Resonant Souls - Part 1: The Dream

Resonant Souls

Part 1: The Dream

  "You will remember this," a voice whispered gently, but Peter wasn't sure if the voice was coming from inside his head, or if it belonged to the redheaded woman dressed in white standing in front of him. The whisper's origin was impossible to pinpoint as a high-pitched humming sound had started to drown out everything else. The sound emanated from brightly sparkling, opaque spheres and a wide variety of constantly changing, translucent shapes dancing and flashing around the two. As Peter slowly reached out to hold the girl's hand and saw her do the same, a protective sphere made of radiant white light appeared around them, encapsulating them as soon as their hands touched. The light filled their hearts and minds with warmth, comfort and courage.

  The oddly miss-placed, familiar oldie rock 'n' roll song playing in the background slowly faded out as the Earth beneath the couple's feet literally began to shake. As the two were irresistibly drawn closer to each other, vibrations around their bubble grew stronger and louder, distorting reality and cracking up the fabric of space-time with a low, growling rumble. The thundering sound waves seemed to rip open gaping wounds whenever they collided with the dancing shapes, causing the newborn rifts to only bleed in more distortions, accelerating the cataclysm towards the inevitable. People panicked and cried for their lives in desperation everywhere, but the exploding chaos didn't weaken the connection the couple had. Even though planes crashed from the skies above into the gaping mouths of nothingness below, and the unknown, previously invisible dimensions bled out their horrible secrets from the rapidly growing, cosmic lacerations.

  But it all meant nothing to them, as they were, to put it simply, lost in each other's eyes. In those final moments of utter destructive chaos, perhaps the last few seconds of existence itself, Peter only had eyes for her. The smiling redhead had her eyes locked on his, gazing back at him with a look that almost touched his soul. The whole cosmos trembled in fear of what's to come as the couple leaned in for a kiss. And as they did, in a single bright pulse, everything-

  Peter woke up lying on his back on the bed, feeling a puddle of cold sweat under him on the mattress. He felt a little shook up, but nothing like what you'd expect after the world had ended, if you could feel anything at all at that point that is. After realizing it had only been a dream, a warm, comfortable wave of happiness washed over him, causing a wide smile to appear on his face. A weird side-effect, considering the dream's conclusion. Most people probably saw less terrifying nightmares than what Peter's mind had shown him, and yet he felt happy and content, almost blissful. The redheaded girl's smiling face only enhanced the feeling, and she was quickly becoming the most prominent and vivid memory of the chaotic dream.

  The sheets had escaped halfway off of the bed during the night, and one of the pillows had escaped Peter's clutches completely and was lying on the floor, taunting Peter with its successful escape. Peter sighed and turned to his right side and grabbed the closest pillow he found on the bed, resting his head on top of it. He recalled a voice whispering "You will remember this." Sure enough he did, but was it because of someone or something telling him that, or simply because of his hobby of keeping a dream journal? A few years of practice versus a strange voice in a weirder dream? He thought the answer was obvious as he turned around to pull out his dream journal from the old, wooden nightstand drawer. His alarm clock's red eyes stared at him ominously from the top of the nightstand, lying in ambush under Peter's nightlight's cover. Only a couple more minutes and it would go off, welcoming another start to a jolly week at the office with its terrible, screeching song. Peter defused the alarm before it had a chance to fulfill its mission and opened up the journal, turning over to a blank page and dating the newest addition. While he focused on recalling the dream, and scribbled down the different events and feelings he had felt during it and after waking up, Peter realized he was still feeling happy, and the smile on his face wasn't showing any signs of wearing out. Normally, after waking up from these kinds of dreams he felt a certain glumness throughout the following day. Peter jokingly called it 'the aftermath of the happy, warm and sappy dream', a bit of a mouthful, but he had labeled some of his past dreams as such too.

  Despite the apocalyptic ending, which made the blissful feeling even more bizarre, the dream had indeed been a happy, warm and sappy one. The warm emotions strongly contrasted the usual thought process he had shortly after waking up from them, as he normally longed for the good feelings inside of those happy.. escapes from reality. So much so that if he could choose, he'd go back to them, rather than to stay awake. Peter knew preferring dreaming to reality was probably an indication of some deep rooted, emotional problems he had buried somewhere, but as long as he wasn't feeling suicidal, everything was just fine and dandy. At least that was his take on it, and that was surely enough. But the bliss hadn't worn out or turned into a longing, not yet anyway, which made this time different, somewhat unique.

  Recalling and writing down a dream is never a simple thing. Even with years of practice the vague memories could easily get tangled up into a mess and then shatter into dozens of smaller pieces, which are then much harder to glue back together to form a clear picture. At least that was generally the case for Peter, but this time the dream almost wrote itself. Peter was familiar with the place it all took place in, a big, busy airport, an hour and half or so drive from his apartment, not counting traffic. It was buzzing with people in the dream, as it always was in reality too. Planes taking off and landing, people moving in crowds like ants, rushing everywhere for whatever reasons, a Ronald McDonald-clown frolicking around the entrance looking creepier than ever, a familiar rock 'n' roll tune playing in the background... and a bunch of smaller details that didn't really seem to matter, but he jotted those down anyway. Remembering the song gave him trouble, since it was only playing faintly in the background and wasn't really in the spotlight of the event. He tried to write down some of the lyrics, but only managed to conjure up two incomplete lines, replacing the words his memory had already mumbled up with question marks:

'You break my (??) and you rattle my (??)'

