Come Back To Us - 18. Chapter 18

Karl really couldn’t understand it.

He was having one of his reading lessons with the Lieutenant General in the common room. But he wasn’t in the mood. He had been thinking again about these visions. After that time he had wanted to run away, none of them hadn’t happened again.

Mimír really liked playing with his nerves and sanity.

Karl was still deeply focused on the page. But he couldn’t focus on the words anymore. They didn’t make any sense to him.

“I started having weird dreams after George tried to kill himself.”

The words were plain, his tone emotionless.

He looked up to see the man taken aback, once more. Of course, he said that out of the blue; who wouldn’t be taken aback?

It seemed he was waiting for him to proceed only with a single look. Maybe he just didn’t want to look too curious and that he wanted to leave him the choice whether he wanted to go further or not. And strangely he thought he needed to it. To finally talk about it to someone.

“In these dreams, there is still the same boy. He looks like me, except that his clothes are different and he doesn’t have so many freckles. But his name’s Mímir. But that’s not all. There is also another boy. One who looks like George, except that he doesn’t wear glasses and that his haircut is different. I don’t know his name. But I saw his death.” He felt a lump form in his throat so he stopped for a while. It was still as awful as he remembered. “It wasn’t precise at first. But then I dreamt it again. And again. More recently.” Another pause. “He died while Mímir should have been the one to be killed.” It became hard for him to breathe normally. “It was winter. And the snow became stained with blood.” He needed to calm down, and quick. But this was easier said than done… “His blood…”

He glanced at the man who was now looking like he thought he was a madman. Or maybe his was just his imagination luring him. Because he thought he was one.

“It seemed that they were pretty close. I don’t know…I mean I just got that feeling seeing them…”

Could have they done…the things he and George had done…? Had they reached that level of intimacy? He still hadn’t had any visions which would make it true by that time. He could never know if he wasn’t shown.

“They were running away from a castle…Mímir had been made a prisoner. He freed him. And then he died. Because he freed him.”

He needed to stop talking about that. This isn’t the only vision he had had anyway.

“But this was only the beginning.” His voice had changed by now. He sounded like he could break down at any time. “the ned of the beginning.”
The man looked intrigued more than anything else now.

“I learnt that Mímir’s father had been killed by the other boy’s father who was a king. I didn’t see his death, but I saw the King’s death. I saw how Mímir and his older brothers wanted to get their revenge. How they made the boy their prisoner and slave. But I didn’t see any further after that.”

Yeah. There was still a whole hole in that story. All the key pieces that were missing and making him too intrigued to stop thinking about those visions.

“It just seems like…these two boys are different version of George and myself, like what they could have been in another life, in the time of Vikings…it’s really weird. It gets on my nerves because I can’t explain it. Those visions just came out of nowhere right after George attempted to kill himself. This can’t be a coincidence.”

It was so frustrating. This lingering uncertainty making him doubt about who he really was.

“I don’t know if George had the same dreams or if it’s just me becoming crazy.”

But what happened in those dreams couldn’t have been real, right?

His silence was becoming unbearable. He knew it wasn’t his fault, let alone his problem, but he needed answers, no matter from whom they came from. He was probably only taking time to think and try to find a good explanation which could solve the whole thing; he shouldn’t be so impatient.

“In Asian culture, there is something which is called ‘reincarnation’. It means that when you die, your soul leaves your boy and can migrate to another body to continue its cycle. So maybe after that Mímir boy died, his soul reincarnated in your body when you were born. And the same thing may have happened with George. I think this is the only viable theory which can account for your weird dreams.”

Reincarnation…

He had never heard about that before…

He thought about the idea carefully, mainly to make sure he had understood what it really was about.

So..this meant that he and George had been Mímir and the King’s son in another life and that they souls had waited for hundreds of years to be born again into another body. And so this meant that their “souls”, spirits or whatever had anticipated this war and that his father would send him away so they could meet each other again.

This made no sense at all.

“But this is only an Asian spiritual belief. It has never been proved scientifically speaking.”

Of course, who could prove that such things existed?

“If you follow Darwin’s theory about the evolution of species, there is no such thing as souls, spirits, God, Paradise or Hell.”

He didn’t know who that Darwin guy was anyway.

“But then if you follow Freud’s own theory about the interpretation of dreams, it’s not that far-fetched…”

Freud?

He didn’t know who that guy was either. But he was now curious about this theory.

“What does it say?”

“I’m not going to go into too many details, but to sum it up he said that any dream we have has a symbolic meaning, that it’s not just a meaningless random thing we can forget in only ten seconds. It’s basically our subconscious which comes into play.”

Our subconscious…

“What’s that?”

