a dream retrospective

Before I met him, I was in a steady downward spiral into a deep, unending abyss, a yawning black hole that consumed every ray of sunshine in my life with its terrible visions. I have watched myself and felt myself be shot, stabbed and torn apart more times than I can count on both hands. I have experienced the searing burn of being nearly disintigrated into a pile of no more than blood. I’ve died.

I’ve been tortured, irradiated, nearly wiped from existence. I’ve had limbs torn off, organs ripped out, but those aren’t the dreams that get to me the worst, no. The ones that eat me alive are the ones where the people I know are hurt, or broken, or the enemy. The first time I watched Anya die a horrible and painful death with no way to stop it, it destroyed me, mentally and emotionally. I never had a vision from that world again, but it was enough to seal the deal. Before that point, I don’t think I ever realized what these were.

After the dreams became violent, I became distant. I started skipping class and leaving home to hide away in the woods, in a treehouse me and my sister had begun to build, because I couldn’t be near anyone. I couldn’t trust them for everything I had seen. Somehow, though, Anya would always find me. And so I grew… well, maybe even a bit clingy? I had seen her die so many times that I believed I needed to be there all the time. Because if I was there, I couldn’t make the same mistakes. I could protect her, even though she didn’t need protecting. I could keep her from losing her mind even as I lost my own.

The only thing keeping me somewhat together were the nice dreams, where I was well-acquainted with a gentleman of sorts. I never even knew his name, those dreams were far enough between at the time, but he was out there somewhere in those dream worlds. The first time I saw him, I remember watching a stony, world-weary face melt into a gentle smile, with soft eyes. I remember making him laugh, and feeling my heart stolen away. But those dreams were one in a thousand. That man couldn’t be real.

Ma and Mom tried their best for me, and I love them both to death. But it was the same deal. I watched them die horribly. I saw them hurt. I tried never to let it show, but I knew it did. I knew the pain showed right through, and I knew they worried. Ma has always been the more social one, she tried everything she could to get me out of the shell I was slowly constructing for myself. They were good times, nice times, and I cherish those memories and I know she meant well, but at the time they were always hung over by a shadow of doubt.

One night, she took all of us out to a nice bar she had found after I nearly had a mental breakdown. Anya hung out on the ceiling, preferring to stay to herself in a place like that. Mom got pasted and tore up the dance floor. Ma hit on a plushie that I know I’ve seen before and ended up fucking her pregnant wife in the bathroom. And me? I was sitting there barely through a second drink, watching a Lucario and an Arcanine have a hushed conversation, wondering why it was so calming that I had never seen them before. There’s a lot of people I had never seen before, what was it about them?

Anya and I ended up going home with them that night, and not in the sexual way. The Lucario could lift Ma, and that was a herculean task to me at the time. We needed a place to stay, because we wouldn’t make it home the way we were. Home, at the time, was a shitty apartment on the bad end of town, anyway.

I don’t know what it was about the place that felt so downright safe. That night, I think I had the mildest dream I’d had in months. I slept soundly. And when I woke up, Mom was in the middle of setting up a couple of apartments at the place for us. One for her and Ma, and another for Anya and I.

For a while, things turned upward, at least a little. I was able to get back on my feet a little bit. Xan wheedled his way into my heart astonishingly quickly for the wall I had built around myself, becoming something of a dear friend of mine even then. We’ve only grown closer as the years have passed, really. I met my teacher, another dear friend, not long after that. At the time, I never saw her before either. I was amazed at how swiftly she was able to tame my Ma before she went on a rampage. I wanted to learn that art, to keep Ma in check, to learn how to better defend myself and my loved ones, and out of a legitimate interest, an outlet for all of my pent up energy.

We established a schedule for lessons not long after that, one which I maintain to this day. As I grew in strength and prowess, I felt my confidence build up from the ruins it once was. Life got better, and I began to heal from the deep scars the dreams left. Not completely, never completely. I began to see their faces in the dreams too. But I knew I could defend them here, where it mattered. And I knew they could defend themselves.

And at the same time, the dreams featuring that gentleman, with his soft dark chocolate eyes and his long and beautiful hair, grew more frequent. Sometimes it was just us two. Sometimes, there was a third involved, a woman who you’d swear was made of sunshine and rainbows despite all she’d seen and been through. Some little fragment of myself knew my heart really belonged to them, even if they weren’t real. I began to include stargazer lilies in my flower gardens, just to have at least one little piece of one of them.

