Dream Myself Alive At Christmas, Page 3

He then proceeded to explain somewhat randomly about how he lost the first great love of his life – which, and don’t laugh - had been his pet cocker spaniel dog Goldie.

  He discovered that she would come to him in his dreams. It was as if she was still alive, just in another dimension, the dream dimension if you will. Many people believe (apparently) that when you dream you are actually entering another realm, an alternate reality I guess. And if you’re clever enough, you can actually teach yourself how to control this alternate reality and what happens in it (apparently) by waking up in your dream.

  As you can see, I wasn’t instantaneously convinced. And if you haven’t already put on a white coat, personally yourself, to escort me to the nearest mental asylum, I applaud you.

  Here’s the science: Oneiros is Greek for dream, hence where they get the name Oneirologist, pronounced ō′nī-rol′ŏ-jist. Oneironautics refers to the purported ability to travel within a dream, usually on a conscious basis. A traveller in a dream would therefore be called an Oneironaut.

  I felt like I was at NASA, only the rocket I was taking wasn’t to the moon, it was to the inside of my subconscious psyche!

  Anyway far be it for me to bog you down with jargon, so from this point on I’ll simply refer to myself as a ‘Dream Walker’. But I’m getting ahead of myself here. Even though I wanted to be believe it was possible, with every inch of my being, I was a little bit… okay, a lot sceptical.

  Dr. Irving was telling me that my dreams were effectively real, just on kind of another plane and that Kelly was still alive on that shall we say alternate reality, as she had only died in this one. Awesome, what time was the next train and how soon could I move there? Well there wasn’t one and I couldn’t. But I could go there as often as I liked (apparently) so it sounded almost as good.

  I just had to figure out a way of how to get there. And it wasn’t quite as easy as it didn’t sound.

  Dr. Irving went onto explain that these astral planes are also known as ‘dreamscapes’ and they are simply other dimensions that we commonly enter every time we go to sleep, every single night that we dream. Sometimes we might enter a dreamscape created by a friend or a family member. And sometimes they might be created by the soul of a friend or a family member (or even a complete stranger) that has passed, left this plane and is in the spirit world.

  Yes, ghosts dream too, apparently! Who knew?

  And we’re all already interconnecting telepathically; we just don’t know it yet.

  And there you have it: Dr. Stefan Irving’s theory on how to get back together with your dead girlfriend!

  Waking up in your dream?

  As I said I was sceptical. It sounded crazy. I didn’t believe it was possible. I didn’t believe it was a sane concept.

  But I digress that YES…

  I can… now wake up… in my own dream.

 

  Chapter 5.

  My mother always told me as a child that if I ate cheese before bedtime I would have nightmares. I don’t know where she got this from or if it was true or just an old wives tale as such but as a 12-year-old obsessed by 1980’s horror movies, I once devoured a whole pack of cheese triangles hoping to bring a pizza faced mass murderer into my dream. Unrequited death wish or not, it sadly didn’t work.

  And now here I was aged 40 and ¾ doing pretty much the same thing.

  All I knew was that I had to find myself in REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, as this is the state when you are most likely to wake up in a dream, and waking up asleep enables you to control the dream. It’s called lucid dreaming and it’s not as crazy as it sounds, though I’m not sure who I’m trying to convince: you or me.

  The mind is at its most active during this part of the night, but the hardest part is finding your way there. However, a trick I quickly learnt was the power of the snooze button. I set the alarm on my phone to wake me up at about 5.30am with a soft, somewhat relaxing tone. I originally chose the sound of a harp playing but it was so delicate and gentle, I barely stirred. However, duck’s quacking (again, don’t laugh) seemed to do the trick. Anything louder or abrupt and I was too instantaneously wide awake. The sound of quacking ducks jolted me enough to hit the snooze button and then I found myself there…finally… awake, but still in the dream.

  Although it wasn’t the most exciting of dreams.

