The Tangibility of Dreams

I was told I was going to die today.

The news was aimed at me, point blank. The specialist rattled off facts that hit my ringing ears like spent shell casing meeting concrete. The barrel of a gun pressed flush to the space between my eyes as he detailed the way my body was set to destroy itself. Finger already on the trigger and poised to pull as he told me the statistics for survival. A pretty way of saying ‘buy your coffin now while it's on sale’.

The clean cut of the doctor's suit and the gentle cadence of his voice did nothing to blunt the impact. Did nothing to dam the rapids of thought that careened uselessly through my mind only to tumble off the edge in an endless pour.

He clicked off the safety in the next sentence.

You have maybe four months left, five if you’re lucky. I flinched at the word ‘lucky’, recoiled like the weapon would when it fired.

I pictured that gun a thousand different ways, all different types of ammunition, but it always ended the same.

It’s a Nerf gun, with pins stuck in the darts because kids are cruel, just like the world that taught them to be. It’s a water pistol, this news like water torture, eating into my brain with nothing to wash the stain of fear away. It’s the cold press of steel, a Glock, the bullet would pierce my skull like paper and not even hesitate to make liquid of what lay behind. It’s the scatter of buckshot from a shotgun that would pepper me with promises of pain. It’s the sleek curve of a plasma gun with lasers of striking purple and a noise that makes it sound more like a game than a threat, because that's what all this must be—just a game.

His voice had become a steady drone of noise I could barely comprehend. His words were drenched in honey like he was trying to pretend they weren’t going to choke me all the same. Finally some syllables reached the bullseye.

“I think this might be your best chance.” Chance. Never has a word so built on bullshit given me pause.

He’d slid a pamphlet across the desk to me and my eyes burned with the need to roll as I buried them behind my eyelids and fought to dam the tears. The font pissed me off, the colours too cheery. It was like the artist had painted the word ‘opportunity’ over ‘terminal’ but the letters just wouldn’t match up.

I muttered some promise to ‘think about it’ and barely felt myself moving though the white noise as I walked out. The proclamation for my death and the promise for my salvation stuffed into the back pocket of my well-worn jeans.

I was three, maybe five scotches deep when I first laughed about it all. The noise was so sour my jaw ached. It escaped my lips as I dropped the paperwork onto my desk to join my bills and the settlement for my divorce. I was set to own the most depressing filing cabinet the world had ever seen.

I punctuated that thought with another measure of scotch before clicking open my web browser and drowning myself in some semblance of hope soaked in liquor.

I’d passed out on my keyboard somewhere between actual research and a conspiracy theory that death was a construct owned and run by government officials. The article was claiming that ‘we just needed to move off grid to find our immortality.’

My eyes blurred the ads for weight loss drugs and hot singles in my area before I blinked the time into view. The numbers spelled out three am and the crick in my neck was just the precursor to the regret I knew I’d feel when the sun came up. I popped two aspirin and crawled back into oblivion beneath my sheets.

My hands were numb. So were my feet. My chest was filled with some kind of liquid that froze and boiled me at the same time.

I stood in the bathroom, at the vanity, the yellow light making the space feel so small. The bench before me was blue laminate, peeling a little at the edges to prove that the design choice was not a recent one. I’d forgotten why I’d come in here, the cracked mirror showing the bags under my eye where I’d stored all the sleep I’d missed on taking gave me no clues.

I looked down again, spotting my toothbrush. Maybe that was why? My fingers curled around the plastic as my eyes sought out the toothpaste. My movements were stiff, my joints aching like they were rusted machinery. As I squeezed the paste to the bristles my vision blurred, the mint scent was replaced with something metallic.

I blinked but my vision refused to clear.

I frowned as I glazed back up at the mirror and startled.

Blood leaked from my eyes like macabre tears, throwing the whites of them into a devilish visage and tracking paths down my sunken cheeks.

My nose joined in, streaming crimson into the crease of my lips, my gasp revealing the shameful state my teeth had taken on. Drips escaped from my chin, dripping into the sink as I looked back at the plastic toothbrush in my hand. Not plastic. Metal.

