The Sledgehammer of Dreams

The dreams always progressed down the same route: first the woods, then the lake, then the bottom.

But that only happened when Ed managed to sleep, and for months he'd felt his control of nocturnal habits slip away. The worse it grew, the more he worried. Now it was the only thing he could think about by the time he sat down for dinner. Would he sleep tonight? If so, for how long? Was there anything he could do to improve his chances? What should he do if he went to bed and he tossed and turned? Should he call the doctor and change the medication again?

The articles he perused on the internet did nothing to help. Exercise more, they suggested, so Ed ran for several miles every day, and still his sleeping was irregular at best. No screens before bed? He spent every night in a strictly-analogue world, and sleep still eluded him. He bought every book he could find on the topic, but none of them helped. The mere thought of slipping into bed caused enough anxiety for pungent sweat to prickle from his armpits.

He knew worrying made it worse. The internet said so, the doctor said so, the books said so.

That didn't stop his worries.

And then, like a sledgehammer to the temple, sleep would hit him all at once. Unfortunately, it never hit him when he was in bed. Fortunately, it never hit him while driving. But while he was watching TV or sitting on the toilet or folding his laundry, unconsciousness arrived all at once with no particular pattern.

First the woods.

Ed walked between trees that he did not recognise. He trailed his fingers through soft leaves. The path ahead of him was clear and well-illuminated, even though he couldn't see a source of the light. The trees made whirling, twisted patterns all around. And no matter which direction Ed chose, it always had the same destination.

Then the lake.

The water spread out deep and wide, but never so wide that he couldn't see the opposite shore. It rippled in midnight blue, reflecting swirls of stars overhead. These stars weren't cold and white, though. They were mostly green and blue, punctuated by pops of garnet. Ed could never say why, but he felt like the lake was waiting for him, and once he reached the shore he could never even consider the possibility of walking away.

Then the bottom.

One step. Then another. Ed inched towards the water's edge until the cold water sloshed against his knees. Another step. And another. It froze his thighs, his genitals, his nipples. But still he proceeded. Because there was a light ahead, waiting for him in the lake. Waiting for him at the bottom. He would descend down into the depths, and there it would be: the answer to all of this.

And then he woke up.

At work, Ed leaned against the cubical wall with feigned casualness. He was on good terms with all of his coworkers, and he'd been particularly chummy with the woman who sat nearest to him in their office scheme. "Hey, where do you live?"

"Ooh, creepy," she said, her perfectly-painted lips twisting in a smirk. "Are you thinking of stalking me?"

He forced a laugh. With his sleep habits so unpredictable, forcing laughter was increasingly a habit he relied upon. It wasn't that she wasn't beautiful--she was. And it wasn't that he wasn't interested in flirting--he was. Just not right now, when it felt like the lack of sleep had sucked more than half of his life-force out of his body.

"Carpooling," he said. "I was thinking about carpooling. You've seen gas prices, haven't you?"

"Well, if that's the cover story you need..." She wrote down an address and a phone number on a sticky note, then handed it over with a wink. "Give me a call, and we can figure something out."

"Right, thanks." He wanted to be suave, but he knew he sounded strained.

He didn't sleep that night. Over the past few months he'd consumed enough calming herbal tea to be fifty-percent chamomile by body-weight, and still he lay awake, eyes clenched shut, unable to force unconsciousness to steal him away.

He often thought about the woods, the lake, the bottom during his waking hours. How could he help it? Every time he fell asleep he found himself there again. Not just frequently, but every single time. He couldn't remember when this began, because he'd never been one to track such things. But now it felt as real to him as any part of the waking landscape. When sleep finally came, he would be in the woods. When he neared the bottom of the lake, and the answer to all things, he would wake. And to make it worse, he knew this was a landscape without a comparison from his own life.

Ed grew up in suburbia. His grandparents had been enthusiastic campers to such a degree that they'd completely exhausted any interest his parents had in camping, so Ed had never been on an overnight trip in nature. He tried hiking, but he decided it was just a long walk that left him with too many blisters.

So why--instead of the dozens of places he'd actually visited--did he always return to the woods, the lake, the bottom in his dream walks?

He wanted to call them nightmares, but it wasn't so simple. In the dream, he never felt threatened. And if he reached some terrible end at the bottom, he always forgot it upon waking up. The scenery of those trees was eery, to be certain, but it was also beautiful. If he only had the dream once, he wouldn't have thought about it twice. But it came back every time he lost consciousness. It was that persistence that bothered him. It felt like the universe was calling, and when he refused to pick up, it just dialled his number and called again.

