Over the span of a century Matthew traveled and dreamed, dreamed and traveled—and in the dim space between dreams he often wondered how far he’d come, how close he was to his destination.
Matthew didn’t know for certain. Sometimes, it seemed as though he’d been dreaming, waiting to be awoken, forever, for centuries, millennia. And other times, it felt as though he’d gone to sleep only seconds before. That he’d wake up on the other end to find that one hundred light-years had passed by in the blink of an eye.
Then, one day, Matthew dreamed a different kind of dream—a dream of things he’d never seen, of a foreign planet that had no place in his memories.
The dream began in a haze, a cloud of luminous, white space dust. Then the planet—an orb mottled in shades of pink and orange—emerged from the haze and grew bigger and bigger until the orb blotted out everything else.
He passed through another haze as his consciousness entered the planet’s orbit, descended into its upper atmosphere. Then yet another clearing, the dissipation of the haze and his first vision of the planet’s gently undulating surface, the rounded, swelling hills like waves, like a sea of bodies sleeping one next to the other.
Closer, he saw that the waves on the planet’s surface had their own waves, a pattern within a pattern: a sea of grasses that rippled with the wind.
The colors were strange: below, the grasses were painted in vivid shades of purple and burgundy; above, the sky was pinkish orange from one horizon to the next. Embedded in the sky was a glowing orb: a sun, creeping across the sky.
The dream sped up as if on a video loop; the sun rushed across the sky and knelt to touch the land. Then the vision slowed again as the sun hit the horizon and began to dim, to turn a bright red that blended with the distant grasses. The sky exploded with shades of purple and red, mirroring the planet’s surface, until he couldn’t be sure which expanse was land and which was sky.
And then Matthew’s feet were on the ground, pressing through the prairie as the grasses bent against his knees. He came over a hill, and saw her.
A girl. She lay in the cleft place beneath a small hillock, her eyes closed, a ragged, sleeveless cloth dress covering her from her shoulders to her knees. Her skin was gray. Her hair lay pooled around her head, black but reflecting a rainbow of colors in its strands.
She was beautiful. And she was in pain.
The girl’s eyes snapped open. She sat up, propped her hand behind her, and looked at him.
“Who are you?” the girl demanded. “What do you want?”
“Don’t be afraid,” Matthew said, reaching out a hand to calm her. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
At that moment, a shock of electricity coursed white-hot through Matthew’s body. The girl disappeared as Matthew’s eyes snapped open. He sat bolt upright and gasped. At once, the real world flooded in around him, overwhelming his senses. He was sitting in an open cryochamber, his legs submerged beneath several thawed inches of the blue liquid he’d been sleeping in for the past hundred years. To either side of him sat Sam and Dunne taking choking gulps of the air, trying to find their breath just like he was. And above their heads, through a small circular window, a planet loomed.
Matthew was awake. He had arrived.