The dreams were so real now that I hardly knew what was reality and what was not. In school I would drift off into recollections of the previous night and return surprised that the floes of shimmering blue ice were mere desks, the cliffs only blackboards and the grunting walruses simply teachers insisting on an answer to a question I hadn’t heard. I just couldn’t be bothered. The concerns of the real world seemed irrelevant compared to those in my dreams.
One day I was walking across the schoolyard with Wayne, one of my friends from the team. Sarah and a few other girls were walking toward us. I had never made any secret of the fact that I thought Sarah was beautiful, but she had never shown any sign of being interested in me. Her crowd was the school elite, and I was a long way from that social circle. As we passed, she looked straight at me, gave a smile that would normally have made my knees turn to jello and said cheerily, “Hi, Dave.”
I just kept walking.
When we were past, Wayne nudged me hard and said, “What are you doing? I thought you were crazy about her. Why didn’t you stop and talk?”
I just shrugged.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I didn’t feel like it.”
Wayne shook his head, “Man, you’re getting really weird,” he said and walked off.
The truth was, I really didn’t feel like myself anymore. I was constantly thinking about my dream self. I really was getting weird. All I wanted was to sleep and dream. I stopped going out with my friends so that I could go to bed early. On weekend afternoons, I snuck away from whatever chore I had been assigned, curled up, and slept in an attempt to return to my other world.
Some nights would bring two or three short dreams, others just a single long, involved one. Either way they were always in order and always advanced the story. They also varied from simple images, which stood on their own, to complex dream-memories of things my waking self could know nothing about. Sometimes it even seemed like my dream self was keeping a sort of spoken journal. Whatever form my dreams took, every morning I could remember each one as if I had actually lived it.
I was becoming obsessed, and people were beginning to notice. Teachers commented and asked me if everything was okay at home. My parents asked if everything was all right at school. Even my friends gave me a hard time about never doing anything with them. But I didn’t care; my dreams were everything.
But I couldn’t ignore the real world entirely. One day I came home around supper time. I was just reaching up to open the door when I heard Mom’s voice from inside. It was loud and she sounded upset.
“But we can’t go on like this,” she was saying. “You have to sell that business. It’s not working.”
I stopped and listened even though I had heard this before. Dad had tried everything at one time or another: selling cars, real estate, landscaping. They were all failures and it was always Mom who spotted it first. Dad tended to always look on the bright side and blame the economic climate or unreliable suppliers.
His latest project was running the local franchise fried chicken place. It’s called Fingers ’n Wings. He even had a secret batter recipe. It should have stayed secret. The stuff tasted like cardboard and it had the texture of partly-set carpenter’s glue. The guys at school laughed at the place and wouldn’t be seen dead there. So the only customers Dad got were the little old ladies who came in on “Seniors’ Wednesday” to gum their way through a few soggy fries and maybe a donut. Even they didn’t try the secret batter. The chicken place was the worst of Dad’s ideas, and right now it wasn’t doing well.
“There’s not even enough money coming in to pay our debts, never mind buy groceries and clothes,” Mom continued.
“It needs a chance to build up a customer base. It’s....”
“Its had three years,” Mom interrupted, “and you still only get six people on a busy night. Face it, the chicken place is a failure.”
That was the wrong word for Mom to use. I guess Dad felt she was calling him a failure and he got very defensive.
“I’ve built that place up from nothing,” he shouted. “This town needs a place like mine. It’s just a matter of time.”
I heard footsteps coming toward the door and jumped back. The door flew wide open and Dad stormed past me as if I didn’t exist. I went in. Mom was standing in the living room. Her back was to me, but I knew she was crying. I went to my room and closed the door quietly. I felt terrible. I was angry at Dad for making Mom cry. Sometimes the fights worked the other way around and then I felt angry at Mom for being unfair to Dad. The dreams were becoming more and more tense and now life at home seemed to be falling apart.
In the past, the fights had made me feel so helpless that all I could think of was running away. I never did, but I would lie in bed and plan how I would do it. I would plan what I needed to take with me, when would be the best time to leave so that they wouldn’t find out, and where I was going to go. Eventually I would fall asleep and in the morning the fight would be over and the thought of going and living on the streets of Vancouver wouldn’t seem quite so attractive. As I lay in my room this time listening to the silence, I began to think that escape was the answer, both here and in my dreams.