  The ducks wandered off and I was at work, restoring an old antique stereogram system. It was a Ferguson 3362 from the early 1970’s that I’d picked up from a household clearance store, one previous sadly-now-deceased owner who’d had it in his loft, gathering cobwebs for over twenty years. All the wiring looked intact and I could get the radio to work, but the turntable was only playing records from one speaker. I’d already tried changing the needle to no joy, so I took the cartridge out of the stylus arm and fiddled with a few of the wires. I put it back together and hey presto, it worked.

  And that’s when things went haywire, as they often do in dreams. The sultry blonde temptress of my favourite 1980’s pop band suddenly appeared, trying to tempt me with her wily ways. She was wearing a small piece of torn velvet curtain wrapped around her like a boob tube and a mini skirt made of sewn together, used dish rags. This was a typical pop star look from that era. As a 12 year old boy I was in love with this woman, who I also might add, I thought was really old at the time. She was 21.

  “Kelly, where is Kelly?” I repeated, over and over in my head.

  I closed and opened my eyes and... uh-oh. The wrong Kelly. My 2nd pre-teen crush from an American TV detective trio suddenly appeared and was also lavishing me with her sudden affections and wanton loins.

  All I needed now was Daphne from the Scooby Doo cartoon to show up and 1980-me would have died and gone to heaven.

  There was a knock at the door, but alas it wasn’t Daphne. Nor even Velma, mores the pity. It was unsuccessful coffin-dodger Walter Perkins, aged 82 and quite dead but standing right in front of me, wanting his stereogram back and me arrested for crimes against music for having dared to play my said favourite 80’s pop band’s record on it.

  Walter had been dead for quite some time, so was looking a little bit worse for wear, and his left arm was almost rotting off.

  Anyway, the next thing I knew I was arrested, imprisoned and sitting in a stone cold cell. Did I mention I was also now suddenly naked?

  And I was throwing dice. I knew if I got a double six I would earn a get out of jail card. So I did it over and over again, but no joy ahoy.

  Kelly was nowhere to be found, no matter how hard I concentrated and tried to will her into the dream. And then the ducks started quacking again and this time I woke up.

  Weeks passed and I was becoming more and more obsessed. I’d had a taste of the realm of possibilities. Basically it seemed anything was possible in my seemingly warped subconscious mind, so I was more than determined to make it so.

  In one dream I ‘entered’ I encountered a violent hurricane, an attack of killer bees and a profanity spouting rhinoceros (!) all in one day.

  And can I just say until you’ve had a rhinoceros tell you to fuck off, you really haven’t lived.

  But no matter how hard I tried, how much I persevered, it was as if something was deliberately trying to hold me back and keep us apart...

  ...perhaps even something in my own subconscious psyche?

  Chapter 6.

  “So how do I find her again?” I asked Stefan.

  I was agitated. It’d been a couple of weeks since I finally found Kelly in my dreamscape. It had taken me so long the first time. And I was growing impatient.

  “First you must master the craft”, Stefan replied rather glibly. “It can take years of practise.”

  The bottom nearly fell out of my arse. I don’t have years, I thought. I wanted to be with Kelly now.

  “I’m not sure dream walking is for you,” Stefan sighed.

  “I’m a little worried I was premature in suggesting it.”

  I surmised I might be coming across a
little too desperate, perhaps a little too obsessive. But I just needed something, some form of hope to cling on to. Dr. Irving had given me a lifeline, however whacked out or crazy it sounded. And I knew it did. And I didn’t care. All I cared about was finding my way back to Kelly again. And maybe it was an obsession. And maybe it was unhealthy and all the wrong things it probably shouldn’t be, but I’d reached the point of no return. And I wasn’t going to take no for an answer.

  You have to understand what Kelly meant to me. This was a woman that got more beautiful with every breath she took, and now beyond some. I liked to call her my precious jewel. My forever beautiful Kelly.

  She was a few years younger than I was, but she still shared the same love of an 80’s childhood I often wish I could go back to. Life was so much simpler then... at least for me anyway.

  Kelly’s upbringing wasn’t quite in the same bed of roses, mostly due to Olivia Montecarlo, her overbearing mother. Olivia is what I call a relig-a-holic, with particular emphasis on the turning water into wine part. She also likes to control how everyone else lives their lives, but only obeys half of the ten commandments herself. Love thy neighbour, unless he’s not straight or not white or not devout, and that kind of still living in the past mentality, governed by a fictionalised fairytale of strict rules to live by.

