Temporal Tantrums

Stay where you are - don’t move. Stay where you are - don’t move. Stay. Stay - don’t move - don’t move. Don’t move, mustn’t move - can’t move. Mustn’t move. Can’t move - trapped

Until the fixed time. Time. Fixed time. Fix. Fix time. Fit it - fix time. Device. The device. Can use the device. Fix time - use the device.

To create a portal. Create a portal. Portal. Create a portal - fix time. Trapped. Create a portal. Use device. Fix time. I am coming to get you.

Subject: Horaios

Locator: 284.14.000-23

Assessment: REM sleep phase showing signs of partial awareness of probe.

Recommend: Run psycho-heuristic and general pre-erasure scan.

Why do our brains tell us stories in our sleep, engrossing us in dreams we so soon forget?

Does the subconscious hide in us, wake and know freedom whilst we are dead to the world?

If lucid dreams foster artificial memories, and the ‘real’ world can be induced into inner space, dream-reality confusion and false-awakening loops threaten to leave us all in two minds.

Mist’s dreams of late were unusually lucid and colourful. She still dreamed all the usual things: lingering impressions of recent events; dim, soft-focus recollections of childhood; the perplexing peculiarities of people she knew. Yet, recently there was a sense of greater depth, of greater intensity, greater purpose even.

It wasn’t unusual for Mistletoe to be swept up in wild night-time flights of imagination. Her sleep naturally conjured a phantasmagoria of wonders and peculiarities: pink hedgehog-things that strained to get into her mouth; shape-shifting creatures that turned on her as soon as she trusted them; candle-tailed foxes of glowing Autumn orange and lurking strangers whispering nostalgia in the dim peripheries of her room. Sometimes she was glad to wake up, thankful it had all been ‘just a dream’.

Her most vivid dreams often arrived just before waking, when the last lingering mists of sleep were not yet dispersed by the morning sun. Today was one of those days.

In her dream, as the light angled through her windows, she wandered languidly from room to room, picking up different items as she passed, turning them over in her hands.

Mist turned in her sleep, contented, enjoying her dream, when a sense of something faintly

awry began to seep into her thoughts, began to bother her. Something was not quite right.

She watched as she moved about the house. It was all so ordinary. Still, something about the dream made her feel increasingly uncomfortable. As her fingers brushed ornaments, pictures, everyday things she gazed at them with casual interest as though they were new and curiously unfamiliar to her.

In the dream, she came into her bedroom, smiling, looking at the things on her dressing table:a violet glass bangle. an orb-like silver heart with a delicate inscription, a rose preserved in a box. But, a creeping uneasiness was making the sleeping Mist moan and shift restlessly under the covers.

The dream Mist ran her fingertips along an assemblage of make-up, eye-liner and scents in elegant bottles. Then she turned her hand revealing something held deliberately between thumb and forefinger: a slim straight pin. Her smile tightened. That wasn’t normal. What was wrong? She found herself feeling heavy, detached.

Detached.

There it was. Mistletoe just didn't ‘feel’ this person in her dream. It was like her alright, identical; but that consciousness of ‘living’ the experience inherent to a dream was lacking. It felt like watching someone else. Detached. The sleeping Mistletoe felt a growing discomfort and an urge to cry out. Her mouth seemed remote, a distant place where just the faintest of whispers hung between her lips, “ffvvv…” She felt a suffocating weight on her chest.

Now, the Mistletoe in the dream was leaning over her, peering down, holding the pin as if looking for the best spot to jab it. She wanted more than anything to wake up, to move! That wasn’t her. Who? “Who's there?” As Mist motionlessly, noiselessly gasped, the other Mist leaned closer, the sharply cut bob of her hair drifting forward, the pin glinting in a shaft of morning sun that stabbed through the curtains – ready to stick it.

A bedside alarm bleeped – Mist woke instantly, rolled over, stopped the alarm, then looked round disquieted. No-one there, a dream. Just another dream. She relaxed, sank back into the pillows, began wondering, “Where do these dreams come from?” A moving shadow passed across her field of vision and she sat up, barely breathing, unsure if her eyes had been open or closed. The movement of the curtains? A remnant of sleep? A false awakening? Dream within a dream? Was she still asleep – something like that? The room was empty, Roan must already be up; relax, a few more minutes in bed.