The Dreaming: Old Shalon (Book 4)

1.1. Woken Up and Tumbled Up

Old Vancouver

March 19, 2063  

I woke up that morning trembling with disbelief, violently shaken from the dream I'd been having. It'd been so long, so many years since I'd had a dream — and a terrifying dream it had been. 

Adrenaline was still flooding my body. I forced myself to take a deep breath and closed my eyes, trying to remember what had happened. I didn't want to remember, but old habits — even very, very old habits — die hard, as they say.

This was my first memories of that dream:

I was at the Red Sea in Sinai, Egypt. The sea was a bright welcoming, shiny turquoise. In the distance, the mountains of Saudi Arabia lifted from the sea and above them was a pure, clear sky of the deepest blue. I felt amazing—my body was strong. I was walking on the beach toward Arabie's hut, to go swimming.

Everything seemed perfect, but then suddenly there was a girl beside me on the beach. She wanted to go swimming with me. Just as we entered the water, there came a storm and clouds covered the sky.

I felt a darkness racing down the beach towards me. Something was coming for me — chasing me, looking for me. I wanted to run, but I couldn't move. My body was so old.

I looked around and realised the girl had disappeared.

I dove into the water to find her. I was terrified because I couldn't see the bottom. I sank deeper and deeper. At first I thought I was drowning, but then at some point I was able to breathe in the water.

I kept floating or swimming down until I hit the bottom. In front of me was a cave and I felt compelled to enter it although I didn't want to.

Inside the cave was a woman. A woman who told me... that something horrible was happening and I needed to find Blue Jay to make it stop.

And then I'd woken up.

I lay back in bed, staring at the gap between a stack of books — something horrible was happening and someone was looking for me!

No, no no! I grabbed my pillow and hugged it to me. It couldn't start again. The dreams couldn't start again. I resisted what was happening. I knew I should get up and find a bloody pen and write that dream down, but you know what I did? I squeezed my pillow instead.

I thought I had been released 29 years ago, but the dreams had found me again. Did I do something wrong? Am I being punished? Those were my disturbed thoughts. Of course I wasn't being punished, I knew that, but it felt like it.

The dream had come out of no where. 

Why now? I wondered. 

Despite my fear, I felt a deep sense of recognition, or familiarity, with a state of being that has been at times more a sense of self than the flesh and bones of my body. Dreaming. I used to be a Lucid dreamer. But that's a story for another day. Right now I'm telling you the story of the day I woke up from a dream after 29 years without a single nocturnal vision. 

I took another deep breath and tried to convince myself that it had been nothing, and it almost worked. Within minutes the details had faded. It had been a dream about... a cave. That's all I could remember. And something about... Egypt. 

What's so bad about a cave? I asked myself, but deep down I knew the truth — the dream was ominous.

Regretfully, I opened my eyes and propped myself up, looking around my dusty bedroom with the strangest feeling, as if I were seeing it for the first time from the eyes of a stranger.