Every night for the past few days dreaming has been muted; I simply didn’t drop into any scenarios – my vantage point was from afar, and not involved in anything that happened.
This morning was entirely different.
Most of my readers already know me, sometimes when sleep is interrupted around 1:30 or 3:00 in the morning, I will check in on Twitter to tweet the fact that I just woke up. A boring routine at best. Looking at the phone again, I decided not to post, the algorithm has pushed my tweets far from the eyes of anyone who cared. This morning several factors caused me to wake up, I was deeply dreaming something mundane and forgettable. The dog has been sleeping with us for several months, he got up to shake himself off at 2:30, waking me up. Opening my eyes, I could see that the light from my wife’s LED iPhone charging cord was flashing, disturbing the darkness. The inevitable bathroom trip was at hand.
With my head now back on the pillow at around 3:10, I felt like I had at least another 2 hours of sleep, dreams or not – before Leo jumped off our bed to signal it was time to get up to pee. That worry was just enough to light the spark for what happened to me next.
That worry was just enough to light the spark for what happened next…
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Leo was crawling up on my chest for me to wake up but I couldn’t move, usually I’ll slide my hand down to pat him on the head and scratch his chin, my body was immobilized. Panicking, with the realization that my body was caught in the grip of paralysis, I tried to call out to my wife – she was still asleep. Gaining movement of my mouth I began calling out to her “Babe… Hon” “Leo has to go, but I can’t move” her breathing was deep and she didn’t hear me, my voice was barely a whisper. The dog had moved up onto my face almost smothering me “I know, I know Leo… wait! Get off my face!” Turning to my wife pleading for her to wake up did not work, slowly parts of my body were waking up and I was trying to call out. Leo had jumped off the bed ready to go. The next few minutes was a struggle to break out of my hypnopompic prison. Finally my arms and legs began to move, but there still was no response from my wife as I thrashed around trying to pull the covers off of me. Frustrated by this epic turn, I whipped the covers off and pushed off the side of the bed, this woke up my wife – she got up with me and I explained what happened. She decided to go with me to take Leo outside, concerned that I might not be in my right mind.
Opening the bedroom door, we stepped into a nightmare. It has been raining for several days, off and on. This morning the rain must have been constant – the living room just outside my bedroom was flooded, holes in the ceiling pieces falling down and my son and son-in law were just sitting together on the sofa, they were waiting for us to wake up to tell us the bad news. I looked up and said “This much damage in only a few hours of rain?” The boys told us that this was pretty much the situation all over the house that they had come downstairs because the rain had flooded the upstairs bedrooms. The front wall of my house had disintegrated, outside across the street, my neighbors homes had suffered the same fate. The devastation looked as if a tornado had whipped through my neighborhood. I asked the guys about my daughters, what happened to them? Fern and Tina would have been upstairs sleeping – the looks on the boys faces were grim. I started up the staircase to look for them, just as I made it halfway up the ceiling began to fall from the living room above the sofa where the guys were sitting. There was no time left, we had to leave the house before it collapsed! My wife pulled me by my shirt and the boys ran out of the house.
Stepping outside the scene changed. My “wife” and I walked up and down the flooded streets of the Bronx looking for survivors of the catastrophe. We searched for neighbors, the fronts of buildings were collapsed. In a storefront a woman was picking up some of the clothing items she sold, I commented that maybe she can get back to business when this was all over. The woman looked up at us and smiled which I thought was odd, she turned and blushed a bit. My “wife” said to me “She’s smiling because your naked.” I began to blush, how could we leave the house and I not know? The cold rain didn’t affect me, I started running back to the house, nude to try to find clothes… My vantage point changed again, I was watching myself running up the street nude at top speed in my younger body. I just laughed.
A new episode began right away, the transition was flawless. I was looking out a large window inside a craft, or maybe from a high-rise building staring at a bright blue sky – a large white shape that I had seen before was turning circles in the air. This reminded me of the bloated shape of a Tic-Tac UAP! The movement was slow, floating like a blimp but making vertical loops in the sky gracefully. I thought that maybe it shouldn’t be out there too long – before military jets arrived on scene. Thankfully the craft kept turning vertical circles as if it were a bucket on an invisible Ferris wheel while slowly fading out from reality. I was astonished that the craft had vanished. A deep familiar male voice chimed in next to me on my left – “Those craft can cross dimensions and simply left this reality” as if he were explaining the workings of his world. Before I could turn to see who the voice belonged to, my head began to fill with visions of craft flying with the same characteristics – as the narrator tried explaining how the effects on mass were not disturbed by this type of travel – he demonstrated by pausing the scene of a female riding a personal transport shaped like a motorcycle. The image was vibrating against the narrators’ time dilation. He then went into details that explained how this was possible.
