d had in the high school, looked frantically around the space. It definitely was our living room but, like the school hallway, there was something uncanny about it. Everything looked correct—the couch facing the fireplace, two armchairs on either side, my grandmother’s old coffee table in the middle, photos on the mantel. But we weren’t home.
“Rose, what—” Aaron was breathing heavily, spinning around in an attempt to understand his surroundings that made him look like a dog trying to see where the ball went.
“Where are we?” he asked, stopping his pivot to look at me, his expression like he was noticing for the first time that I was there.
“You—there’s—we’re—” I couldn’t find the words. It felt like I was rebooting, my brain loading along with the environment, a computer trying to run a new program. That was how Aaron described it. Like he was getting the spinning rainbow wheel of death and then a rush of code all at once and then all the graphics coming into focus. I kind of get what he means—my dawning realization felt a bit like that—but I can’t imagine how much worse it must have been for him. At least I already knew I was dreaming.
“You were dreaming.” I breathed, the pieces finally clicking together in my head. “That’s where we are. We’re in your dream.”
There was a long pause, completely silent. But the silence was wrong. If we had been in our living room, we would have heard the sounds of the street, birds chirping, the house creaking. People think they know what silence is, but dream silence—the silence manufactured by a sleeping brain—is a kind of pure quiet that is impossible to describe.
“What?”
“What were you dreaming about before you saw me?”
“Rose, I—I’m awake, I have to be awake. Why do I feel like I’m on drugs?”
“That’s just what it feels like at first,” I said, remembering the way my brain felt like Technicolor jelly the first time I lucid dreamed and how that feeling was impossible to imagine again the moment I woke up.
“What what feels like?” he asked. He was beginning to panic. His voice was doing the thing it did when our parents were away for the weekend and we broke an antique vase while playing “the floor is lava.” I’d been convinced that we could glue the vase back together (I was wrong) and Aaron was convinced that we’d both be grounded for a year (we weren’t).
“Lucid dreaming,” I answered as calmly and authoritatively as possible.
“Rosie, what the fuck is going on?”
Before I could answer, the floor turned to lava.
And then I woke up.
I was surprised to find that it was already morning, the dream still ringing in my head, clear as a bell. I just lay there for a second, serenely turning the dream over in my mind, examining it, before the full weight of what had just happened hit me like a truck.
I bolted up in bed like I’d just been shot through with adrenaline and burst out of my room, only to find Aaron already marching down the hallway toward me.
“Uh … Rose?” he demanded.
“Yeah, so…”
“What…”
“That’s never happened before…”
“Did you…?”
“I think so? You remember…?”
“Yeah … and then the floor…”
“Turned to lava. Yeah, that definitely has never happened before.”
I have a lot of questions. But at least I have one answer: looks like I’m Atypical after all.
community/TheUnusuals post by n/thatsahumanperson
So … anyone ever heard of dreamdivers?
December 22nd, 2016
The one upside to being trapped in this hellhole: whatever they’ve got me hooked up to is letting me sleep, dreamlessly. You wouldn’t know this, because I was always the one who was up first, the one who barely slept so that you could, choosing instead to keep an eye on the motel door, through the venetian blinds, out the windshield, wherever we were, to keep us safe. A lot of good that did. We were doomed from the beginning—manipulator versus mimic. It was always gonna go sour.
If you had been more awake this summer, or had stayed up to watch over me, you might have become privy to the nearly nightly terrors that jolt me from sleep. You might have watched me twitch and gasp awake, soaked in sweat. As it was, I always tried to make myself presentable before you woke up, hide the sweat and the circles under my eyes, thanking my lucky stars that we never had to share a bed, even though I’d started to
Maybe this is the end of the road for me. There’s so much I’ve done—some you know, most you don’t—that should have been the thing that ended me. But it looks like Caleb did me in. Does he feel bad about beating me half to death? Or is he just happy that his boyfriend is safe?
I wouldn’t have hurt Adam. I really mean that. Wadsworth doesn’t seem to believe me though, and I guess she’s reserved the only living part of her ice-cold heart for her sweet little nephew.
Sleep brings me peace—it’s when I’m awake that I find myself in the nightmare.
09-22-2016, morningwaffles, text post
What do you do when you’ve had a great first date and you were pretty sure there was going to be a second—in fact, there was even a discussion on the first date about a second happening the following week and now that day is tomorrow and you’d talked about maybe seeing a movie so you’ve started looking up show times, but you’re not sure it’s even worth looking into because, despite that first date being really, really good, she hasn’t texted you back in three days and you think you might be getting ghosted? Anyone have any advice?
SEPTEMBER 2?, 2016
I think I just spent two days sleeping. I don’t remember much after … Sunday? Maybe? I know it’s sometime in the middle of the week, I think, but everything has been so hazy. I’ve been awake for a few hours now—have eaten, washed my face because showering felt like too much work—and I already want to go back to sleep. But I promised myself, when I groggily got out of bed at 1 p.m. today, that I would try and write in here before I fell asleep again. That I would try and document everything that’s happened the past few days. And a lot has happened.
After Aaron and I realized that we were IN THE SAME DREAM, we just sort of stood there in the hallway for a moment, staring blankly at each other. I had wanted to sit down, catch my breath, maybe have some coffee, and talk things through with him. Go over every detail of the dream and figure out if he had been dreaming about school before I got there, or if I had, or if we were somehow building something separately together. But Aaron put a wrench in that very civilized plan.
“Mom!” he shouted, his eyes not moving from my face. “Dad!”
Traitor.
Fifteen minutes later, we were all gathered around the kitchen table, sipping our coffee, our parents silently processing everything we’d just told them.