  She predominantly promoted what those stuck in that era love to, in my humble opinion: intolerance, xenophobia and hate, though I think most of that is simply down to low, old spec brain ram and lack of modern day education.

  So Kelly’s childhood was a torturous endurance of rules and regulations, having to do this and not being allowed to do that. Of course that kind of parenting usually results in rebellion, and Kelly and her mother hadn’t seen eye to eye in a long time.

  Kelly’s father Charles wasn’t so much henpecked as easily laid back, usually literally. He was too busy having a catalogue of affairs to care or really interfere otherwise, though believe it or not Mr and Mrs Montecarlo have stayed together, probably because no-one else would have the horrendous, fire-breathing dragon lady or he who is too afraid to even say boo to an invisible ghost.

  It was just as well Olivia was too occupied driving Kelly crazy, as Kelly’s little brother Ben was hiding a secret that would have gotten him hung, drawn and quartered in the Montecarlo household: he was dating an Indian, oh and did I mention this also happened to be a man?

  Kelly and Ben were very close of course, like most siblings from warring-yet-futile parenting often are, so it was a little devastating that the crash that ‘killed’ Kelly also put Ben in a continuous vegetative state.

  They were travelling back from a day out together, recreation at a safari park; Kelly was in love with the giraffes there, followed by a bit of retail therapy at an outlet centre. They did so much together that it’s tragic they endured the accident together too.

  Kelly was driving and pronounced dead at the scene. Ben was the front seat passenger and has been comatose since.

  I wasn’t even in the car but have felt trapped between those two states. Well until now, that is. Until Dr. Stefan Irving fed me the hope of a kind of life after death with a woman I refuse to live consciously without. And now, here he was suggesting taking that newfound hope away from me or at the very least delay it. Take it easy? Be patient? I don’t think so.

  When he left the room for a few minutes to see his secretary about making another appointment for me, I browsed his bookshelf:

  ‘The Truth About Lying’...

  ‘Finding Your Sanity in an Insane World’...

  ...and then I saw something that really caught my eye:

  ‘Counting Sheep: The Science of Dreams’.

  I left his office that night, feeling determined. If Dr. Stefan Irving wasn’t going to help me find my way back to Kelly again, then I would surely find a way myself.

  Chapter 7.

  If I thought fighting my way through an obstacle course on a land mine - naked and blindfolded - while being attacked by a horny, demonic succubus tribe was hard enough, I was soon to encounter something that made all that seem quite tame in comparison: Olivia Montecarlo.

  If Godzilla had been reincarnated as a woman on earth, then this was surely her. And that’ll teach me for creating a dreamscape she would find herself so welcome in…

  While out walking my invisible pet dog Aisleyne somewhere which looked like the deserted terrain of an uninhabited planet (as you do) I found what looked like a giant floating and rotating glass mirrored sphere, that was actually a time travel machine.

  Who knew?

  Anyway, somehow I suddenly found myself in Phoenix, Arizona, 1963, kidnapping a pop star - who shall remain nameless – at the top of his game, and like a rubber ball we came bouncing back to current day (via the time travelling sphere, of course) where he performed in my very own charity fundraiser for The Protection of Hedgehogs.

  Here I was enjoying a spectacular (if somewhat peculiar) duet of his biggest, bounciest chart hit, performed with blonde 80’s US teen chart sensation Debbie Whatshername, when it was just as spectacularly interrupted by the dreaded dragon lady herself.

  “Have you accepted Him into your life, yet?” she bellowed. It was as if her voice had an implanted boom box, turned on maximum volume with full added bass.

  I hadn’t seen Olivia since Kelly’s funeral. It was the wrong time to hound me over my atheism then, just as it was now.

  “You will go to hell, Zachary Knight,” she warned me, not for the first time.

  If it meant I never saw Olivia Montecarlo again, I think I would be happy to. But now this creature was even coming into my dreams to try to dissuade me from my apparent wrong way of life.