As usual, I missed part of the presentation because my mind was wandering, I was more concerned about the fate of the woman on the sky-cycle who was straining against the interruption. We were on a craft ourselves, probably the same as the one that faded from view, now it was time for us to return to the reality of the narrator – the military craft were closing in to our vicinity – we pulled away and in an instant we were flying in the sky lanes of another world! This looked like a future earth – the unmistakable shapes and insignias of UPS and Fed-ex trucks were flying around in highway patterns with other vehicles – all were large – I didn’t know if this reminded me of Star Wars or The Fifth Element. The narrator was now gone, I was the pilot of a delivery vehicle that was much older that the one we were flying in before. The vehicle was landing itself automatically, I had jumped at the controls as if the descent was an imminent crash. All I knew was my trust of this vehicle paled with every trip, my assimilation into this dream was complete. Instead of a nice soft touchdown on a pad or loading area, the craft piloted itself through a back-alley in a rough looking industrial part of town – it figures that I would be a smuggler dropping off my haul. Just before the end of the road a man steps out of a doorway holding up his hand and causes my ship to slow down by skidding on the undercarriage or sled feet underneath.
This ship is horrible, I hate making runs in it. The side door slides open and I jump out mouthing off to the dock supervisor or whatever his title is. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, I’m going to crash one of these days!” A quartet of thugs appear around my craft holding tough looking dogs on chains – one guy holding an unusually large brown Chihuahua lets him loose. The dog charges at me catching me by the pant leg, I yell “Hey! WHAT THE FUCK MAN?!!” Kicking the dog off, it decides to latch onto my left hand, biting in deep. Message understood, these guys are not to be messed with. The smiling thug called his dog off and the boss was now ready to do business with me. I can’t remember any pain in my hand but the must have been. The dream starts running quicker, as if the reel of film had cut at the end and was spinning…
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Inside the building again, there was a commotion going on, people were scattering around as if chasing each other, this was a confusing scene to drop into. A group of my “friends” show up “C’mon LET’S GO!!!” the young woman yelled at me yanking me in the opposite direction down the hallway nearly separating my head from my shoulders. We were after another group of people, there was no time to explain why we had to catch them. Bounding down flights of staircases, the building went through different iterations, changing from modern, to pre-war, to Victorian to the Subway. We exited the staircase in a station, losing our intended targets in the crowd. The lone woman in our group had a quick thought to turn back towards the stairs and the restroom area just beyond. She began banging on the locked door furiously “OPEN UP, WE KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE!!” My “friend” loved shouting at the top of her lungs. The latch behind the door slid open with an audible clack and a booming voice from within was heard “Keep your pants on! There’s only one stall working in here!” The door opened up and a giant of a man at least seven foot, steps out from a crouch to exit under the door. He reminded me of The French Angel and George the Animal Steele combined. Hairy and shirtless, dripping in sweat holding a large roll of duct tape he states “There’s no more paper, you can use this” handing the roll to our woman friend. His voice tainted with a British/Irish inflection with Acromegaly scared us – he wasn’t part of the gang we were after. Dejected that our prey had long gone after wasting our time with this pooping giant, we started our way back upstairs from the station. We said nothing most of the way up the stairs, reaching the modern section of the building we started out from, my “friend” looks down at me from the landing, holding the roll of tape over the rail and says to me “Do you really think that guy was using this to wipe his ass?” I thought the question was funny enough to try and imagine what it would be like for this giant using slim strips of sticky tape on his hairy…
Aware I was imagining something totally hilarious and absurd, the dream started to fade out quickly, leaving me confused as my mind released me into my bedroom. Checking the time on my phone, it was exactly 5:08AM – my two hours were up.
I lay there trying desperately trying to remember everything as it happened, the sequence of events were jumbled and swirling, trying to disappear back into the void where it was created. I caught onto the clues and wispy threads of information and slowly built the narrative back into view.
The fact wasn’t lost on me that I had a paralysis event inside the dream, the Old Hag had imitated Leo this time. The pressure on my chest and I could feel the familiar fur of my dog, but since he was pressed against my face, I couldn’t be sure it was him. The first part of the dream wasn’t lost on me as well. Before falling asleep I tweeted out my goodnight… “Time to touch the sky…
Gabe Miranda lives a stones throw from uptown Charlotte, enjoys Star gazing and creating chaos on Twitter. Currently working on editing diary posts to self publish his first book.