Soon, I was set up on a date with a lovely woman in her own right. Q and I are still friends and bandmates, don’t get me wrong. We were set up because she ticked all of my weird niche fantasy porn buttons, and it was nice while it lasted. We never really dated, so much as sat around the house when she didn’t have work at Ms. Amethyst’s store, but it was relaxing.

After Xan was kidnapped, things began to go downhill again, and quickly. Everybody was shuffled off to foreign countries – Nan took us to Scotland, while everybody else was sent to Russia. Before I was forced to leave, I saw what became of him. With my best friend’s fate uncertain, separated from the people I had come to let past my walls, the dreams grew more frequent again. They eased up a little when we, too, were taken to Russia to have a celebration with the Storms, but they hit me fast and hard. Even once we were home again, the feeling of safety was robbed from me, and I began to spiral out of control again.

It became so bad that I legitimately feared waking up one day over Q’s body. I knew I could never break Xan, and Anya did a good job of keeping me under control, but her… I had already given her scares in the past. We broke up soon after everything was said and done with the mafia. She wanted to go off to theater college, anyway. I never told her the real reason I thought it would be best if we split.

I threw up a mask, tried to hid the cracks in my aura from Xan and the fractures in my mind from Anya. There were things I enjoyed doing. I loved video games, I loved gardening, I loved reviewing pornos, and I loved keeping myself in shape. It was easy enough to make it look like I wasn’t losing my mind, but I think on some level, they knew I was headed for dark places no matter how legitimately I loved those things. I know they just wanted to see me happy.

It came to a head one Christmas morning, where I woke screaming and terrified and enraged from a dream in which my sister was kidnapped and tortured and mutilated and Xan had to pin me down until I stopped. Later that day, I had my very first flashback. Not long after that, the gecko was brought to the house by Death himself, and I almost tried to kill them on sight, because they masterminded it in the dream. They hurt her. It was the first time I had ever seen anyone or anything that hurt her in the dreams in reality, and I didn’t take it well. It stung bad when I learned that this was Ms. Sadik’s very best friend whom she talked about so often. The one that was hospitalized and bedridden.

Not long after that, though, I went to the local sex shop. I knew the owner well. Sometimes I would stop by just because, even though I was cagey about her at first, because I had seen her face before. That day, my sister and I were in to purchase aftercare products because we had put a video of questionable nature on the internet and we were still roughed up.

That was the day I first saw him. He wore a stone-faced, world-weary mask, but when I looked him in the eyes, I saw it melt away into warmth, just like I did the first time, and so many times after. It was mind-blowing to me that he was even real, it felt so much like looking at a unicorn. I was scared to talk to him at first. I ran off because I didn’t want him to know why I was in. I didn’t know that he knew. Enough badgering, though, got me to finally see him out on a date.

It was strictly business, at least at first. We wanted to drive off protesters from his sister’s store. But as the day went on, it was amazing how he seemed to know me like the back of his hand. Know what would get me, know what I liked. That first date ended with us two in the woods making love in the sunset like a couple of randy teenagers. Like we knew each other all along. Little did I know, we had known each other for what must be, collectively, decades.

I didn’t find that out until his father kidnapped me to meet the family. Anya badgered me into spilling the beans, like the shitlord she is. He assured me I wasn’t alone. That we weren’t strangers to each other. I don’t think I had ever been so relieved in my entire life until that moment.

After that, the dreams got easier to deal with. I could talk about them on a level I could never talk about them to anybody else, and I learned that it was easier to sleep if I had him to keep me bound up in vines and held close. Xan tells me that after he entered my life, it was as if somebody had slam dunked the sun into my aura and filled in the dark cracks he kept seeing. Anya was surprised to learn that the ‘dream man’ I was so smitten with was a rich businessman, but I hope she grew to appreciate him. Nan even came to like him after a while, but I think it’s mostly because he makes me legitimately happy.

The scars I’ve been left with may never really heal. I still have flashbacks sometimes. I still see terrible things sometimes. Whenever I see a face that I know from the dreams, I still have to adjust to what they are and who they are in this world. But it’s gotten so much easier to handle than it was when I first came to this place. I don’t feel like I’m breaking into tiny pieces anymore. I don’t want to kill myself anymore.

Some things don’t change between the dreams and here, of course. But I’m much more ready to take on the threat of a mob man tearing through the veil into my reality and spreading like a virus than I would be ten years ago. I know now that I can take him on. I have the confidence in me to join up with this resistance and take back our city.

I think I’m in the best mental state I’ve ever been in, despite everything that’s happened.