No longer a toothbrush.

I was holding a gun, the toothpaste tube had become a magazine I’d begun loading with practised ease. The flow of red now cascaded over the silver, the smell of iron mingling with steel as I fought to figure out what I was doing in here. The blood made my grip on the gun slippery and I couldn’t work out why I cared to hold onto it so tightly.

I looked back in the mirror as if to ask myself that very question and found that my face has sunken further. The skin was sliding off the bones as if it had no way to hold itself there any more. I opened my mouth to speak but my reflection didn’t move and my lungs were empty of air. I felt like I was stone beneath the melting wax of my skin. The reflection in the mirror looked at me with pity, sighed and raised the gun. I remained locked in place as the safety clicked off. I croaked out one word, a feeble ‘no’ before the trigger slid back and the mirror shattered with an ear splitting crack.

I choked on my own scream as I woke. Salt tracks and spittle crusted my face but when I ran my hands over my skin it held its form. My heart was warming down from its panicked race as I sat up and heaved in gulps of air.

I didn’t dream often and after that bullshit I found myself wishing to return to mindless slumber.

I wasn’t sure if it was fear or the numbing awareness of the lack of choice I truly faced but I found myself retrieving the crumpled pamphlet I’d tossed onto my desk. I ignored the fact that it was clearly in the running for last pace for some graphic design award and dialled the number.

Another doctor, another droning voice I barely paid any mind. Another gun placed before me offering promises of control, only the ammunition was different this time.

The doctor asked me questions and I mumbled my responses.

“Any family?”

“Not really.”

“Have you looked into all your alternatives?”

“Alternatives?”

“Well, you could seek spiritual guidance, natural medicine, hypnotherapy…”

“You know I’m terminal right?”

“Right. Well you could consider voluntary euthanasia”

“That's a fancy way of saying suicide right?”

“Basically, yes, but it's medically induced, you’d have help”

“My body is already killing itself, so you're suggesting the alternative is to beat it to the punchline?”

“Not at all, it’s just protocol that we ask these questions.”

“Right, well, no. I don’t want to kill myself.”

“And you are aware this procedure is relatively new and you would be a part of the trial phase?”

“Yeah, beats dying without trying though, right?”

“Right.”

The documents I signed made the pen pinched between my shaking fingers feel like a shovel. Like I’d admitted defeat and dug my own grave. The Earth's maw was opened to swallow me whole, and I’d just stored the dirt in tupperware to save it for later and left the ground, jaw aching, for another time.

Weapons have many forms, many names, many faces. Now it was the plunge of a syringe, full of transparent promises for a second chance at life as long as I live the rest of mine half gone.

As I faded away from the only life I knew for the chance of prolonging it, I wondered if this weapon would be my salvation, or my doom.

~

I don't know if they know that you dream when you're in cryosleep.

At first it was just colours through the fog, memories washing against a distant shore until all the grains of sand were stacked up neatly into cliffs surrounding my mind.

You can’t tell time, can’t feel, but eventually you clue into the fact that you’re dreaming. It was hard to hold onto that reality though. I lost count of how many times I realised I was dreaming for the first time. It’s like lucid dreaming, when you’re aware but you have no way to wake yourself up.

Eventually I remembered why I was here—the diagnosis, the looks of pity, the feeling of betrayal that my own flesh and blood had given up on me and started a mutiny to sink the ship of my bones into an early grave. At one point I turned to the thoughts I probably should have considered before sinking into this partial existence betting on the future to save me from myself.

I thought of my mother, dead of a heart attack at sixty-three. I thought of my brother, seven years older, killed by his best friend when they went on a drunken joy ride. I thought of my absent father and wondered if he’d even realise I was gone? I thought of my ex-wife and her new life, the one I’d not been able to give her. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was that bitterness that had turned to poison in my veins.

It was too late to bother but I still asked myself the question of why? I’d long ago realised that I had been living out of the sheer necessity of it, I was depressed, just like the rest of the world, but not so depressed that I would salivate at a well tied noose. I guess in the end the chance for something different was what I’d placed my bets on. I’d rather take a long nap to wake up in the same bullshit world and sigh at the inevitability than miss the chance to wake up and find it half-way decent and give myself the chance to start it all over.