'(??) much love (cries??) a man in pain'

  "Thank God for internet", he mused and added a "google it!" note to himself.

  Finally, after describing the events that led to the conclusion of the dream, even some that he shouldn't have witnessed as he wasn't paying any attention to them, there's was only one character left to add into the play; her. The pretty redhead.

  "Of course. Do people even dream about ugly people? Well, unless they know them, of course, and they just butt in," Peter thought to himself. He decided to start her portrayal with her eyes. "Blue eyes.. Or were they gray? Bluish-gray?" It seemed weird, they had stared at each other for so long and he couldn't be sure about the color? After a while of pondering he decided they had to have been light blue eyes, adding a note "too deep to look away" in the end.

  Describing her hair and its color wasn't that difficult, but demanded a little bit of effort to recall. "Red. Long, shoulder-length. Wavy?" Peter also wrote down her skin color, white, although he couldn't be really sure whether she was that pale in the dream normally or if the glowing white bubble or sphere had something to do with it. He noted "Irish?" next to the details about her skin color and chuckled.

  Her clothing was a bit weird, since it was a warm summer day, and she was wearing a dark winter coat and dark winter boots to match, and underneath the coat he remembered seeing glimpses of a knee length, pearl white dress. Remembering the dress triggered another memory; the coat had disappeared at some point, maybe because of the bubble appearing or even before it, but Peter was sure she didn't have it on anymore when the dream ended. Peter himself had worn a pink t-shirt. "I don't even own pink clothes, that's almost funny." Not mentioning specifically that they also had pants on made Peter briefly chuckle, so he made another note, just to be clear on the issue: "Both wore pants!", underlining it heavily. Immediately afterwards he realized she had a dress on that showed enough leg to deny the existence of pants, so the note had become inaccurate in just mere seconds after Peter had thought of it. Sighing, he crossed out the note, making an inky mess on the page. Leaving notes like this was rather useless since Peter was the only one reading the journal. The dreams he wrote down always stuck vividly in his memory, so he very rarely felt the need to go through any of the older entries. But if no one else ever saw his notes anyway, who's to say what he can or can't write down? Whether it was funny or not.

  'Short?' was the last physical characteristic Peter added in the unusually long passage concerning a dream character. "Shorter than me anyway." The biggest thing bothering him was that he didn't recognize her, yet her face was still crystal clear in his mind. Normally he only remembered blurred out faces when writing down details about people who were unknown to him, but something about this felt different. Peter shrugged it off, maybe he had seen her somewhere, just in passing, in a commercial or a random TV show but he hadn't paid too much attention to it at the time. If she even was an actress, he felt funny about that being his first guess. She might as well be a singer, or an athlete. Or maybe they had met on the street, passing each other, like strangers do every day.

  Peter slapped the journal shut and left it on the bed. He jumped up, wincing a little as his lower back reminded him of its troubles with a dull pulse of pain. He stretched it off, yawning, and slowly made his way through the hallway leading out of the bedroom, drowsily wobbling into the kitchen. As he opened his coffee-stained cupboard to grab his coffee box, he realized he'd forgotten to mention their conversation in the dream, which had preceded the kiss. The tidbits of information on how it started and who initiated the conversation were already fading out, so Peter had to rush the process of loading up the coffeemaker, which, unsurprisingly, resulted in a mess of ground coffee all over his counter. After hurriedly cleaning it up and getting his morning pan of joe brewing, he jogged back the few paces to the bedroom and sat back down on the bed, opening the journal on his lap once again. Bringing up the dialogue-part wasn't an easy task anymore, but Peter felt he managed to do it fairly well. The beginning of their conversation had eluded his memory completely by now, but in the end he was quite satisfied in the way he'd gotten most of the dream-speak down. It didn't really follow logic at times, as objects and occurrences in dreams seldom did, but it flowed nicely and was almost coherent. The whispering voice left Peter wondering again, as he couldn't pinpoint its origin, so he made a side note of it, "Whose voice?" Reading through their dream babble only widened his smile.

  "Cheeseburgers and grasshoppers," Peter mused to himself as he jumped up again, without pain this time, and grabbed a clean towel from his closet. He hurried to take a shower while he still had the "empty morning minutes" to spare, as he called them, meaning the time it would take for the most important coffee of the day to be ready to serve. It would be done by the time he got out of the shower, like always. Finishing the shower with an ice cold blast of water, Peter multitasked drying himself up while brushing his teeth, to not lose any precious seconds. After he quickly dressed up in his usual manner - blue jeans, an old t-shirt with a brown hoodie on top - a refreshed Peter marched onwards to the kitchen where the aroma of fresh coffee was enticingly floating through the air. He grabbed his favorite cup - a Garfield 'I Hate Mondays'- from the cupboard and filled it to the brim with hot java, and carefully carried the hot cup to the living room. He sighed contently as he sat down on his white, worn out couch, carefully sipping the scalding coffee while thinking about the dream and the unforgettable girl guest-starring in it, completely oblivious to the fact that he was already late for work.