In the morning, his coworker appeared at his front door. He wanted to be charming, but he felt hollowed out. His eyes itched with exhaustion.

"Late night?"

"Something like that."

She looked around past him, peering through the door and making no effort to hide it. He pulled on his shoes and said, "Ready?"

"Sure..."

The strange thing about the dream was how real it felt. The cold water bit the sensitive parts of his body. And the longer he stayed awake, the more it felt like the waking world was just a dream.

This beautiful woman driving the car that would take him to his mundane job, for instance. Was it more likely that she really was hitting on him, or that this was just a dream? A fantasy playing out on his unconscious synapses? What could there be that would recommend him to a beautiful, flirtatious woman? Nothing. So wouldn't it make more sense that this was the dream? When he woke up, he would return to his real world, where for reasons his dreaming self couldn't understand, he would walk through first the woods, then to the lake, then to the bottom, and whatever waited him there.

Outside the car's windows, the world passed by in a swirl of indistinct shapes and shades. There was no color. Just shades. Everything was gray, a desolate hellscape of concrete and overcast skies. A row of trees grew in the road's median, but they were all withered and blackened, and even their leaves appeared to be leeched of lively color.

"What are you thinking about?" his coworker asked.

Her lips were red, so there was some color in this world. And yet if he looked through the window, Ed could see little that would make this reality seem less dreamlike than the world of the dream.

"A lake."

"You're an outdoorsman?"

He shook his head.

She evaluated him, and she made no effort to hide it. Under other circumstances, this pointed attention from a beautiful woman would have sparked excitement deep in his belly, but his mind was still at the woods, the lake, and the bottom.

"There's a lake where my family used to go," she said. "We should go sometime."

Surprise knocked the breath out of him, like the moment when the lake's cold water sloshed against his chest and forced an involuntary gasp.

"We should."

They arrived at the office. "You have my number," she said. "Give me a call when you've had a look at your schedule."

Ed barely made it through work and the drive home without sleeping, but the moment he stumbled through my front door he was unconscious again. He returned to the woods. The trees... could they exist on earth? They formed crystaline structures, all angles and straight lines like a spider's web.

And then the lake. The cold water rose across Ed's body, and yet there was no fear. He felt everything else--the rough abrasion of soaked fabric against his skin, the clutch in his guts as the cold bored through him--but never fear.

And the bottom was waiting.

When he woke up, he scrambled to his phone. "I'm open this weekend," he told her. "Does that work for you?"

"Huh?"

He checked the time. It was too late for a polite call. He had been unconscious for five hours.

"Sorry. I just..." He couldn't think of a response that he felt comfortable sharing. "I'm open this weekend."

"Sure," she said, sounding a little strained. "Okay. Yeah."

Ed would have sworn in that moment that his socks were still soaked with cold lake water.

The morning finally came for their drive out to nature, and Ed was ready. He felt certain that when he saw the lake, some critical piece of the puzzle would click into place, and he would understand. And perhaps if he did understand, he would also be able to stop it. He couldn't imagine the bliss he would feel if for eight straight hours every single night he simply bobbed along a sea of unconsciousness.

Like a dog waiting for its owner, Ed watched from his window for his coworker's car to arrive. Questions swirled around the edge of his mind, but the focus of his attention was just the patch of road where he knew she would park.

She. Who?

His heart pounded an irregular beat.

What was her name? She had a name, of course. He must have heard it. He must have said it. He must have fantasised about moaning it. But he couldn't summon it to the top of his focus right now, because that was somehow still trapped with the irregular trees and the lake.

He worked through everything he knew about her: she sat nearest to him at his job. He knew that much. But what was her title? That would jog his memory. What did she do all day?

What did he do all day?

Her car stopped right where he knew that it would, but his legs were too weak for him to go out to meet it.

He staggered away from the window and collapsed.

When he opened his eyes, he was in the woods. The green, verdant woods. He knew this was a dream. Or maybe the other world was a dream. Or maybe they were both dreams. Or maybe there was no such thing as dreams.

He stood up. When he walked down the trail, he didn't feel like he was sleepwalking. When a branch clipped his cheek, he felt the sting of ripping flesh and the ooze of warm blood.

But what waited for him at the bottom?

He knew that he would never know. There could be no answer, because the answer would never be about the bottom. The answer was the loop. All of this was one great loop that he could never break, but so was his supposedly-waking life. And all he could hope for as he approached the dream-lake's edge was that one day he would truly wake. Not just from the lake, and not just from the concrete hellscape, but from them both.

Legs moving mechanically, Ed sank into the depths of the water, hoping that there was a world more real than either of these.