Old Vancouver

March 19, 2063  

I woke up that morning trembling with disbelief, violently shaken from the dream I'd been having. It'd been so long, so many years since I'd had a dream — and a terrifying dream it had been. 

Adrenaline was still flooding my body. I forced myself to take a deep breath and closed my eyes, trying to remember what had happened. I didn't want to remember, but old habits — even very, very old habits — die hard, as they say.

This was my first memories of that dream:

I was at the Red Sea in Sinai, Egypt. The sea was a bright welcoming, shiny turquoise. In the distance, the mountains of Saudi Arabia lifted from the sea and above them was a pure, clear sky of the deepest blue. I felt amazing—my body was strong. I was walking on the beach toward Arabie's hut, to go swimming.

Everything seemed perfect, but then suddenly there was a girl beside me on the beach. She wanted to go swimming with me. Just as we entered the water, there came a storm and clouds covered the sky.

I felt a darkness racing down the beach towards me. Something was coming for me — chasing me, looking for me. I wanted to run, but I couldn't move. My body was so old.

I looked around and realised the girl had disappeared.

I dove into the water to find her. I was terrified because I couldn't see the bottom. I sank deeper and deeper. At first I thought I was drowning, but then at some point I was able to breathe in the water.

I kept floating or swimming down until I hit the bottom. In front of me was a cave and I felt compelled to enter it although I didn't want to.

Inside the cave was a woman. A woman who told me... that something horrible was happening and I needed to find Blue Jay to make it stop.

And then I'd woken up.

I lay back in bed, staring at the gap between a stack of books — something horrible was happening and someone was looking for me!

No, no no! I grabbed my pillow and hugged it to me. It couldn't start again. The dreams couldn't start again. I resisted what was happening. I knew I should get up and find a bloody pen and write that dream down, but you know what I did? I squeezed my pillow instead.

I thought I had been released 29 years ago, but the dreams had found me again. Did I do something wrong? Am I being punished? Those were my disturbed thoughts. Of course I wasn't being punished, I knew that, but it felt like it.

The dream had come out of no where. 

Why now? I wondered. 

Despite my fear, I felt a deep sense of recognition, or familiarity, with a state of being that has been at times more a sense of self than the flesh and bones of my body. Dreaming. I used to be a Lucid dreamer. But that's a story for another day. Right now I'm telling you the story of the day I woke up from a dream after 29 years without a single nocturnal vision. 

I took another deep breath and tried to convince myself that it had been nothing, and it almost worked. Within minutes the details had faded. It had been a dream about... a cave. That's all I could remember. And something about... Egypt. 

What's so bad about a cave? I asked myself, but deep down I knew the truth — the dream was ominous.

Regretfully, I opened my eyes and propped myself up, looking around my dusty bedroom with the strangest feeling, as if I were seeing it for the first time from the eyes of a stranger.

Beams of orange morning sunlight poured through my grimy bedroom window and illuminated a room full of books. Books formed a wall from floor to ceiling, some on makeshift shelves that I had cobbled out of bits of lumber Michael had found for me, some just stacked, end on end, never to be found, never to be read again. Not that anyone else around here reads — they'd just as soon burn them for warmth. I looked at the book on my bed that I was reading — something by Asimov, fodder really — and couldn't bare to pick it up.

I leaned back and closed my eyes, allowing the weight of my body to be fully supported by the bed. My joints were aching. I breathed slowly, trying to calm myself down; my chest felt tight and the deepest sense of frustration and loneliness overcame me.

When I eventually crawled out of my bed that morning, I was still out of sorts, and my back and joints were aching fiercely. It was just my luck that I ended up tripping on a book lying on the floor, which, at my age, is no laughing matter. One broken hip and I'm as good as dead.

I went tumbling into stacks of precariously balanced 19th century English classics — Dickens, Bronte, Sawyer — at the foot of my dresser,  and ended up buried under a mountain of literature. 

Lying there in a very uncomfortable position, I lost control at last, and began cursing and screaming while throwing books across the room — something I knew I would regret later, but which felt precisely the right thing to do at the time. I picked up a Hemmingway—a hefty missile—and threw it at the dresser. The glass smashed. 

It felt good to destroy something. It felt powerful. In that moment I would have been happy to destroy my entire apartment. Lying there I realised that the dream had woken something up in me. Something I didn't want awake. 

I began to cry. Wasted years, wasted life. Nothing but books. Nobody but me and the characters in my books. All alone. 

I was sobbing, feeling very sorry for myself, when I heard a noise from the other room. I shushed myself to listen. It was the young Michael calling out for me. He'd probably been in my apartment for a few minutes and I was suddenly very annoyed and wondered if he'd heard me cursing or crying like a baby.

"Hello, Shalon?" he called softly from the hallway outside my bedroom door.

"Go away!" I shouted, which was a senseless thing to say, since I wouldn't have been able to get up on my own. I looked at myself, covered in books, my head resting on a giant webster's dictionary that had fallen over, and realised that this was somehow a very fitting place for me to be, all things considered. This got me laughing: tangled up in books — that's what I am.

"Are you... sure you're alright?" he shouted from a respectful distance.

I took a deep breath and yelled, "No, no. Get in here and help me, Michael." I just had to surrender to the situation.

After a moment, Michael cautiously opened the door and peeked around the corner into the room, looking nervous and licking his lips. He tried unsuccessfully to hide his look of shock at the state of my bedroom. He'd never been in here before. 

I followed his gaze, seeing my life through his eyes, and cursed myself. The room was a book-padded dungeon — anyone could see it. The only book-free area was a narrow path from the door to the side of my bed and a small space in front of the window. The books were stacked up to the sill, and the only reason the stack hadn't progressed to the ceiling was that the light allowed me to read during the days when I didn't get out of bed. I felt ashamed and would have started crying again, except I would never do that in front of the kid.

"Are you okay?"

"Ha! Do I look okay? Get over here and help me out of this mess!" My tone was like a whip on the young boy, who shrank visibly. Such a sensitive boy. I had to be more thoughtful, I scolded myself. I took a deep breath, feeling guilty. 

Maybe this was what you're being punished for, some part of me said silently. I pushed the thought away, forcing my rising anxiety down. This was no time for that. I'd figure out what was going on later, when the kid was gone. For now, I just needed to get out of this mess and into the kitchen so I could get a damned cup of tea.

Michael was picking up books at my feet, setting them neatly on top of other stacks. He wasn't following my filing system and it irked me, but how was he to know. "Really, I was very lucky you came by this morning, Michael."

His face brightened as he continued clearing books away, handling them gingerly, as I had instructed him to, long ago.

I suddenly felt tender toward him. He was a good kid. "Oh Michael, you've really saved me today, you know."

He grinned at me, as he took a grip on my hand, leveraging himself against the bed. I groaned and got up with difficulty, cursing because my joints were aching double.

Once I was up, I dusted myself off. "Shall we have a cup of tea then?"

He bobbed his head. He wasn't one for speaking much, which was just as fine with me.

"Go start the fire and fetch us some water then."