When Dreams End, Page 2

  These journals are designed to record each lifetime after you leave the chamber as a temporary solution. Please record what you experienced in the chamber while it is fresh, and read over your many lives so you may find some meaning to it all. When you succumb to going back into the chamber, write the number of days you were free on the board on the back wall to track if you were able to gain any progress in breaking the cycle of addiction. Good luck with making sense of it all. –You”

  Thousands of tiny hand-written numbers cover a board behind me. According to the numbers, I normally enter the chamber every day or two. The longest I’ve gone without living a dream life was seven days. What transformation took place and caused me to reenter so soon?

  Leaving the library, I walk down the hall and into the bathroom to freshen up. Another journal sits on the sink with its own hand-written note attached to the cover:

  “READ ME- Gabriel, you need to come here between dream sessions, so that’s why this journal is here. It’s designed to make sense of this reality, apart from the thousands of dream worlds you create. Any ideas you have about this life and meaning you find can be recorded in here. The truths you find inside may hasten your recollection of painful life memories, so only read this when you’re ready to face your pain head-on. –You”

  Flipping through, I see many stories about me, but I don’t read the details just yet. Suddenly, I’m very hungry. After finishing up in the bathroom, I take my “reality journal” to the kitchen.

  After a few minutes of scavenging the garden, a plate of fresh picked carrots, nuts, beans, and potatoes sits before me. Savoring each bite, I wonder how the experience of eating in a dream tastes just as real as eating here. After finishing my food, my curiosity gets the better of me and I open the journal, ready for whatever story it has to tell about me. The more I learn about my new world, the more I want to know.

  Chapter 4

  Reality Journal

  “The past is history, the future is a mystery, this moment

  is a gift, that is why it is called the present. Enjoy it.”

  -Allan Johnson

  I anxiously read the reality journal from page one:

  “My Story- Born into a family of scientists, I grew up comfortably. While the world fell into turmoil, our family’s situation was pretty good. The government gave large sums of money to people like my father, who were finding solutions to the world’s energy and environmental problems. Wealthy customers also paid my mother and other sleep scientists to escape their misery by dreaming lifetimes inside chambers.

  Other than images of worldwide flooding, famine, overcrowding, and violence on the television, we were spared the turmoil which happened elsewhere due to our isolation. Traveling became difficult, so I never left the Big Island of Hawaii. Humanities resources were devoted to food production and militaries, making the global interactions that brought the world together earlier in the century uncommon.

  With coastal cities around the world flooding, people migrated inland. At 1500 feet up the side of southernmost mountain of the Hawaiian Islands, Mauna Loa, our family home was well above the flood zone. My father’s laboratory was in back of the property hidden amidst dense forest. Directly on top of an active lava tube, the laboratory provided nearly unlimited electricity. While the people below migrated up the mountain to escape the flooding, we held to our large plot of land high above.

  A local group of scientists lived nearby who were family friends. Our closest friends, the Herrington’s, owned a wind turbine farm on the distant island of Kauai. Their father brought the family to the Big Island because he was researching the process of harnessing wind at high altitude on the top of Mauna Kea on the northern mountain of the island. Mrs. Herrington was an assistant at my mother’s sleep laboratory, running a second experimental chamber. They had two children, an older son Greg, and a daughter Allison who was my age. I spent a lot of my time with Allison, my only real childhood friend. We stuck close because all of the other children on the mountain below would always attempt to take things from us or would just ignore us.

  People were going hungry when the heat, scarcity of land, and increasingly impossibility of transportation limited food and water resources. The news showed hundreds of millions of people around the world starving and rioting. Violence broke out everywhere.

  The Hawaiian Islands were relatively peaceful, but people left the city of Honolulu and Oahu for neighboring islands, fearing the eighty foot retaining wall encompassing the city and keeping the ocean at bay would rupture at any time. Similar walls encompassed coastal downtowns around the world to protect them from the rising ocean. The last line of defense, coastal walls were increasingly difficult to maintain because the water continued to rise and resources to repair them dwindled. While people fanned out to the other islands, excessive populations took their toll on fishing and other local natural resources, causing the scarcity to worsen.

  By this time, our family grew enough food in an outdoor garden to support ourselves. When starvation threatened the people below, we knew they wouldn’t let us keep our food to ourselves. One rainy day in December of 2036, they came for what was ours. My father tried to defend our property. Fifteen to twenty men beat him mercilessly, nearly killing him. With most of our crops gone, we knew we had to take drastic measures to ensure our survival.

  A few days later, the Herrington’s lost much more. The same band of looters came to their home and their father and son defended the house with a rifle, firing warning shots. The looters left, only to come back with their own weapons, killing Greg and beating his father unconsciousness. Their home was burned to the ground, leaving them with nothing.

  Devastated, the remaining three decided to sail the family boat to their wind turbine farm on Kauai. We were invited to join them, but my father declined, convinced he needed to finish perfecting his geothermal technology to save humanity. Taking the second sleep chamber, their mother wished to continue her work on a different island. Their boat set sail and we wished them well. Watching my only friend Allison disappearing over the horizon, I feared that I wouldn’t see her again. After they left, concerned for our lives, we abandoned the house and moved into my father’s laboratory hidden in the dense forest.