  This did get me thinking though. Did heaven exist? Was Kelly there? I thought about it for a second. Then it readily hit me. Kelly! What if Kelly was playing hide and seek, hiding from her overbearing mother in the dreamscape I’d created, just as she did as a little girl?

  I hunted high and low but to no avail. Kelly really was simply nowhere to be found.

  Olivia was a most unwelcome intruder in my dreamscape and she was evidently stopping Kelly from coming through as well, so I tricked her into stepping into the sphere-like time travel machine and sent her back to 1583, a time I was sure her beliefs and way of life would be most accustomed to. It felt cruel but I couldn’t stop smiling. If only it could be this easy in real life.

  Then another thought popped into my head. What if heaven did exist? And what if it really was a place on earth?

  Suddenly Disco Brian’s Magic Fun Bus pulled up by the roadside. I quickly hopped on, excited for the journey ahead.

  It felt like we had gone halfway around the world twice. I’m sure there’s a juxtaposing oxymoron there. But still, what an exceedingly delicious mystery tour this was turning out to be. The drinks flowed nonstop and party lights flashed to the beat of only my very favourite drum.

  The seas had evaporated, connecting every city and every country in the world. One world. I liked the thought of that.

  So anyway, we first arrived in America via LAX, which was now a converted Magic Fun Bus Station. 300 miles and 5 hours later we were passing through Death Valley, which I thought was rather appropriate. Then we came to an abandoned ghost town right in the middle of it.

  Was this heaven? Was heaven in Death Valley? And was Kelly in heaven? I had so many questions as I got off the bus and it boogied off into the distance.

  Suddenly I was alone and you could hear a pin drop. I walked about a kilometre and came across an empty saloon bar. I entered through the swinging doors and put a dime in an old vinyl jukebox. A busty barmaid appeared, chewing on straw. She looked me up, then down.

  “She’s been waiting for you,” she said, nodding towards a booth in the far corner.

  I could feel my heart beating so high up in my throat it was virtually coming out of my mouth. I walked over. The woman in the booth had her back to me but certainly looked familiar. Well the back of her hea
d did anyway.

  She turned around.

  It was Kelly.

  She took another breath and was more beautiful yet again.

  Chapter 8.

  It looked like a massive venom-spouting killer tarantula. In actual fact it was a hardly frightful, barely-an-inch-wide common British house spider and the nearest and biggest thing I could find to crush it with was a bible.

  I had no idea how a bible had found its way into my home. I guessed that Kelly’s mother had planted it there in another futile attempt to try and save me from Satan’s hellfire… and… CRUSH… now she had only helped in the exact opposite.

  I pondered if all the spiders you kill on earth might be perhaps waiting for you when you get to heaven… if you get to heaven… if heaven exists.

  And now here I was in the apparent very same place with the woman I loved more than life itself, and not a single spider in sight.

  “I thought I’d never find you again,” I said as I clutched Kelly’s hand, tears streaming down my face.

  “I’m always here Zac,” she replied, using a tissue to dry my eyes.

  “I’m wherever you want me to be.”

  The more I thought about this, the more it made sense. I just had to relax more in the moment. Not be so desperately tense. And chill out. Maybe I was finally getting the hang of it? Perhaps I had it in me to be a dream walker after all?

  Kelly and I had spent a glorious two weeks in Los Angeles about a year after we met. We stayed in Hollywood, drove all around California and spent a day in awe of the pure nothingness that was Death Valley. We had strangely loved the place and had always planned to go back. And now here we were.

  I ordered the same breakfast as we often had on that trip: Pop Tarts, washed down with a bottle of California’s finest White Zinfandel wine. We then reminisced and laughed about some of our other most awe-inspiring travel misadventures.

  There was the time we had been in Brisbane, Australia all of twenty minutes when we were accosted by the police for trying to park our rental car against the line of traffic. I mean, who knew? It was a little hard to take authority seriously in khaki shorts and we would have wound up in a quarantined slammer, if heaven forbid we had British mud on our shoes during the then infamous mad cow disease scare. This, despite having spent a week in between trekking the rocky terrain of Langkawi, Malaysia.