“Let me try to explain it simply. According to Freud, there are three levels of the mind. First and more importantly, the conscious mind. That is our ability to think, remember, feel, everything that happens in our head when we are awake and conscious. This is the most obvious part of the mind; the one we all know and all acknowledge as human beings capable of thinking. Then there is the preconscious and further down the unconscious. Try to picture an iceberg. In an iceberg, you have the visible part of it above the surface, which corresponds to the conscious mind which we are aware of. Then you have the two others parts which are hidden under water. And if you can’t see them, you can’t be aware of them, right? Unless you go underwater. But even if you do that, you probably won’t see them clearly. Let’s say that the precocious is the part of the iceberg just under the conscious mind, that is an in-between state between this and the unconscious, like a bridge that enables to connect them. The further you go down, the more complex it gets to understand to explain what really happens in there. When you are unconscious it means you’re not awake. So you can’t think rationally like you do when you are.”

He thought he was understanding what he was explaining. But this theory of reincarnation still didn’t make any sense to him. He thought about it more deeply, trying to find a way to make it logical, but there wasn’t any he could find.

If all people chose to reincarnate into another body after they died, then it meant that the people who were already reincarnations of other people who had lived before them couldn’t be…really themselves…since they were reincarnations of different people that weren’t them. It’s like ghosts took control of their bodies to have a second life. It was only creepy when you thought about it…

“Maybe your dreams only want to make you understand something important which you can’t figure out on your own. It’s probably not to make you question yourself or wonder about what you could have been hundreds of years earlier. I don’t think it’s about that. So you shouldn’t worry too much about this theory of reincarnation.”

Would it be only for that? All those visions?

“Like what?”

“Only you can find the answer to that question.”

He said that as if he already knew the answer himself.

“Well, then maybe I would need all the pieces of the puzzle to figure out that important thing I can’t find about on my own.”

They stared into each other’s eyes passively, Karl waiting for him to react with great patience.

Kristian suddenly put one hand on his knee.

“I’ll let you think through all about it. Still, don’t forget to get some rest, okay?”

He removed his hand swiftly and stood up in the same way.

“Good night.”

Was that all?

Now that he had explained this whole thing to him, he just left him there like that?

“You think I’m insane?”

Their eyes met, Karl’s stare hard and intimidating. It seemed that Kristian didn’t know what to answer because he hadn’t expected that question, or simply because he thought so he didn’t know what to do anymore.

“I don’t think so. And I never will. Or in that case we’re all insane. We’re just not aware of it.”

Karl would have preferred he stopped with the “never will” part.

“I don’t think everyone else has that kind of dreams.”

Even if he could never be sure, he thought he couldn't be quite much mistaken.

“Trust me. It’s not that kind of dreams that makes people insane.”

“Then what does?”

“There may be plenty of various reasons why people become insane. Loneliness. Too much suffering. Betrayal. Everything that is linked to suffering I guess. I mean I am no psychiatrist.”

He actually didn’t know what it was really like to be insane. He had never been told about it either. It was already good enough for him to know that word itself.

“Like war?”

They kept staring into each other’s eyes, Karl waiting for his answer.

“Yes. It destroys anything it touches. Lives, families, happiness, honour. That’s why we say the men who came back from the trenches during Word War One were ‘shell-shocked’. Hearing constantly the sound of shells and see the corpses of people you had got used to staying with is enough to drive anyone crazy.”

Karl looked down as he bit the inside of his cheek. Shell-shocked… It sounded like a strange term, but the meaning hidden behind it was probably the worst thing ever.

Did that mean that Mr. Hopkins was shell-shocked? It seemed to him he was questioning the obvious only as a way to hope to hear the answer would be no.

“Did you go to war? Did you see those trenches?”

There was another moment of hesitation on the man’s part.

“No. And I was lucky not to go. Unlike so many men.”

Yeah, like Mr. Hopkins. He bit the flesh harder.

“Don’t worry too much about your dreams. There are things much worse than that. Nothing proves that what you see has really happened. It’s best to focus on the present before what we have slips from our hands.”

He let the man go as he stared at the right page of the book that had been left opened. There was one sentence that stood out in the middle that he managed to decipher, not without difficulty, but with enough concentration not to give up at the first word, despite being a long sentence.

Men havfruen har ingen tårer, og så lider hun meget mere.

But a mermaid has no tears, and therefore she suffers so much more.

He kept staring for a while thinking about it, now trying to decipher its meaning. It was good to know how to read words, but if you couldn’t find the meaning hidden behind the sentences, it was pointless.

He had a feeling that that book wasn’t just a kids’ story.

Hello my dear readers!!
Here you go with another chapter!!
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