Some Faraway Place

by Lauren Shippen

  But there was one face that stood out against all the others. Ralphy, small and freckle-faced, was looking at me wide-eyed, like they knew exactly what had just happened. Where I had just been. And that was when I realized I had been in someone else’s head, someone’s waking head, and knew exactly whose.

  “You’re psychic,” I breathed, before I could think it through. I knew, in my bones, that I was right, and then Ralphy’s face fell. Their mouth grew tight, their chin wobbling, and then they bolted. Sneakers screeching on the floor, their chair clattering to its side as they ran off faster than I would have ever expected, almost as if they were the one in the group with super speed. And all I could do was sit there and watch them go, as my stomach dropped with the horror of what I’d just done. I wanted to run after them—apologize for opening my stupid mouth—but Dr. Loving ended group early, going to clean up my mess. I knew that if I went with her, I would just somehow end up making it worse.

  Tonight we “kick up the sleep trials” as Owen put it. He tried to make it sound fun, like I’m leveling up or something, but my stomach is in knots. I don’t want to violate anyone’s privacy, don’t want to get trapped in a nightmare, don’t want to see something or hear something I shouldn’t. I’ve just gotten my own dreaming under control, can recognize all the edges of it and know what it feels like to stick a toe outside those bounds. It’s boring, sitting in that black space, but it’s safe. What happens when I step through?

  community/TheUnusuals post by n/thatsahumanperson

  It happened again. There was that fog around my dad’s thoughts and this time, I tried to go deeper, tried to actively read his mind to see if I could figure out what the fog was or where it was coming from. I got nowhere. Every time I found a thought of his, I would try to follow it down, see where it connected to other ones, but it would disappear into the fog before I could get a really good grip. That alone was freaking me out, but it was nothing compared to what happened next.

  My dad doesn’t remember where my sister is. He was just sitting in the living room today, reading the same book that he couldn’t find the other day, and when I walked past he looked up and asked, “Where’s your sister? I’m going to the grocery store later and want to see if she’d be up for cooking that salmon that she makes.”

  I thought he was joking for a second—I don’t know what kind of joke he would have been making, but you know how dads are. They find shit funny that no one else does. So I brushed it off, saying, “I don’t think she gets to use their kitchens while under observation, Dad. I think we’ll just have to keep fending for ourselves.” But instead of trying to joke about how he’s such a great cook and could totally pull off the complicated dishes that my sister does (he’s not and he couldn’t), he put his book on his lap and looked up at me, his bushy eyebrows scrunched together.

  “What do you mean?” he asked. “Use whose kitchen?”

  I stared at him for a second, waiting for him to let go of whatever bit he was trying to do, but he just stared right back at me.

  He didn’t remember. My sister has been gone for over a week and it was like … it was like that hadn’t been happening for my dad at all. Once I reminded him that she was at the AM, getting help for her dreamdiving, he nodded a bunch, like he was trying to listen to something really far away and then gave this, like, hollow laugh before walking upstairs to get his wallet (which—that’s weird too! normally he would just use his telekinesis to bring it down and it’s like he forgot about that too) and then going to the grocery store. That’s where he is now and … I don’t know, I feel like I should have gone with him?

  I’m scared, you guys. I’m going to talk to him and my mom about him getting looked at, but … I’m scared.

  OCTOBER 7TH, 2016

  I did it. I found the seam and stepped through that invisible door and what greeted me on the other side was better than I could have imagined.

  Something happened last night, something broke wide open and let a cool, sharp breeze into my head, throwing everything into perfect focus, bringing it all into the light. That doesn’t make any sense as a metaphor—how could wind shed light on something? And yet, it makes perfect sense to me as a thought, even writing it down in the harsh light of day. That’s the world I’m dealing with now—the world I live in. Wind can be made of light, light can make sound, sound can be tasted on the tip of your tongue. I’m Dorothy, the tornado has pulled me up out of drab black-and-white and dropped me in a Technicolor world that has rules I can’t even begin to understand.

