by M. B. Julien
For a moment I'm at sixes and sevens, and I forget what I am suppose to do. After a few seconds I remember and I start to walk away from this place, and it gets darker and darker with each step until it's completely black, and then I wake up. I look to the right and I see my composition notebook, and I do what I always do. I write down the dream.
Three nights ago I was checking my mail, and I decided to see how Lynne's flowers were coming along. Her zinnias, her shade garden. I go outside and I see that they are beginning to grow. As I'm standing there admiring her work, I see her walk through the front apartment building door with David and Sarah. She takes a look at me, and I smile at her. Something I got used to doing.
The thing was that she didn't smile back at me, she just continued walking. She was in some sort of a rush and I guess she didn't have time to say anything, or smile back. She puts her kids in the car and then she gets in and she drives away.
Later that night I'm sitting in my living room watching television and I hear a loud banging. Bang, bang, bang. I get up and look through the peephole. This fisheye view. Now the man is banging and shouting. I can hear him, I'm sure every one in the building can, but I can't see him. After about a minute he stops, and then he walks away. I see him pass by, but it's too quickly for me to see what he looks like. I'm positive he is coming from Lynne's apartment because I know I heard the name "Lynne" somewhere in his barrage of expletives.
I start to assume that this is what Lynne was hiding from. After he walks by, I'm still looking out of the peephole, staring at Joe's apartment door.
Right now I'm standing over Lynne's body in her bedroom. She's deep asleep. I can tell she's physically and psychologically tired. Tired of every thing. A few hours ago she knocked on my door to apologize about not greeting me the other day.
She tells me that the whole time she was at the hotel with her kids, trying to hide from her antisocial ex-husband, she was thinking about how she just walked away without acknowledging me. I tell her it's okay, and I invite her into my apartment in an attempt to find out why she has these bruises on her face.
She's sitting on my couch telling me about her ex-husband, but not once does she mention how she got the bruises. I assume it's just a part of her life that she will not talk about. Everyone has those. Then she starts to talk about how she feels so alone at times.
I start to tell her about Maria, how even when I was with her I still felt alone at times. I think to myself, sometimes we are alone and in pain for so long that after a while we can't feel the loneliness or the pain anymore. I tell Lynne that even if you find someone, there is still a chance you will feel alone.
As I'm talking, the phone begins to ring. That damn ringing sound. I tell her that I'll be back, and I answer the phone. It's the hospital, some lady telling me that they are going to move Joe to another room. A room where they put other coma patients who have been in a coma for a long period of time. I go back to the living room, and I find that Lynne has fallen asleep on my couch. I was gone no more than five minutes.
I start to say her name out loud, but she's not waking up. I rub her shoulder, but she still doesn't wake up. Deep asleep. I think to myself, what should I do. Just let her rest here until she wakes up? I say her name out loud one more time, this time even louder, but she still doesn't wake up. At this point I'm thinking of getting a large bucket of cold water, but instead I go to her apartment door and I see if her door is open, and it is.
I decide that I will just carry her to her bed. It would probably be very weird to her if she woke up on my couch in the morning. So I open her apartment door wide open and then I go back to my apartment, I go back to her. I say her name louder one last time. And then I rub her shoulder harder one last time. She still will not wake up. I pick her up, this tiny woman, and I carry her to her bedroom and I place her in her bed. I look down at her for a little while. I wonder what she is dreaming about, hoping that she is in some kind of peaceful place. Her utopia.
I look down at her legs but I can't see her fake leg because she's wearing jeans again, but I can however see her feet. She didn't wear shoes when she was coming over to apologize. I'm looking at this plastic foot, and then I reach out and touch it. I slide my hand across it. That cold plastic. This one part of her body that doesn't have to deal with pain anymore.
I pull the blanket over her and as I'm walking away I hear her say something, but I can't understand it. I turn around, and I realize she's talking in her sleep. She talks in her sleep.
I laugh and then I go across the hall, to the kids room. I put my hand on the doorknob, and I think for a little while, and then I open it and I see David and Sarah sleeping. In the corner I see the television on that high cabinet. David and Sarah should be arguing about what cartoons to watch, but instead they have watch their mother take a beating in the places that are still prone to pain.
Chapter 14:
“SLEEP WHEN YOU'RE DEAD”
I'm leaving my apartment building and I notice the flowers. They are growing but they look funny now, as if they are missing something. I wonder if Lynne planted them right. Now I'm at the hospital, asking someone if they could find out where they moved Joe, he's still in that damn coma. They take me to the room, and I see a few other people who are also in comas. I pull up a chair next to Joe and I sit and think.