  By late January of 2037, all of our things including the sleep chamber were moved inside the laboratory, and we then named it the compound. We were able to run everything off geothermal energy so we would never have to leave and give away our concealed location. A wide variety of edible crops were planted in mass quantities in the indoor greenhouse.

  Over the following weeks, television broadcasted the same looting we experienced on a global scale. Entire militaries were utilized to acquire food and resources from less defended nations. The world had plummeted into complete chaos. Things couldn’t have been worse, or so we thought. The unimaginable happened.

  Reports of nuclear attacks on American cities came on television, while concurrent reports of attacks on foreign cities came from around the world. The television suddenly turned to static. A distant low pitched rumbling from Oahu to the northwest was heard outside. The following morning, we woke to a scorched reddish grey sky that continued to darken. We never witnessed the beauty of a sunrise or sunset again.

  Over the following days, temperatures plummeted due to the scorched sky blocking the sun. It was soon below freezing and gunshots and screams came from down the mountain. Freezing temperatures killed the vegetation concealing us, bringing the ocean and town below into view.

  With nothing hiding our location, we worried more looters would discover the compound. Days passed with no signs of life from the town, putting our minds more at ease. We were convinced we were alone, until one quiet night we realized our mistake.

  I woke in the library to yelling from my parent’s bedroom next door. Two men found us and broke into the compound. They wanted our food and would kill to get it. Without thinking, I ran to the kitchen and picked up a knife.

  Swiftly approach
ing the large man who was beating my father repeatedly, I stuck the knife deep into his lower back. He screamed in pain as blood stained his white shirt. He fearfully looked into my eyes and fell to the floor. The second man stopped struggling with my mother. Rushing me, he yelled “I’m going to kill you!” He was soon on top of me, with hands around my neck squeezing tightly. My vision faded to black, just when my father jumped on top of him. I blacked out.

  I awoke on my parents’ bed, my mother at my side. A wet towel was draped around my neck, soothing the soreness from being nearly strangled. My mother told me I was brave as I regained consciousness. I asked where my father was, and she said he had killed the second intruder after I blacked out. He was outside burying both of their bodies.”

  A vivid flashback of my hand thrusting a knife into a man’s lower back jolts me away from the journal. Memories of my terrified parents under attack fill my head. Suddenly consumed by fear and rage from that night, I see a glimpse of how important my parents were to me. Feeling ill, I run to the bathroom.

  Chapter 5

  Memories

  “We cannot change our memories, but we can change

  their meaning and the power they have over us.”

  -David Seamens

  Splashing water on my face, I pull myself together. I had done what was needed to save my family that night. I return to the kitchen and read more from the journal:

  “After the attack, temperatures dropped several degrees. We fearfully waited for more attackers to come. Occasionally, gunshots were still heard from the town below, making us wonder if it was a murder or suicide. Despite our fears, nobody came to the compound again.

  We slowly adapted to our new lives of solitude. The snow line crept down the mountain every day, and flurries soon filled the sky. Not long after the first snow, a thick layer permanently blanketed the ground. The final vegetation died off, and the lush island completed its transformation into barren and frozen tundra.

  With the vegetation gone, the coast was clearly seen below. The massive glaciers that were forming at the earth’s Polar Regions caused the ocean to retreat. Ice soon formed nearby, small amounts collecting by the shore, which merged into larger chunks that dotting the coast, and finally the ocean was completely frozen to the horizon. We inhabited a planet of ice.

  Weeks passed while we waited in hopes that someone from the mainland would come for survivors. My mental state began to deteriorate because of thoughts of Allison, killing the intruders, and what has become of our world. Reading, working out, spending time in the greenhouse, and sleeping, were my weak attempts to distract myself. Nothing kept my mind off the new depressing reality that we were alone.

  A few more days passed. I woke up and my parents were sitting in the kitchen. I walked in the room and they yelled, “Happy birthday!” They sang and we ate dessert. After the celebration, my mother said the sleep chamber was ready for me to use. She explained it would be therapeutic for me to get away from my traumatic past and to experience other human interaction. My father refused to use it, and my mother would only use it occasionally, after which she seemed detached from us for a few days. Desperate, I agreed, and soon dreamt entire lifetimes every night.

  The chamber is a remarkable invention even if it has a downside. It transplants me into different but complete lifetimes and distracts me, allowing me to forget my past. Before entering a lifetime, I select several parameters, including the theme I will live in. I can be a 3rd century Chinese fisherman in one life, the Pharaoh of Egypt in the next, and a successful business executive in the one after that. Designing the overlying parameters and events in each of my dream worlds, I become the main character of a life of my own design.

  After lying inside, a temporary state of amnesia is induced by brain scan, bypassing my middle and long term memory. I soon don’t remember anything about this world or any of the other dream worlds previously entered. A sleeplike state is induced on my body and I enter my “new” life where I become a baby in knowledge and understanding. The memory void is quickly filled with the new experiences inside.