  I walked into someone’s dream and it was … it was like that blank canvas at first, like it is when I dream myself now, but then the canvas started to come to life. The AM volunteer—a younger doctor I think—started to dream about a plane, for some reason. Initially, it was just a boring old plane—cramped seats, stale air, too many people. But then I remembered how I got rid of all the other high schoolers in Aaron’s dream, how I had a thought and they just vanished.

  I half expected the simple act of remembering I did that to send all the plane people away. But apparently things are a little bit more complicated based on the person. And I started to feel that. There was something familiar about Aaron’s dream. Not just the high school setting, or the fact that he was there, but the feeling of his dreamworld felt like a place I’d been before. Maybe it’s because we’re genetically related, maybe it’s because he’s Atypical too and this doctor wasn’t.

  It took me a few more minutes—seconds, an hour, who knows, time moves very differently in the dreamworld—to clear the plane, but I did it, watching each individual person disappear in front of my eyes. For some of them it took longer—if I let my concentration slip, they wouldn’t disappear or they’d fade away unbearably slowly. I didn’t see the doctor himself anywhere, but that had been the case for most of these tests. I guess that’s part of why this guy volunteered—apparently he rarely dreams about himself and rarely has nightmares. People’s brains are wild.

  There was something slightly morbid about watching random strangers disintegrate into nothing, knowing that I was the cause. I had to keep reminding myself that they weren’t real. Well, maybe they were real people in real life—images of people the doctor actually knows instead of truly random dream conjurations—but they weren’t real here. Nothing in dreamworld is real, which should be scary, but it’s incredible. There’s no consequence. I asked the doctor if he’d felt anything when I vanished all the plane people and then the plane and he just said, “Oh, I was dreaming about a plane?” because he didn’t remember a single thing about his own dream.

  Once everyone was gone, I walked up and down the aisle, running my hand along the tops of the seats. They had the sensation of fabric, but not the cheap, scratchy kind you get on actual planes. Instead, it felt like the fibers were made of delicate spiderwebs, light and soft, but somehow not dissolving underneath my fingertips. When I looked out one of the tiny, rounded windows, I saw that the outside looked like cotton candy too. Big, puffy clouds lit by a beautiful orange-pink sunset. I wanted to see it up close. That was when I realized, I could.

  I focused on my feet like the doctors had taught me. “Always find your solid ground first,” they said, citing the experiences of dreamdivers they’d worked with in the past, always couching every piece of advice in the understanding that “every dreamdiver is unique. What works for one might not work for you.” I guess that’s why they have me fill out all these evaluations, to see what works.

  The ground thing does work for me, and worked beautifully with the plane. I felt the carpet beneath my feet, the rumble of the engine as the plane moved through the sky, and concentrated on it all disappearing. It didn’t go right away, so I grabbed onto the back of a fluffy seat, closed my eyes, and imagined the seat being a cloud instead. And then it was.

  I was still on solid ground. Not physically, there was no pressure against my feet, no texture, but I knew I wasn’t going to plummet to the ground thousands of feet below. I was floating a
mongst those pink and fluffy clouds, nothing but air under my feet. Nothing but the dusky sky around me.

  A light wind blew across my face, warm and smelling of flowers. The wind had shape and texture, somehow carrying light on its wings, so that a glow pirouetted through the air, twisting the clouds into swirls so fluffy and full they looked good enough to eat. It felt like the most natural thing to walk over to one of them, my feet sinking and bouncing into the perfectly buoyant air as I went, and reach out my hand. Instead of pushing my arm through vapor—the way it would have worked if I had been, somehow, touching a real cloud—my hand met with the swirl, solid and soft. My fingers wrapped around it, grasping the bit of cloud and bringing it to my face. It shaped itself into a cartoonish version of a cloud and it tasted like a cartoon cloud. Like ice cream and cotton candy and every bit of animated food you see in movies as a kid that you wished were real.

