Chapter 13: What My Soul Does When I Am Asleep by Stephen Simpson

It is eerie to physically see something you have only seen in a dream.

While we drive home, I try to understand what just happened. I must have seen his face before. Maybe someone I am friends with on Facebook is friends with him, in a friend-of-a-friend kind of way. I must have seen his profile image and then I started dreaming of him. It can be the only explanation. Maybe I clicked on his profile and saw his name, and this is why I suddenly know his name so clearly. When I read his file, he was only another Barclay. Now he is my Barclay.

I hardly speak to my parents after we get home and while we have dinner. I am too busy trying to figure it all out in my head, without having to tell them anything. They will ask, “You don’t really believe in those things, do you?” I can already hear the mocking tone of their voices, the glint of amusement in my dad’s eyes, as well as Isaac’s shrill laughter.

After I say, “Goodnight,” I go to bed. I settle myself in under the blankets while laying on my back in the dark. Closing my eyes, I take a deep breath, which lifts my chest. I want to try and imagine being part of the universe, so I imagine a bright, white light shining on me from the heavens above. I imagine there is no ceiling or roof above me, and the stars are twinkling in the night sky. I stretch the light further up until it seems to be coming from somewhere beyond the planets and galaxies. I imagine the light fills first my heart and then it spreads throughout my body. I imagine the light shines from my hands and feet as if I am a four-light torch. I sense a movement at the bedroom door, and I hear my name, “Gaby.” I become aware of a dark shadow walking closer to the bed and then standing next to the bed, looking down at my body.

I am afraid.

Seriously frightened.

I fight to wake up.

I am battling to open my eyes, but then I force them open and I feel a gush of air fill my lungs. It feels as if I am pushed back into the mattress. My breathing is heavy, and my heart is pounding. I can hear it in my ears.

“What was that?” I say. It sounds loud in my empty, dark room.

Too afraid to fall asleep, I lay staring up at the ceiling whilst forcing my eyelids open even bigger. My eyes dart to every shadow.

I am standing in front of the house again. The house I never go into, but this time I feel I should go up the stairs. I must open the door and walk into the house. I need to find out why I seem to have happy memories of this house. Why it feels as if I have lived here before, even though I do not recognise it from a bar of soap.

For the first time ever, I let my gaze drift to the side of the house. The house shares a wall with a large stone church. The steeple rises high above me into a powder blue sky, and I have to crane my head back. As I lower my head, I notice a hill behind this house, and I can see the outlines of gravestones and crosses. My eyes wander back to the house. As before, a light breeze tucks and pulls at the lace curtain in front of an open window.

I step forward and lift my leg onto the first step. The wood is painted white. My hand folds around the white painted railing to my side. I walk up the five steps and then I am standing on a wide wrap-around porch. I assume it wraps around the house, even though I can only see it going around the corner to my right. To my left, there is a wall, which must belong to the church.

I walk across the porch, and my hand lifts and pushes against the door. It swings open at my touch. Standing in the doorway, as the door inches inwards, I can see all the way down a long narrow hallway. There are doors leading off the hall and at the far end of the hallway, a room opens to the side, but I can only see the wall across from me.

I take a hesitant step into the house. I walk down the hallway. Sunlight reflects off the light blue linoleum on the floor. At the first door, I glance into the room. It is decorated with furniture from the sixties. Furniture I love. Furniture I have pinned onto my ‘Dream Home’ board on Pinterest.

I move on further into the house. Sunlight washes through the house from unseen windows.

At the next door, I stop. In this room, there is a long table with people seated around it. I do not recognise most of them, but in the middle of the table, on the far side of me, sits Barclay. He guffaws as he passes a dish with what looks like potatoes to the person sitting across from him.

He does not notice me.

A woman comes in from a room across from me, carrying a serving dish with a large roasted chicken while laughing. This group of people looks happy, as people would at a large family gathering.

Next to Barclay there is a young girl with long, dark auburn hair and facial features the same as Barclay’s.

Then I understand. I am dreaming of dead people having a meal together, and they all seem happy to see each other. The girl next to him must be his younger sister who died in the car accident. This must be like a homecoming meal for Barclay. But Barclay is not dead. He is just trapped somewhere in his mind. That is all it is, isn't it?

“Barclay?” I ask.

He looks up, startled, and then smiles when he sees me. “Gaby. You came.”

Was I ever invited? Am I dead?

He pushes away from the table and squeezes past the wall and chairs until he can walk around the table to me. From the corner of my eye I see two oval-framed photographs hanging on the wall next to me, and under the pictures there are one of those old-fashioned display cabinets. The glass is gleaming clean. In the cabinet, on glass shelves, I can see Christening booties, a plastic girl and boy taken from the top of a wedding cake, a porcelain doll and a doily covered porcelain tea set.

I jump when Barclay takes both my hands in his. “Come, we’ve saved a place for you.”

I shake my head.

Terror courses through me.

I do not want to be dead.

“You remember everyone, don’t you?” he asks.

No. I am sure I have never met them before.

Again, I shake my head.

Then we are walking hand in hand toward the lemon tree. The sun is hazy yellow above us in a pale blue sky. Marshmallow clouds cover the hills to our sides.

“I miss you,” he says.

I glance at him. “I miss you too. Why were you in that house?”

“Do you not remember? That house is our story. You and I used to live there, and I came back to it after the--”

“The accident?” I ask without thinking.

