This choice: Uma stirs—be it the booze or the full belly, she has a real humdinger of a dream • Go Back...Chapter #4Sleeping on and Dreaming of a Full Belly by: Bobo the Hobo   Most people, assuming a full night's rest, have anywhere from three to five or sometimes up to seven dreams a night.
You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who remembered all of them, and Uma was no exception. In her twenty-five years, she'd only experienced a handful of dreams so vivid and real that she could recall them after she returned to the waking world, and tonight was no exception, no matter how many times she'd found herself in this particular fabrication before. It felt more real than anything else her mind had fabricated for her, or would during the rest of her drunken slumber. But every time that she found herself here, Uma's subconscious twinged with a hint of deja vu that would flicker and fade away by the time she opened her eyes in the morning.
To call it a recurring dream would have been a bit of a stretch. She'd had a few dreams like it before, but the events were almost never the same between the dreams themselves. She was never the same, outside of one persistent recurring feature, almost always with different hairstyles or sometimes different (or forgoing) clothes.
But every now and again, Uma would have these dreams where she was very, very fat.
It wasn't something that Uma was aware of, at least consciously. There was no retention of these events outside of small glimpses enough to trigger a sense of familiarity with the large brown body that sloshed and wobbled with her heavy footsteps, or with a sense of amazement that her fleshy folds could be squeezed with the entirety of one outstretched palm.
The dreams had started during the brief stint when she took an aspiring volleyball career seriously, during college. Whether it was due to stress or a natural reaction via her contrarian nature to buck against routine, nobody would ever know. But even after she had been removed from the team, the dream persisted silently in the theatre of her mind's eye, flaring up during times when it felt as though she were withstanding similar circumstance to the one that birthed it—times of great stress, emotional duress, or whenever she decided that she needed to cut some weight.
Uma would never remember the great, lumbering mountain of woman that she dreamt herself to be. All belly, with sagging rolls that rested heavily on the ones that billowed below them. The weight of her arms as she raised them, sagging with the heftiness of her plump arm wings, would be just as lost to her as the feeling of her triple chin creasing in anticipation of another bite of chocolate and peanut butter cake. No matter how real her chafing thighs and the sensation of her fat-buried knees slapping against the underside of her hanging tankard gut felt in the moment, Uma would wake without even a passing thought to what it must have felt like to be such an enormous, greedy woman.
But in the moment, she relished in it.
Perhaps not so much the fat. No, it was more that she was free to do as she pleased. Free of constraint and regiment and expectation. The feeling of the militaristic didactic that had been instilled into her in the name of training her to play some stupid sport having been fully expelled from her consciousness, if only for a brief moment in REM sleep.
Her heavy, shallow breathing was a show of ecstacy as she fed herself her favorite treats. Her eyes glazed as she gorged herself on all that was within her reach. The Dream of Uma was, in a roundabout way, far more free than Uma had ever been when she was training for the Olympics. And it felt far more free to be her than even being Uma as she was in the waking world, mooching off of her college roommate in a house shared almost entirely by said roommate's family.
The sounds of her gorging lingered longer than the mental image of what such unbridled abdication might bring her. The sensation of her fore arm and bicep fat creasing faded with the feeling of her fat toes clenching in bliss at another slice of cheesecake. The heaviness of her stomach as it rolled forward further and further still began to lift as her subconsciousness flickered and sent her shifting slowly into another fabricated fantasy.
But while these little deviations lasted, Uma slept peacefully. Happily, even. With a little smile on her face.
Any other time that she had visited this strange little land of do-as-you-please, Uma almost always woke up feeling better than when she had gone to sleep the night before, though she could never explain why.
The morning following this one, however, would not be so forgiving.
***
"ooouuuuUUUARGHHHHH"
Uma's tight curls brushed against the toilet seat as she violently vomited into the bowl. She gripped the sides with shaky hands as her hangover worked its natural course through her body, leaving her absolutely miserable.
"There we go..." Audrey rubbed circles into Uma's back as she continued to barf, "Let it out..."
This wasn't the first time that the two of them had done this. As far as Audrey knew, it probably wouldn't be the last. Uma felt like she never wanted to drink again in the moment, but that could easily change after a day or two of rest and relaxation from one of the biggest hangover she'd ever endured in her twenty-five blissful years of not being this fucking miserable.
"Oh... oh goOUUUUGH—"
Uma had never felt so godawful in her life. Last night was an absolute blur. Not that she cared to remember anything about that party while she was staring down the business end of a drain. She was violently ill after everything that she had taken into her body, and right about now she almost would have rather that she had gotten hit by her Uber last night instead of getting inside of it.
"Let me get a better grip on your hair, there..."
"Thuh... ugh... thank you Audrey." Uma gasped out, unable to look up and keep her eyes open at the same time without barfing on the poor blonde girl who had walked her to the bathroom, "You're... ooogh... you're a good friend..."
"Are you gonna be okay, Uma?" Audrey said with a soft smile, "This has been happening a lo—"
"ooouuuuUUUARGHHHHH"
And with that, Uma was back in the bowl in record time with another wretch. Audrey just sighed as she resumed rubbing her friend's back with one hand as she grabbed her limping curls with the other. Something was gonna have to change, at least as far as Uma was concerned. Either she was gonna have to quit drinking, or she was going to have to start contributing around the house (and with the rent) a lot more. At least, if this was going to remain a common event in the only bathroom on this floor...
***
While Uma would never remember the dream that she'd had the night before as she spent the next day recuperating in her bedroom (and certainly not while she was hugging a toilet bowl intermittently) her dream had been trying to tell her something. She had been feeling trapped by her circumstance, just as she had when she was training for volleyball.
The stress of not having a job, the embarrassment of not having a lot of spending money (or even a car) and the pressure of having to mooch off of Audrey and her family weighed on her more than she recognized.
And though she couldn't have known it beforehand, those two days recuperating from literally the worst hangover she'd ever experienced had gone a long way towards shaping her future, in a subconscious reaction to her stress...  indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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