The cryo dreams get really fucked up in the early days when your thoughts turn dark and the dreams become nightmares because you have no way to escape. In cryo you don't suddenly wake up when you’re falling, right before you hit the ground. The endings always repeat and change. It’s insanity, reliving the same second over and over, endlessly, until your mind is content with the outcome and moves on to the next idea.

I think I spent years falling. I think it was my brain trying and failing to wake itself up. Sometimes I would hit the ground, sometimes I would pass right through and keep falling and suffocating, buried alive because physics failed to take me out so biology could instead.

Sometimes when I hit the ground, I would watch myself from third-person, witness my body pulverised by gravity. I had an astoundingly astute imagination for someone who had never seen a body experience such an impact before. Sometimes I would shatter like glass, I imagined the shards made music as they shredded the people on the street.

At some point the dreams became more real than the memories buried in the cliffs that kept the world at bay.

I was healthy, happily married. Sometimes I had kids, sometimes I had exotic pets and a very eclectic fashion sense.

I lived lifetimes of prosperity in mansions on the seaside with my yacht moored just offshore and I loved to watch the storms roll in and thrash against the world.

I’d spend weeks at a time building log cabins from scratch and camping under the stars, trying to remember one single constellation from the real sky but I’d always end up making an elaborate painting in their lights instead.

I taught myself to do a multitude of things with methods that would make wikipedia look like valid source material but I never found it in me to care. The cars I fixed always purred like kittens and the feasts I cooked were never less than exemplary.

I performed live on stages to sold-out stadiums where people loved me so much they would beg to get my signature tattooed on their flesh while others sobbed into my discarded laundry like it was a blessing from the gods.

I also learned to fly. I started with aircraft before remembering that I owed nothing to physics and took to the sky with nothing between me and the wind.

I visited postcard places that were fuzzy on details and probably resembled b-grade movies more than reality, but I was a tourist all the same.

I spent aeons perfecting the landscaped garden for my house that was ever changing.

I had gothic eras with towering spires and deciduous trees that only ever bloomed blood-red flowers nestled in spider-webs. I made this my Halloween house and without the confines of time, I'd celebrate anything on a whim. It would appear a casual Tuesday, the weather wintery grey when the carved pumpkins would pile up and gutter internally with ghoulish flames.

Out of all the places I created I had a favourite, after a while I settled into it and rarely brought about the others as this felt the most like home. It had marble floors and sweeping views of whatever scenery I’d conjured up that morning, though it was often a tumultuous ocean. There was a fire always burning in the hearth and a couch that caught the afternoon sun. It would have been a prime spot for napping if you could sleep within your own dreams.

Sometimes I would spend autumn mornings on the porch, sipping coffee as I looked over a lake flooded with the colours of flame and by the evening of the same day I’d retreat to the depths of the ocean just to see how deep I could swim before the stars faded out to nothing.

Sometimes I thought that was the closest to sleep I’d find here.

Other times it made me wonder what death would be like. Would it be like this? Floating in an endless expanse with nothing but my own thoughts and the weightless body those thoughts were tethered to. Would there even be thoughts? Would I even still be?

I worked tirelessly to build myself a town, it was filled with people I had once known so it didn’t feel so empty. I wasn’t sure how close to real I got any of them and I really wasn’t sure when or why my neighbour Jim started collecting garden gnomes but some part of me must have thought it up. My ex-wife lived on the far side of town and I loved to drive by in my fancy cars and make her regret leaving me. Every other day I would have a crush on someone, like the waitress in the coffee shop who never forgot my order or the stylish guy I met in the library who smelled like woodsmoke and only read the classics.

I fell in love—with everything.

Then they woke me up.

~

My eyes watered even though the lights were dimmed to almost nothing and the sounds around me made my brain ache.