He ignores my question and smiles as he pulls me in under his arm. “When we dream, there are different places we can go. One is a place we know from our memories. Sometimes even memories we do not know we have. Then there are normal dreams of people and places who exist in our everyday lives. These are the most believable dreams, and we will probably wake up, thinking it was a nice dream, unless of course, a person has violent tendencies, then I suppose the dream would not be so nice at all. Some things in this dream might be unfamiliar, but they would not be strange or difficult for us to figure out. Then there is another place I have discovered. Our souls are not from this world and so sometimes it might travel to a place where material things do not exist. A place when then and where is here. In this dream world, we can create things we are used to, to make it more comfortable for us to stay. We can surround ourselves with any material possession we know and love, to make it easier for us to adapt to these new surroundings.”

“Is this the reason you were in that house?”

“It is. It is a memory I have of us, together. My mind brought everybody I love into the house as well because I wanted to stay. I could not bear facing my reality. You never came though, until today.”

“I've dreamt of the house before, lots of times, but I've just never gone into it. Did I die, and that's why I went into the house?”

“No, of course not. The mind has a strong resistance to change and we have been programmed consciously from birth to be afraid and scared of what the possibilities are beyond death, so it can be daunting when our souls first arrive in a place where there are no laws of gravity, where everything is not made of matter. Where everything is purely a state of being, and to us it might feel like dying, so we resist it as much as we can. Your soul just drifted here, to a place where it is supposed to be.”

“It's strange that you say our souls drift around, because my grandma is obsessed with computers and she thinks our brains are central processing units from where every command runs through and is then routed to its appropriate destination.” I cringe a little when my soft chuckle ends in a high-pitched nervous tenor. “And she says our souls are the programming chips. So, if our souls are not from this world, does it mean she is right? Are our souls only taking up residence in our bodies and our souls are who we really are?”

“What do you think, Gaby? After every strange dream you've had. Finding me in your dreams, even though you don't know me at all. Don't you realise it's destined for us to be together?”

I smile up at him. “My grandma also told me my physical body is limiting my potential, and my conscious is fooling me into believing all physical things are reality, that I am only made of mere flesh and blood, when in actual fact I am so much more than just what I can touch and see.” I shake my head to clear my mind of the silly notion.

He pulls me even closer to him and brushes his lips against my forehead. “Point made. When we are awake, we cannot understand everything. We know there is more to life, yet we cannot grasp the idea of what it is. There are things and plans in motion that are beyond our understanding.”

I turn my face up to look at him. Unsure, I ask, “Do you remember the accident you were in.”

He gets a blank look on his face.

I decide to push forward with the idea in my head. “You remember how your safety belt broke, even though those things are supposed to be welded to the frame of the car and are near impossible to actually come undone?”

His arms drop away from my body, but he remains standing close beside me, looking down at me. A trace of fear lurks behind his eyes.

I continue, “You were thrown from the car, and landed in a freshly dug pile of sand. It was a relatively soft landing in my opinion.”

He takes a step away from me.

“You were saved from burning to death in that car, Barclay. This is profound. Can you understand the immensity of this happening?”

He takes another step away from me.

Then we are standing in the shade of the lemon tree, and I reach up to pick an unshapely leaf. After rubbing the leaf for a short while, I lift it and inhale the sweet, sharp scent of lemons.

His shoulders slump as he turns to face me and he says in a low voice, “There is this barrier, like a firewall, that lowers when we wake up from sleep, erasing the dream or the memory of the dream. It’s like a magic slate board.”

“Is this why you refuse to wake up?”

He lifts his hands and rests them on my hips. “Gaby...” His voice is a soft murmur.

I look up at him, into his huge blue eyes.

“To me, you are more than just a dream.”

I feel my blood rush to my cheeks.

The corner of his lips lifts in a smile as he lowers his head to mine. He plants a soft kiss on my forehead, then rests his forehead against mine. His arms creep around my waist. I want him to hurry, to kiss me before this dream fades into another. I want this dream to last. I know with such enormous certainty I am supposed to be with Barclay. The certainty is overwhelming. He feels like home. When his lips eventually settle on mine, they are soft and yielding.

I lift my arms and place my hands on his shoulders.

His arms tighten around my waist and he pulls me closer to him.

Then Barclay is no longer standing beside me. I am in a big square room. It looks like someone’s family room and it is a room I do not recognise. Across from me there is an old grandfather clock, and below the face of the clock, a large bronze disk swings slowly from one side of the wooden rectangle to the other as the clock rattles the minutes off. My eyes dart to a television straight ahead of me. The TV fits snugly in a wooden cabinet and there are two doors on either side of the cabinet, as if when the television is not being used it is locked away in this cupboard. The grey glass screen in front of the TV bulges out, unlike our flat screen TV at home. On the sides of the screen, there are wood panels with grooves cut into it, and I assume this is where the speakers are. On the one side in the top corner there are two large dials.

The television comes on all by itself and the room is filled with the noise of static. The rapidly moving grey and black dots on the screen disappear, and then Barclay is inside the TV. He bangs his fists against the glass from the inside.

I can see his lips moving, but all I can hear is static. I will myself to hear him. It is not as if I have actually been talking to anybody in my dreams, their words just form in my head, and my reply is a thought in my own head as well.

Lifting my head off my pillow, I feel a wave of nausea sweep over me. It must be something I ate. Maybe there was something wrong with that cake I ate in the cafeteria yesterday. I lift myself onto my elbow and look around the room.

Where am I?

When I open my eyes again, I am looking up at my mum and dad towering above me. They look worried.

My dad asks, “Did you fall off the bed?”

I look up at him, confused.

Panicked my mum asks, “What are you doing on the floor, Gaby?”

My dad bends down and pushes his arms in between my arms and my ribs. He folds his arms around me and lifts me up from off the floor.

I feel something in my ankle roll into place.

Then the pain deletes my every thought.

Continue reading Chapter 14/19

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