According to some scale, if you are in a state of confusion, you are in the mildest coma. A coma is a state of unconsciousness. You are considered unconscious when you don't react to the environment around you. So imagine a person walking around confused and technically unconscious. What happens if that person comes face to face with danger and doesn't even realize it?
Some people will tell you that coma patients can sometimes hear you if you try speaking to them, but I don't know if it's fact or fiction, but I had a weird dream last night and it had something to do with Joe. I decided to tell him the dream regardless of if he could hear me or not. I tell him that in the dream I'm sitting in this small room, at a desk.
On the desk in front of me there is an emergency contact form that I have to fill out. On the wall that I'm facing, there are two paintings. On the left there is a painting of the Chicago Cubs logo, a baseball team, and on the right there is a painting of Anna Briol Walkhill, a celebrity. I don't pay as much attention to the paintings as I do the form, simply because I'm having such a hard time filling it out. If something happens to me who should know first? Who should know last?
I still often wonder why Joe would put me on his list, but I think I'm starting to understand. I'm starting to understand that maybe Joe is as alone as I am. Maybe one man can never know another man, but if we can begin to understand and comprehend these things that this man does because we also do these things, we can come closer to understand who he is through who we are. He probably had just as hard of a time filling out the form as I did.
After a while I think about the other people that I know in my life, are they as alone as I am? There are thousands of people around us but we still manage to drown in loneliness either because we don't know these people around us or we just don't want to know them at all.
At some point during the night I guess my dream completely shifted focus because I also had a dream where I was in a helicopter with someone. He was the pilot and I was the co-pilot. I looked down at this city, this civilization, and I realized just how little I really knew about a world where there was so much to know. So many people walking, working. So many rocks, roads.
In the human body the heart pumps blood throughout the entire system to get nutrients around to parts of the body, parts such as the brain and the muscles we use to walk. The way of travel is through veins and arteries.
While I'm looking down at this place with so many roads, its structure begins to remind me of human veins. People driving to work along this road, blood cells traveling to the calf along this vein. They do this all for the sake of the bigger picture, for the efficient operation of a large system. The similarities of how our
body functions and how a city functions are uncanny. Every one has to work. Every blood cell has to supply. Every one has to do their job to keep the system in motion.
The pilot moves the helicopter a bit closer to the ground and as he's doing this there is a big automobile crash on a road below. A small problem in a large system. Now the pilot is bringing the helicopter even lower so we can check it out, and then I wake up. I remember in another dream I had when we finally land, we see a lifeless body on a sidewalk near where the crash took place. I can't help but think about Joe's crash. I picture Joe's lifeless body lying on that pavement the same way he is lying here on this hospital bed. Who is this man who lays here sleeping? Who is the man who lays there dead in my dream? Who is that woman that lays in my bed in my dreams and never shows me her face?
Chapter 15:
THIS FISHEYE VIEW
I pick a random composition notebook and take it down from off the shelf. This one is dated from two years ago. Now I flip to a random page, to a random dream, but what exactly is random? If you stuck an invisible magnet on one side of a die and then rolled the die on a floor that would attract the magnet, you can get the die to always land on four, or any specific number that you want, every time. We have applied a specific circumstance or force, the magnet, to the event, rolling the die, which will give us the same output every time.
Now we remove the magnet and then roll the die five times, we will usually get different outputs. While this may seem random, there are still circumstances and forces at work, such as strength and gravity, but if we can manipulate these circumstances and forces we can get the output we want every time. So considering these elements, true random may be the absence of any circumstances and forces whatsoever. No influences at all.
The dream that I end up reading is a dream about judgment. In the dream I am standing before God, and he asks me why he should let me into Heaven. There was a day when I was younger and my mother came to pick me up from school, and in the car I ask my mother what Hell is. She looks at me for a moment, as if she is trying to determine whether I will understand or not, and then she tells me that when we die, we are either sent to Heaven or to Hell.
I ask her what these two places are, and she tells me that Heaven is a happy place where the good people go, and Hell is a sad place where the bad people go. She tells me that the only one who can decide where we go, the only one who can judge us, is God, because God is good.
She tells me never to judge another person because no matter how good we may think we are, there is still that chance that we can become that bad person we are judging later in life. This bad politician who benefits financially from the murder of thousands of people, he could just have easily have been the good general who saves these thousands of lives, if only the circumstances and the forces in his life were different. But we must also consider that in the change of these circumstances and forces, this general could become the politician.
I tell God that I lived my life the best way I knew how, and I tried to be a decent person. I told him he could accept me for who I am, but that I wasn't going to beg him to let me into Heaven. He looks at me for at least a minute, judging me, and then he tells me to start walking. I begin to walk and as I'm walking there is a light that gets brighter and brighter, brighter and brighter and then pitch black, and then I wake up.
