1
Now I lay me down to sleep.…
* * *
Dreams are like runaway trains, and we, their passengers. It’s a simple truth of dreams that we may ride the train and see the worlds and visions it opens to us, but we are helpless to change its speed or divert it from its course. Dreams go where they will.
Sadly, or perhaps blessedly, most of the adventures presented to us on these nightly forays are lost upon waking, wiped clean by the churnings of the conscious mind, which demands control and has no patience for the train. Yet some small fragments may linger: a feeling of joy or terror, an image, a sound.
Lucid dreams are different.
Unlike their relentless yet forgettable cousins, lucid dreams are remarkably memorable.
Within the realm of lucid dreams, the normal rules do not apply, allowing some to take control. Like a Hollywood director, they can script their actions on the fly, reveling in the godlike freedom to create, enjoy, or destroy at will. The greater the capacity to imagine and create, the more powerful they become, like mages and demigods from some video game, spinning the world to their liking.
The laws of nature are no obstacle within a lucid dream. In such a state, one might soar over snowcapped mountains, scuba dive in blue Caribbean water, or walk in space. Magic abounds. In a lucid dream, the dreamer is in control.
* * *
Jason Norris has never had a lucid dream.
As cofounder of the prestigious Norris & Lambert, an accounting firm in San Jose with offices in New York and Houston, he’s rarely been accused of showing even the slightest hint of imagination. He reads voraciously, but never fiction. He plays games, but only those that are numbers based. He collects coins and bills, but only because they speak to the history of ledgers and counting.
His wife, Alice, says he likes his spreadsheets more than the spread of her legs.
It’s not entirely true—they do have two daughters.
Despite his machinelike brain, Jason enjoys fly-fishing. He was introduced to it in college, and it’s the only sport-related activity he was ever good at. It’s no surprise then that in this, his first lucid dream, he finds himself at a favorite spot on the Upper Kern River, a fly rod in his hand. He knows every bend, pool, glide, and riffle for miles—yet instead of fishing, he finds himself standing at the edge of the water, perplexed.
This is not the river he remembers, this place beyond sleep.
* * *
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.…
* * *
The hills are the same, as are the trees and the collections of riprap gathered here and there, forming pockets of still water. Even the air smells of the wild just before spring, as the Upper Kern so often does. Yet, as comfortable and familiar as these things are, Jason finds himself distracted by something … unfamiliar.
There’s blood in the water.
It seems to start at his feet—just the surface spread from a few translucent drops, resembling a thin sheen of oil. But as he watches, the red grows deeper, expanding out. It doesn’t wash away as one would expect, diluted by the river, but instead defies gravity and spreads in all directions. Soon, the stain reaches across the entire breadth of the river. Some of it washes downstream, but more seems to move upstream, like a dark mass of spawning trout.
No, that’s wrong, Jason thinks. Not spawning salmon—shadows, undefinable darkness upon the river that only he can see.
Jason doesn’t believe in God.
The divine isn’t something you can quantify and calculate. God multiplied by creation does not equal life, at least not in his perfectly ordered brain. Still, when he hears the rustle of feet next to him and turns, he half expects to see Moses with his staff extended to the water, turning all the Kern to blood in a lesson to Pharaoh.
It’s not Moses.
It’s something else.
As Jason opens his mouth to scream, the dream ends abruptly. He awakens to darkness, utter and complete. Even the comforting glow of the night-light is gone. The bulb must have burned out, he tells himself; either that or Alice moved it. The air is stifling, the bedroom claustrophobic.
* * *
If I die before I wake …
* * *
As he starts to jerk upright, his head strikes something and he flops back down. Attempting to lift his hands to feel for the obstruction, he discovers that they too are blocked, as if someone had built a low ceiling over him while he slept.
It only takes a moment for realization to settle heavily in his chest, a bowling ball resting on his sternum: this is not his bed.
Fear begins to take over and Jason claws at the obstruction and pushes it with all his might. His breathing grows short and shallow as a sense of claustrophobia rises within. “No, no, no!” he pants, the words giving way to whimpers. He searches his pockets for a match, a lighter—anything that’ll shed light on his situation, but finds them as empty as a promise.
The truth finds him slowly and then all at once, like a fast-approaching train that leaves him in a Doppler wake. When it has come and gone, he lies trembling for a long moment, utterly quiet and still. Terror simmers within him, growing to a boil. An immaterial creature seeking release.
Then the screaming begins in earnest as his mind breaks.
* * *
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
Copyright © 2021 by Spencer Kope
