Prompts? - 1. Prompt #103

Prompt #103: We have the embodiments of ideas around us. We see Death as The Grim Reaper, Justice as a blind woman, the world of dreams is watched over by the Sandman. Take one of these or create one of your own and write a short story from their point of view.

Bring me a Dream

I glance down at the man sleeping on the floor. His name is Bobby and he is sleeping on the floor of his living room. I am perched in the shadows of his mind, drinking in his story. He has had a bad run of luck lately. An oil tanker had mistakenly pumped in several gallons of fuel into his home. Bobby's household used natural gas and had the old oil tank removed, but the oil company arrived at the wrong address, and had pumped it through the outside fill pipe, flooding the basement with oil. It had ruined his children's toys, his grandmother's heirlooms and several of his cherished guitars. His wife and his two children are currently living with his in-laws while the damage was assessed and the litigation against the oil company to kindle up. Bobby disliked his in-laws as strongly as they disliked him and he despised the fact that they were under their roof, tolerating their cutting comments about his lack of a career, the poor job they thought he was doing raising his children and the unspoken accusation that lurked under their sympathetic comments. The relationship between him and his wife had been strained for some time and this current turn of events had not improved matters. He struggled with his other children, his autistic eight year old and the deaf younger child, who was only 2 years old. Not to mention the still present heartbreak of their first son, found dead of SIDS in his crib, followed by the vasectomy reversal and the infertility issues that had followed. All of it had run him from his unhappy temporary home, to find little solace here, in his old familiar house, a temporary respite from the current misery of his life.

I know this. I know all I need to know about anybody. It is what allows me to invade their head, to find their memories, their fantasies, their fears and their hopes. Secret, fragile things that their mind would not accept in the light of day, but would creep forward, under the shield of sleep, to invade their brains and explore the mettle of their souls.

I often don't interfere. Not like I used to. I used to reign on high, when people feared me, worshiped me and prayed to me. But as technology grew and people hooked their mind on to their electronic pulses, they trivialized me, labeling me with silly, childish names and convincing themselves that my influence is imaginary, finding comfort in their arrogant superiority of scientific thought. And they are right--to a degree. Sleep aids and woefully inconsistent sleep patterns limit the delta waves that are my home. Children were still accessible, with their rich imagination, but anxieties too often lead to nightmares as they struggled with their helplessness at the hand of uncertain, unconfident parents. By the time they blossom into independence, the rich fertile fields of their mind are too heavily fogged by external stimuli or a vast variety of addictive substances that keep their minds far out of my grasp.

Bobby, however, is an adult, stripped and vulnerable by his recent misfortunes as he lies curled on the lonely floor of his former home. I can tell from the weight against his heart that he is perilously close to giving in. He harbors thoughts and fantasies of just leaving, taking off and leaving his responsibilities behind, but he is mature enough to know that he never will. But he longs for it; longs for comfort, if only for a few short hours.

I explore his mind and heart, gently and find something...a spark among all that happiness, a memory that he likes to pull around him like a security blanket at times like this, when his guard is down. It is a deep memory, buried down in those soft layers of his mind, because it is as uncomfortable as it is comforting and it bothers him if he must examine it too closely. But I find it, because it is what I do, and slowly coax it to the surface, as carefully as rolling a bubble across my palm. It is warm and golden and I clear the way with a distant memory of his mother's hands and the smell of her apple pies before I gently blow the sands of his past across his face.

It filled Bobby's mind with the warm, spring days spent in the woods behind his parent's house. There was a tree there, a majestic oak that had been around for as long as time itself, it seemed, an old tree that had seen many things and had weathered many storms. He could remember him and his best friend Thomas climbing that tree, finding a convergence of branches in the center, near the trunk, where there was just enough room for the two of them to curl up together. They would lie up there for hours, hidden from their parent's suspicious eyes, talking about everything. He dreamt of the way the sun would sometimes shine through Thomas' hair, burning it golden bright against his eyes, remembered how they would lace their fingers together without even thinking about it, the way that Thomas would smile at him. He had sunk into that first kiss, so sweet and deep he didn't care if he never resurfaced. They kissed up there for forever, it seemed, with the bark rough against their arms and necks and the sun lighting the world up around them and building on the heat, the gentle warmth that was already building up between the two of them....

He stirs not, just continues to slumber, but I can already feel the weight against his heart lightening, buoyed by warm summers and simple uncomplicated friendship. I had already been to the elusive Thomas and had slipped a familiar memory into his dreams of whoring and drinking. Perhaps these two wayward souls still needed each other. Needed a little uncomplicated friendship to ease equally different pains for a little bit. Needed a reason to bring humanity back, so humans could find their comfort in each other instead of their prime time sitcoms, bottomless vodka bottles and the mechanical sex, or the endless streams of consciousness that they chased down their throats with the names of Ritalin, Xanax and Zoloft. It was my hope at least, that perhaps one of them would pick up a phone and call the other. Make the simplest of connections, voice to voice and let things built from there. I hope for this, but I have done what I can and will do no more, but hope.

And if it doesn't work...

...well there is always tomorrow night.