You hold a hastily-stapled coupla pages in one hand and a martini in the other. This should make for a good quick read while you're waiting to hear back from Dick you mean Dirk.
The papers look old. Your mother seems to have written something on the front.
"Roxy,
When the time is right, you'll know precisely what to do with this.
I am so proud of you, daughter.
RL."
Weird. Then again, Mom always was kind of nutty.
The Dream Self
Dr. R. Lalonde
Certain circumstances of the past have found me in situations in which I was unsure what was real and what I had merely imagined in a sort of cosmic fever dream. Every so often I would awake to the grim realization that I was not sure where I was. Certainly most would attribute this to the wiles of alcoholic intoxication. Those who know me better would attribute it to the throes of academic passion: a late night in a library reading about all and sundry would certainly disorient any normally sensible scholar.
These moments of disorientation first began shortly after the birth of my daughter. They were, and are, usually accompanied by dreams-- nightmares, more accurately. Most frequently these night terrors concern huge, tentacles monsters floating aimlessly in the vacuum of space. It is not this which unnerves me: in my youth, I was a connoisseur of Lovecraft, Poe, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert W. Chambers. The nameless and eldritch horror or a hulking monstrosity is scarce enough to unnerve one who cut her teeth on The Pit and the Pendulum and The King in Yellow.
What, then, could serve to disconcert someone so very confident, perhaps confident to the point of arrogance, in herself? The most perturbing aspect of these occasional lapses in consciousness is their invariability. Through half-remembered echoes of the shoutwhispers of the great tentacled things, occasionally as I drift to sleep, a very clear image of a boy and a girl dressed resplendently in purple, standing in front of a massive green explosion that seems to always happen in slow motion, appears to me. This image never, ever varies, and I have never been able to stay asleep long enough to see what happens to the children: that is what disturbs me. I feel I will never know if they survive this inexplicable supernova, nor what they were doing there in the first place, nor why the boy seems to be holding a robotic stuffed toy rabbit.
Throughout the many months during which this singular and weird phenomenon has occurred, the very same months which served as the antecedent for this treatise, I have put much thought into the idea that perhaps the unconscious self is more conscious than many philosophers and psychologists have ever previously postulated. Who can say where the usually dormant portion of the mind goes when its waking counterpart lies in repose?
The concept of lucid dreaming is certainly a very valid one. Any dreamer can have a lucid dream; all it requires is stillness, a dark room, patience, and knowledge of how to awaken one's mind without awakening the body as well. Lucid dreaming is frequently suggested by sleep therapists as treatment for chronic nightmares and sleep paralysis. It is a common occurrence. Some dreamers experience it every night, often without even trying.
The lucid dream itself is just as ethereal as its more mundane counterpart. Unlike that counterpart, it is more often remembered and, as its name would suggest, more vivid and lifelike.
I have reason to believe that my dream or hallucination of the terrible beasts in space, and of the children standing before the explosion, is not a dream at all, but a memory.
[stuff goes here]
timaeusTestified [TT] began pestering tipsyGnostalgis [TG]
TT: Sorry about that.
TT: Squarewave was dying for a rap-off.
TT: What seems to be the trouble?
TG: i
TG: mom plaeid the game
TG: when she was littler
TG: or in antother universe
TG: or smth
TG: and yr bor did tooo
TG: *bro
TG: n they both remember/ed it
TT: Hold your horses. What makes you so sure?
TG: u sound liek janey
TG: but i found this essya mom wrote before she got famouse
TG: adderrsed 2 me
TG: she said id know when it was important to read it
TG: and the way mom was talkign sounded like she sleeptwalked too
TG: not like litearlly asleep but she walked around on that purplel planet you talked about
TT: Lots of people sleepwalk.
TG: she mentionedn it by name
TG: desser
TG: *deers
TG: *derse
TG: dessert yum
TT: Hmm.
TT: I don't say this often, but I think need a drink.
TG: siiiign
TG: u n me both