It was a strange sensation to be ripped from the world I had come to know and slammed back into reality, it winded me as it sliced open my mind to the knowledge that none of it had been real. I knew a part of me had always been somewhat aware that I was living a false life but I had fallen so deep into it that the edges had blurred into nothing and it all bled together seamlessly.

My skin, I could feel it for the first time in centuries, and it was numb, cold and itchy. Everything irritated me. My breathing was wrong and everything was so damn loud.

They told me that it had been forty-eight years. Told me that the company had gone bankrupt and that they had to pull us all out.

There was no cure. I was still dying, that gun pressed between my eyes.

I laughed until I cried.

I didn’t even make it to a hundred. People I’d known could still be alive and yet I couldn’t find it in me to care in the slightest.

I was nearing seventy-three but barely looked forty. My blood had been emptied out and replaced with some scientific mock-up designed to trick my cells and I was colourless until they pumped it all back in. It was like I could feel the disease, the humanity, sinking back into me like a sponge on an oil spill.

I spent more time mourning the lives that I’d lost from waking than the one I’d lost before I ever went to sleep.

The gun was still pointed at my head, but I had died a long time ago. The gunpowder was spent, the smoking barrel a signal to the grave I’d stored behind some backwashed hope.

They set us up in some hotel that sent me further back in time than my conception, if only to mock the waste I’d made of mine. It was on the edge of the city in some run-down block that looked like the council had forgotten it was even there. By the sounds of it we were lucky they could even afford to set us up with this much. I’d sold all my shit before I went under and my bank was in a locked trust that would take some time to untangle so this musty pile of crap was it for now.

I’d forgotten how to walk, forgotten how to be embarrassed as they all but carried me up a flight of stairs and over the threshold into the box of stained walls and shitty carpet.

The only solace was the quiet. I couldn’t stand the voices.

I’d never been epileptic but I could swear the flickering light in the bathroom was trying its best to prove otherwise as I forced myself to shower.

That first night my dreams were a mess, nonsensical and terrifying. I woke up screaming covered in sweat. I’d pissed myself.

I ordered in, the sounds, the people—it was all too much.

They tried to keep it off the news but it was a big ticket item that wouldn’t bury easily. There were about fifty of us that went into cryo over the span of about five years, mine was the second-last year to sign up.

Thirteen were woken in the following ten years for a variety of reasons.

Twenty-five were pulled early due to a failure in the systems of the sister facility to mine and of those only three survived, only to die from the reasons they entered in the first place.

Twelve of us were pulled out today.

Four suffered psychotic breaks, three of whom successfully ended their own lives before they could be sedated and the fourth is in an induced coma.

There were eight of us transferred to this motel, presumably with the hope we would simply fade into history as nothing more than a failed experiment.

I doubted the rest of us would last long enough to cause much trouble for them anyways.

For three days I stayed awake. I lost track of how many cans of caffeine I emptied down my throat to evade the weight of my eyelids. The thundering of my heart was the only sound I could tolerate, though I felt it more than anything.

I bumped into my neighbour in the parking lot on the way back from picking up my delivery late that afternoon. They managed to look even worse than me and I pretended not to notice the track marks or the twitching.

Six left, that neighbour overdosed that night, no doubt from the drugs they’d bought in the parking lot and I tried to not feel guilty for doing nothing about it. The woman next to him died of liver failure, she wasn’t meant to drink but I guess she gave as much of a shit as the rest of us.

On the fourth night I went to the beach.

I’d missed the storms over the ocean more than I care to admit, there was no yacht here but I could picture it dipping with the wake. I could hear promises in the wind, though they spoke in a language that was mine alone to understand.

They whispered to me the memories of flying. Floating, falling without fear.

I dug myself a shallow grave in the sand and settled in, tucked in by the sounds of the water.

I spent an age just staring at the stars, thinking of the end.

Guns were too messy, just like life was too messy. So instead I poured the ammunition down my throat, my mouth the chamber, my tongue the trigger as I swallowed my choice of ending.

A curtain call my fucked-up half-life was worthy of.

As the cliffs of all my life's imaginings crumbled away with my heartbeat I let a smile caress my lips, welcoming the dreams to come.