  I was eating a cloud, simply because I wanted to.

  I burst out laughing, in sheer, unfettered joy, and flung myself backward onto the cloud. It caught me in its fluffy embrace, caving perfectly to mold to my body while still supporting me. I spent hours like that, bouncing among the clouds like trampolines, swimming into them to be enveloped in their warmth, flying through them, feeling lighter than air and brighter than the sun that still had not set, keeping my world in perfect pink-washed happiness.

  And then I woke up. Not suddenly, not jarringly, but peacefully and slowly. I eased out of sleep at first and then all at once I was completely awake, without any kind of lingering grogginess. I lay there for a moment, in my strange windowless hospital room, and felt more at peace than I ever have.

  I think I’m going to like this dreamdiving thing.

  LATER

  I’m writing this from my own bedroom, having completed my time at the AM and come back home. It’s weird, being back. Even though I was only gone for a couple weeks, I feel like I was just getting started. Yeah, maybe group therapy wasn’t for me, but as weird as the sleep trials were at first, they were really starting to work. After last night with the airplane, I feel like something has cracked open and now there’s this whole new aspect of my life, my ability, that I get to explore. I cannot wait to sleep in my own bed tonight, but part of me is a little sad that I won’t be training anymore. I want to get good at this.

  Though according to Ralphy, I do have more training in my future.

  As I was finishing up my final pieces of paperwork with Mags, the cute receptionist, Ralphy passed by the front desk.

  “Oh, hey,” I said awkwardly and they gave me what I assume was an attempted smile, but came out to be more of a grimace.

  “Hi,” they croaked.

  “Here for…” I trailed off, realizing that I had no idea what to guess—there was no group today—and thinking that maybe it was rude to inquire about why someone would be visiting a medical facility.

  “You checking out?” they asked, skipping over my half question and gesturing broadly at Mags, who had her head in my file but who was very obviously listening to our conversation.

  “Yep,” I said. They just nodded and stood there for a moment, chewing on their lip, their hands stuck in their pockets like they were wrestling with something

  “Look, I’m really sorry for—” I started to blurt out, but they jumped in before I could finish my awkward, would-never-have-been-enough-to-make-up-for-it apology.

  “You’ll be back here,” they said, avoiding my eyes.

  “Oh, I’ve actually been assigned to an outside therapist—apparently Dr. Loving thinks it might be more helpful for me,” I explained.

  “I don’t mean for group,” they clarified.

  “Then what do you mean?” I asked, trying to smile through the question, even though knots had started to form in my stomach at their tone.

  “You’ll be back here.” And with that, Ralphy turned on their heel, leaving me wondering what the hell that was all about and why it gave me a distinct chill down my spine.

  But I didn’t have much time to think on it, or to go chasing after them, because I heard someone call my name.

  “Dad!” I exclaimed when I turned around and saw my father of all people walking down the hallway toward me.

  “Hey, Rose,” he said, a big smile on his face. “I’m here to pick you up.”

  “What were you doing?” I asked, pointing toward the hallway behind him. The entrance was on the opposite side of the lobby and, as far as I knew, the hallway he’d just come from only led deeper into the AM.

  “Oh, just wandering around.” He shrugged. “It’s been a while since I’ve walked around this place—they’ve really gussied it up.”

  “Do you approve of the work?” I joked.

  “They could have done a smoother job on joining the additions to the older parts of the building…” he mused, looking pointedly around him, “but it’s pretty decent. Stamp of approval granted.”

  I laughed, looping my arm through his and walking us out of the gargantuan main atrium. We went home and I made my parents’ favorite salmon dish for dinner, feeling alive and awake and like part of my family in a way I never have before.

  community/TheUnusuals post by n/thatsahumanperson

  For those of you that have been wanting an update on my dad and his thoughts, I’ll write more soon, but … we have an answer now, I guess. For why his thoughts have been behind a strange fog, why I’ve had such a hard time getting to them. I can’t say more right now—it doesn’t feel like my story to tell, or maybe it is, I don’t know, it affects all of us, how could it not—and I’m not sure when I will be able to talk about it. Or how.

