The Watchers

Dreams can be a fascinating concept. When we rest our heads down at night and close our eyes we can be taken to faraway lands, a twisted recreation of the office you work in, or sometimes the dreams can turn sour and you find yourself in what can only be described as the pits of hell. Some research says its subliminal interpretation of what's happening in our lives. We can face the turmoil of problems in a dream, or piece together our wildest hopes for reality. Sometimes our dreams can have friends and family in them, or even just someone you talked to at the bus stop the previous day.

Interestingly, the human mind is incapable of formulating a human face, and will only use faces of people your have met when you dream. All of us have had dreams where you couldn’t quite make out the face of the person but they were a part of the dream, or even sometimes it’s a face as clear as day that you just have no idea who they are. The question then comes to, if our minds cannot create a human face, then who, or what, are these beings in our dreams……

I was working as an accountant for a supermarket chain after graduating university. The days were incredibly long to the point where I was working 12 hours a day, and spending 2 hours on a commute to work and 2 hours on a commute back home. I wasn’t really what you would call a social butterfly, so instead of splitting rent affordably in a share house close to work in the city, I opted to find a cheap house to live in by myself on the outskirts that still had a train line for easy access. Monday to Friday I was on a train at 5:30am…. I was in the office by 7:30 in the morning…. Id finish after 7 at night and my train home was just after 8. I looked forwards to sleep. I cherished every minute I could get to sustain myself to reach the weekend.

I never dreamt much growing up aside from the odd dream here or nightmare there….. but after a year of this job I started to have a recurring dream every night….. but nothing free or wild or vivid. I dreamt I was at work, sitting in my cubicle. Usually I was stuck on some loop on the computer inputting data, repeating the same process over and over without it working how I wanted it to. Pathetic right? Even to what my wildest dreams could be, my mind limits me to my work environment. Time felt endless in it. Repeating the same process over and over until eventually a heart shaped locket would pull all my focus and created a sense of urgency where Id suddenly realize I was in a dream before waking up seconds later.

This went on for weeks. I went to sleep almost dreading my return to mediocrity in the office, be it in the dream or waking up the next morning to actually do it. The same loop, with close to the same problems I was trying to solve on the computer. Over… and over…. night after night….. week after week…. Until one night in the dream…. I was pressing a key on my keyboard and it wasn’t working.

“What’s your name?” I suddenly hear a deep distant voice carry across the room. I stop my mindless attempt of typing. I felt strange….. I felt I knew I was still dreaming and aware of the fact, but still encumbered to the drift of where the dream was taking me.

“Who’s there?” I called out. I recall standing in my cubical and looking around the office. The office was dark, and covered in a thick smoke like grey haze making it difficult to make out objects surrounding me.

I looked around and on the edge of the haze I could make out a figure. It was a man wearing a suit…. Tall and slender…. but his face was a contortion of features that felt familiar, but blurred and melded together constantly changing and rotating. It was like when you swear you’ve seen someone before but just can’t be certain, or put a name to them.

“What is your name?” it called to me again. The voice was coming from it, but I couldn’t make our lips or a mouth. A sense of fear started to wash over me like I shouldn’t be there. Like that this was wrong. Almost a natural sense like prey would feel in presence of a predator.

“Andrew,” I yelled across the room to it. I lied. Andrew was not my name, but for some reason it felt right not to tell it my real name.

Suddenly the watch on my arm started to go off. I became fully lucid aware I was in a dream. The suited faceless figure stepped forwards from the haze… The room got darker…. It stepped forwards again… and again… picking up pace….. I started stepping back…. Fear overwhelmed me and I found my back pressed to the wall of my cubical. I grimaced and tensed as it charged straight at me and……. Sat straight up…. In my bed… Covered in sweat. The dream was over. I stared around my bedroom for a moment disassociated and realised my work alarm was going off. It was time for another day.

I showered off and went to work. I guess sometimes any dream can just turn into a nightmare. I shook it off and it was off my mind as soon as I was on the train.

A rinse and repeat of the day and before I knew it, I found myself back in dreamland sitting in my cubical pressing keys to no avail. I press the enter key and the blue screen software I’m working on goes back to the home screen instead of submitting a batch of remittance invoices putting me back at square one in an endless loop.

“What is this you do Andrew,” I hear from across the room. I see the faceless suit standing on the edges of where the shadows darken to the black.

For some reason I felt relieved that it called me Andrew.

“What do you mean?” I asked as I sat at my computer. It started to approach me but I didn’t feel fear or under threat. I felt more an aura of curiosity emanating from it.

“What is this way you spend your time Andrew?” it asked as it came and stood next to me. From the neck down it was just a tall slender man in a suit, but its face was constantly swirling. A combination of all faces I’ve seen before of people I knew and people I didn’t know completely blurring. Staring at its face was like when something you were just about to say and forgot is at the tip if your tongue, but visually like trying to recognize someone but you just cant make them out.

“This is my work,” I replied to it. “I do accounting which is recording the money in and money out for a company, and do a lot of payments to suppliers.”

It stood next to me staring in silence. Watching. I pressed the enter key on my computer to submit a batch of payments and I was returned to the home screen without it doing anything.

“Why is this way you spend your time Andrew?” it asked.

“To earn money.” I replied. “To pay off my car. To one day buy a house. To one day travel the world.”

It stood there in silence for a minute. I continued to work on my computer.

“Time used on a reality, to try create a different reality within it,” it said almost perplexed to itself as it slowly walked into the shadows.

The watch alarm went off and I found myself awake in bed. No sweat, no terror. It was just a dream but it felt so real.

Another month went on with the recurring dream every night. It never spoke to me again. Some nights it would be there on the edge of the shadows, other nights it wouldn’t appear. Some nights several of them would be in the room just watching me work in silence. All in black suits with morphing blurred faces. I realized I could never start a conversation with it unless it had spoken to me first, as in only if it wanted to be spoken to. Otherwise I would work in silence, in an endless loop of repeating doomed to fail problems on my computer, while it, and sometimes the others, observed.

After that month suddenly the dreams stopped. I started going to sleep and would just wake up the next morning. I continued to go to work in the real world, but the dreams never returned again. I never told anyone about it because I didn’t want anyone to think I was cracking under the stress of my career. It felt so real, even though I knew it was a dream.

A year has passed and I’d pretty much forgotten about it, and I spend no time thinking about it anymore. I was back to the endless days still grinding away at the same job, doing the same commute with no end in sight. Last Thursday night I got home from work and there was a small package on my doorstep. I thought it was strange because I never order anything online. I was trying to pay things off and save the deposit for a house. I also didn’t really have any friends, and my distant family haven’t so much as sent me a Christmas card in the last 3 years.

I took the package inside and opened it. There was a small box and a note. I opened the small box and there was a heart shaped locket. I turned the note over and it had 3 words.

Wake up Andrew.