My philosophy on the search for the truth is that I can be convinced. Religion, science, the exploration of the universe, if someone's teachings are convincing then I can believe it. There are people who suffer from a massive amount of pride in their ideas and beliefs and there is no convincing them of another truth. They just won't accept it.
These people have this fisheye view where they think they have the answers, they think they can see it all, but they are looking through only one perspective.
They can hear all these things, but they can't see them because they are only looking in one direction. There was a man who said that you should be like water, taking the form of any cup you should be poured in. An open mind is sometimes the difference between salvation and turmoil. Satisfaction and dissatisfaction.
Chapter 16:
THINGS CREDITED TO FATE
Sometimes our dreams take place in a certain location more than once. For some of us it's a lot more than once, some of us may even have dreams in that certain location every month or every year. The location might be an old house, a place you used to play as a child, the place where you met your best friend or your one true love. This place just keeps coming back to you in your dreams almost as if it were trying to tell you something.
While the location remains the same, we don't usually dream about the same thing. Details, plots, people, these properties of the dreams often change. I'd like to say the location never changes because we think it will always look the way it looks in our minds when we think about it.
Even after years have passed and we've moved on from that place, when we think about it and try to remember it, when we try to think of what it may look like now, all we can remember is the way it looked when we left it.
There is this dream I have often where I'm in the military and I am traveling along with a few other soldiers in this deserted area. There are small rundown buildings and a dirt path for vehicle travel. In one variation of the dream we are all riding in a vehicle. I'm in the passenger's seat, there is a man in the driver's seat, and then there is a big open space in the back for the other soldiers to sit in.
I look down at my dog tags, and they are blank. I look at the driver's dog tags, it reads "Max Harper." Behind me, to the left, there is a metal window slider, I pull it up and I can see the other soldiers in the back, playing cards.
Max Harper stops the vehicle and he points towards my window. I look in the direction that he is pointing and I see this sort of glorified mailbox, I have no idea what it is. Max Harper tells me to roll down my window and throw a grenade inside of it, so that the enemy can't use it anymore. I grab one of my grenades but I fumble with it and then it gets unclipped. The grenade is live.
It falls down to my feet, but I quickly recover it. Now I'm trying to roll my window down, but the damn thing is stuck. I try harder, but the time is ticking away. I start banging on the glass, but it won't break. This entire time Max Harper is also trying to roll his window down as well, but he is just as unlucky as I am.
Max Harper then grabs the grenade out of my hand, pulls up the metal window slider and tosses the grenade into the back and effectively kills all of the other soldiers to save our own lives.
In another variation, it is Max who fumbles with his grenade and I am the one who tosses it in the back and kills every one. In another, after one of us throws the grenade in the back, we don't realize we've killed anyone until after we get out of the vehicle and open the back to find ourselves looking at dead bodies.
There are also versions of the dream where there are no grenade explosions. In one variation we are driving along and we come to a traffic light that has no business being out there. As we approach it, we realize the traffic light is yellow, and it never changes. After a while, Max Harper, or whoever is driving in that variation of the dream, he starts to tell me that we can't fool ourselves.
Each one of these variations always start out exactly the same, the other soldiers and I are walking alongside that dirt path, and then the dream unfolds into whatever it is going to unfold into. It's almost as if there is a start point and the end point is determined by the choices the soldiers and I make. Should we get in the vehicle? Should we continue to walk down this path?
The start point can almost be compared to the beginning of the universe, if we agree that the universe actually has a start point, a beginning, and then all these things happen, and all of these decisions and actions are made, and this will become the story of the universe. However, in a parallel universe that starts out exactly the same way as the first universe, one simple decision or action may be altered, and because of this different action and different decisi
on is made, this parallel story becomes the tale of this parallel universe.
The location is always the universe as we know it, but like these dreams I keep having, no variation is ever the same. The universe has so many stories to tell.
The one thing that keeps coming back to me with this idea, this concept, is this "theory" that as decisions and actions and the likewise are made and as time progresses, the less of a chance a nonspecific event has of occurring.
In this explanation, the number of the point is the moment in time, and the letter or letters of the point is the variation of what happened at that certain moment in time. The amount of characters for numbers and the amount of characters for letters are always identical. Point 1a is the birth of one of your ancestors from over three thousand years ago. Point 10gv is the birth of one of your ancestors from one thousand years ago, made possible because of point 1a occurring. Point 100nkd is your birth, made possible because of point 10gv and point 1a occurring.