  I’m okay. For whatever that’s worth. Like with my sister and her dreamdiving, my inability to read my dad’s thoughts has more to do with what’s going on in his head, not mine.

  I wish it was me that had the problem.

  chuckxavier

  Without a drop of sarcasm or pedantry: I’m here if you want to talk about any of this stuff. No judgment, no preaching about safe and respectful mind reading practices. It sounds like you’re going through something hard and I’m sorry for that. I want to do what I can.

  onmyown

  Ditto. I hope everything is okay but if it’s not, we’re here.

  tacotacotaco

  They’re both right—we’re a family and we’re here for you when your IRL family is the source of stress. Whatever you need.

  thatsahumanperson

  Thanks, all. That means a lot. We’re telling my sister this morning—she’s the only one who doesn’t know yet and I’m hoping that maybe this’ll be the thing that brings us closer together but … yeah. It really helps to know that, whatever happens, you’re here.

  OCTOBER 8TH, 2016

  Things keep falling apart just when I think they might finally, finally be coming together.

  When we were kids, Aaron and I had a hamster, Mr. Wiggles. Mr. Wiggles was very small and very cute and very, very dumb. We would put food in a corner of his cage and it would take him, like, forty minutes to find it. But, like all hamsters, Mr. Wiggles really loved his hamster wheel. He would spend hours on that thing. Honestly, I’m shocked it didn’t kill him. No animal should move that constantly, and this is coming from someone who tried to spend all of sixth grade on her rollerblades.

  Round and round he would go, his tiny little feet pumping as hard as they possibly could. But it was so weird—sometimes he wouldn’t scurry along, moving the hamster wheel in a consistent motion. Sometimes, he would push in these short and fast bursts, his paws working furiously for a few seconds until he screeched to a halt. It was like he was trying to escape. Like he was expecting the bursts of running to propel him forward past the curve of the wheel. But it never did. And if he went too fast, stopped too suddenly, sometimes he would get thrown off the wheel.

  That’s how I feel. Like any ground I gain is hard-won through intense running, before I’m flung from my path completely.

  And what … what a completely and a
bsolutely useless metaphor that is. Here I am talking about hamster wheels and ground I’ve gained like I have ANY control over what’s happening at all, like these things aren’t just happening TO me, like anything I do makes one tiny jot of goddamned difference.

  Everything is falling to pieces around me and I feel like I have no other choice but to fall to pieces with it.

  There’s a reason that my dad came and picked me up from the AM yesterday. While I was doing my … my exit interview, or whatever, he was getting checked on. Because while I was gone these past two weeks, things started to go very, very wrong.

  When I came down to the kitchen this morning—at the shockingly reasonable hour of nine—I found my parents and Aaron already at the kitchen table. Each of their heads snapped up to look at me, surprised at my presence, like they’d gotten used to my absence over the past two weeks.

  “Hi…” I started awkwardly, not knowing how I fit into the family in this new version of my life. That was when I noticed that my mom was holding my dad’s hand, her thumb moving in a soothing back-and-forth motion over it. Aaron had turned his eyes away from me, and was now staring at the table, dead in the eyes.

  “Sweetie, sit down,” my mom said softly. I slid into the empty chair, my stomach filled with lead. I thought they were going to tell me something awful about dreamdiving or that the AM had told them I was a hopeless case, or reveal to me that I’d done something terrible in my sleep.

  The truth was so, so much worse.

  “What’s going on?” I asked when no one seemed able to speak. My dad took a deep, heavy breath, before speaking.

  “I wasn’t just wandering around the AM yesterday,” he said. “I was there for a checkup.”

  “Okay…” I said. Aaron still wouldn’t look at any of us and that freaked me out more than the way my mom’s voice shook when she told me to sit down.