“Anyone want to say something?” I blurted, the veneer of calm freaking me out. “Chime in about what the hell is going on?”
“This explains the narcolepsy at least” was all my dad had to say.
“I knew this wasn’t a ‘run-of-the-mill’ sleep disorder,” my mom said, shaking her head. “It never is.”
“Except you didn’t know,” I pointed out. “You didn’t have a vision about me being Atypical, Aaron wasn’t able to read it in my thoughts … so let’s not pretend like I’m the only one here who didn’t know what was going on. I still don’t know what’s going on.”
“Don’t be mad at me for not foreseeing this,” my mom said. “You know I don’t choose when or about what to have my visions.”
“I’m not—” I sighed, stifling my outburst like always, before starting again. “I’m not mad at anyone, I just … I want to understand. What do we think is wrong with me?”
“There’s nothing wrong with you, Rose,” my dad said, reaching his hand across the table to pat my arm. “You’re Atypical. That’s a beautiful thing.”
My dad was smiling softly at me, genuine warmth and excitement glittering in his eyes. Finally, I was part of the club, joining him in the specialness of being different, being magic. But out of the corner of my eye, I saw both my mom’s and Aaron’s expressions tighten around the mouth and eyes. Telekinesis has always been a fun, magical thing for Dad, but my mom and brother have a different relationship to their Atypical abilities. My dad has a gift, they have burdens. I wonder which mine will be.
“All right, what do we know?” Aaron asked after a moment. “You’re sleeping a lot and you were in my dream. And we were able to talk to each other, but I was definitely still asleep. Are you a mind reader too?”
“She’s a dreamdiver.” My dad smiled and the word sent a shiver up my spine.
“A dreamdiver.” I breathed. “What is that?”
“Exactly what it sounds like,” my mom said. “You can go inside people’s dreams.”
“I think you were in my dream the other night too,” Aaron said suddenly.
“What?” Goose bumps broke out all along my arms.
“You called out my name.”
The empty space. Aaron standing still, the hum, the need to call out to him.
This was real. This was happening. I was in my brother’s dreams.
“Oh my god…” I breathed.
“You remember too,” he said, not a question.
“Yeah … yeah, I do.”
That admission set off a whole other round of questioning—what was the first strange dream I had, where was I, had I seen either of my parents in any of the dreams. That was when the pieces really started to click together.
The snake chasing me, a recurring nightmare of Aaron’s that I didn’t realize he still had.
The nightmare I had on the bus and the stranger’s scared face, like my screaming had woken her up from a bad dream. It had. I’d been screaming because of her bad dream.
The urgent care, with Emily, those two men I thought I recognized. I did recognize them, from a movie though, not real life. Was Emily asleep too? Was I inside her head while she was awake?
The further I tried to think back, the harder it became to remember when this all started.
“How do you even know about this?” I asked, one of the least important questions out of the millions running around my head, but the safest one. “Do you know other dreamdivers?”
“The AM told me about them,” my dad said. “There was one there at the same time I was—I never met them, but they were the talk of the program. It’s an unusual ability.”
“Great…” I muttered. Looks like I won’t even be fitting in among the weirdos.
I guess I’ll find out for sure—it’s already decided that I’m going to be shipped off to the AM. Tomorrow. The moment the place was mentioned, everyone decided that that was the next best logical step.
“Are we sure that’s necessary?” I asked, fear crawling up my throat. “Can’t we just play things out at home for a little bit? Maybe it’s just a phase.”
“Rose, you’ve been sleeping in more and more the past few weeks,” my mom said softly. “I’d be more inclined to let it slide if we could say for certain that it was just typical teenage exhaustion, but now this … your ability seems to be escalating. You need to get help.”
“I’m not sick,” I argued.
“It’s just like getting a yearly physical, Rose,” my mom said. “Just a little bit more thorough. You’ll just go and get checked out, stay for a bit to make sure everything’s all right.”
“By the end of it, you’ll have such a good grasp on your ability, you won’t need to worry about it getting in the way of your lif
e,” my dad added, rather foolishly optimistic in my opinion. This didn’t feel like learning how to rollerblade, like I could just dedicate two solid weeks to it and have it figured out.
“It’s true,” my mom said, clearly sensing my skepticism. “You know I’m not the AM’s biggest cheerleader, but there really is no better way to learn about your ability.”
That was that. Aaron was uncharacteristically silent throughout the entire conversation about the AM, despite being the person who had been there most recently. So when we both happened to be in the kitchen again a few hours later, I bit the bullet and decided to just ask him directly.
I had been stress baking soufflé—which had not been going well, folding egg whites one-handed was difficult—when he came in and stuck his head in the fridge, scrounging for a midafternoon snack.
“Wait an hour and you can have some chocolate soufflé,” I said. He closed the fridge and frowned at me.
“That’s…” he started, searching for the right word, “nice of you.”
I shrugged like it was no big deal, even if I knew he was right to be surprised by my offer to feed him.
“You feeling okay?” he joked.
“Obviously not,” I grumbled, incapable of joining him in what felt like well-intended ribbing.
“Right,” he said sheepishly. “Sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry.” I sighed. “I’m not trying to be a jerk. It’s just … this is a lot.”
“Yeah,” he said, hoisting himself up onto the counter to watch me struggle with my spatula. “It’s not always going to be too much to handle though. You’ll get used to it.”
“I don’t know that I want to get used to it,” I muttered, the bus stranger’s nightmare ringing in my head. The realization that that was someone’s real nightmare, a nightmare that felt inspired by reality—based in it—has stuck in my brain like gum on a shoe.
Aaron just sat there silently for a few moments. I don’t know if he was reading my thoughts or just getting a vibe from me, but he was obviously staying because he knew I had something else to say.
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