He woke up, and out of a dream. As always, the dream was so real he was surprised to be back in the conscious world. Most dreams he quickly forgot between the distractions of the alarm going off and his two hungry cats demanding breakfast. But, this dream was remarkable.
He was on a brilliant green, freshly mowed lawn that ran right up to a beach. The sky was brilliant blue and waves rolled gently in to crash on the sand. His cousin, The Doctor, sat in a wicker chair. He, the Dreamer, glanced at his smart phone and watched planes landing in Sydney with a flight-app.
With dream-certainty he realized he was in Australia. With no transition he was suddenly in a car, at night, speeding toward a city. The loneliness of being far from home swept over him. He thought how he made a new life in Sydney, which in the real world he hadn’t. And he thought of his far off father as the car raced over a high, massive, dark bridge. The sparkling city was before and below him.
It gets dark quick in Australia, he thought as somehow his hand reached down, out of the car, hundreds of feet to dip his fingers in the black harbor water. He looked to his left as the car reached the peak of the arching bridge. He was passing the nearby superstructure of a giant, ocean-going freighter, painted red and white with catwalks and radar dish on the mast. He thought of all the people on the freighter he’d never met and of the far off Pacific places the ship visited. Suddenly, somehow, in overwhelming darkness, he saw the anchor chain with it’s massive links and the anchor going down in the black depths of the sea. At some point the acoustic version of a Men at Work song was playing with the lyrics Ghosts appear and fade-away repeating over and over.
His wife woke him because he slept past the alarm. He was amused by the dream and related the whole thing to her.
And so the dream became memory.
copyright 2017 Christopher Donahue