  The pad I place my head on sends stimulating electrical signals to various parts of my brain creating a realistic mental world inside. The electrical stimulant creates everything in full detail and enables me to remember each experience with vivid clarity. Time seems to slow down, but my living brain here is accelerated. This higher rate of brain processing speed enables the creation of a lifetime of experience in a single night of sleep.

  When each dream lifetime ends, I always wake inside the chamber here in the compound. At first my memory extends only back to the last time my brain was scanned just before I was “born” into the previous life. Shortly after awakening, the memory suppression scan starts wearing off. I slowly recall my lifetime here and memories from other dream lifetimes.

  Unfortunately, there’s a downside to this process of escape, because every lifetime involves painful memories. When these memories flood back they add together to a sum total of residual pain that’s extremely difficult to handle. Like a drug addict going through withdrawal, I break down and feel as though I can’t continue existing outside the chamber. Always succumbing to utilizing the only solution readily available, I re-enter the chamber, perpetuating the pattern.

  This is how I began my endless cycle of addiction as a teenager. My mother saw me changing and thought this was the only way for me to be happy. Unfortunately she was correct.

  Over the following weeks and months I lived many lifetimes. In one of these lifetimes I was a martial arts master in the ancient world. Living to an old age, I died defending a kingdom falling to invaders. Following my awaking here, I found my mother sitting in the kitchen in tears. After asking her what was wrong, she explained where I was and what happened during my last dream.

  My father realized we weren’t producing enough food to survive and function as a family. Right after I entered the chamber eight hours ago, he went to the town below, which had been quiet for several months, in search of food and supplies. He had not yet returned. My mother was worried because he was several hours overdue.

  I had to find him. She attempted to stop me, but I refused. After donning a cold weather suit and taking a large knife from the kitchen, I set off for the town below for the first time since the sky was scorched.”

  Another flashback- My mother is crying, I remember her in a helpless state of panic. How I miss my family! A second memory of apprehensively leaving the compound into the brisk morning air in search of my father fills my head. The memory blockage from my last time in the chamber is starting to wear off. Memories associated with emotions are the first to break through. Turning back to the journal, I want more, even if more knowledge means more pain.

  Chapter 6

  Alone

  “What you leave behind is not engraved in stone monuments,

  but what is woven into the lives of others.”-Pericles

  I continue to read the journal, picturing myself enacting every word:

  “Trekking through the frozen wasteland, the only noise was the howling wind and crackling snow under my feet. The crusty snow collapsed with each step, my feet slipping through to the jagged rock and dead underbrush. Although in a hurry, the terrain made my progress slow. The landscape was barren save a few dead and leafless palm tree trunks ready to fall. Approaching the quiet town I jogged the last stretch to the back of a house.

  Looking down the empty street, all was quiet. Knowing that if anyone else was still alive, they would be only concerned with their own survival, my senses heightened. Many empty and burned out buildings lined the streets. Something was terribly wrong here. Broken windows and an empty interior were all that remained of both the general store and hardware store on the main street. The sky brightened ever so slightly during the early morning hours.

  Walking down a winding side street lined with houses, I suddenly smelled a faint burning and wondered what caught fire. Realizing that only another person could have lit anythi
ng here, my adrenaline raced. The road curved, so I was unable to see in front of any more houses. Carefully peering around the corner of the house, my view of the street opened. Peering farther, I saw the glow of flames that were lit inside a steel drum burning in front of a garage. The fire appeared unattended, but I couldn’t see inside the garage from my present viewpoint.

  Skirting around the structures, I moved into better position behind a house across the street. Looking past the fire into the garage, what I saw next was terrifying. Two men were sawing something on the concrete floor in the front of the garage by the fire. A third man cleaned a hunting rifle in the back. Looking closer, the men were sawing the chopped remains of a human body! Sick to my stomach, I closed my eyes. The men were cooking the body piece by piece on the fire. There were still survivors and they were cannibals!

  Studying the scene further, a fourth person was tied to the bumper of an old car inside the back of the garage. My stomach sunk while the light of the fire illuminated the face of my father, motionless and hidden amongst shadows. Something had to be done to these monsters. Unnoticed by the men, I quietly made my way behind the houses and back around to the side of the garage.

  I assessed the situation - two men with filet knives in the front by the body, a third cleaning a rifle on a table in the back, and my father tied to a bumper behind him. Recalling fighting skills from my last lifetime, I removed my knife, took a deep breath, and moved into action.

  Running around the corner I held the knife blade to the neck of the man cleaning the rifle by the table. I demanded they drop their weapons and step outside. The two men in front angrily jumped up, stood their ground, and eyed me for an opportunity to strike. I made it clear that if they didn’t get back they would have another body to eat. They stepped back for a moment. Nudging my father, he was breathing. I also made it clear that I was going to take the rifle and leave with him. Nobody moved and we remained in a tense standoff.

  Suddenly, a larger fourth man emerged from a door in the back and charged. The other three men attacked in unison. A lifetime of fighting skills kicked in and my body automatically responded.