[WP] Write about a character that is convinced that they are dreaming.

I think I may be stuck for good in this reality. Actually, I’m not sure I even know what reality means anymore. What I do know is that the white flaps are coming...and I don’t know how much time I have till they do.

Wait a minute. Let me start from the beginning.

This whole thing is pretty ridiculous, even for me, so try and keep up. I don’t know what my new family’s intentions are for me or what they’ll do in the next few days. As a matter of fact, I have no idea who they are...or even who I am other than the fragments I was able to piece together about this new me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an idiot. They call me Alexander, and I respond to them as Alexander. I keep cool over my demeanor, while the imposters keep watch over it. Is their spying blatant? No it’s not, a far cry from espionage, but it’s there regardless.

Sometimes it’s from the corner of their eyes at the dinner table and other times through the bottom of a glass while they take a gulp of water. I’ve walked out of a room with my mother; a title which I’ll stick to for the sake of clarity, standing outside my door just watching me. She’ll play it off by saying things like ‘oh I was just coming to see you’, or, ‘oh what would you like for dinner?’. But like I said, I’m no idiot. Once is serendipity. You can call twice a coincidence and thrice a strange occurrence. However, once you lose count of these acts of reconnaissance…well…you be the judge.

How it happened is complicated. As a disclaimer, you can believe what I’m saying or you can shove it where the sun don’t shine, it makes no difference to me. You don’t see with my eyes or think with my head so your level of vested trust is about as fragile as this reality I’m in. For those still interested, read close. My name, my real name, is David Benjamin. I studied English literature in New York City where I was born and raised. I’ve lived there most of my life other than the two years I spent in Houston with my family. That was short lived since our exodus was swift. Once you’ve tasted city life, especially the pace NYC puts on its denizens, the sun feels like it crawls across the sky everywhere else. But that’s neither here nor there. What I really need to discuss are the dreams.

It was small at first. The dreams were normal, nothing odd as far as dreams go. I mean, dreams are pretty goddamn odd by themselves, I’m aware, but what I dreamt was par for the course. Finals and getting laid were usually the central themes in mine, but other stuff such as the day’s conversations, aspirations, and internal conflicts was also common. Nothing more or less than what an average subconscious conjures during sleep. Except one day I saw something which stuck with me. Now most of the time, remembering dreams after waking up is kind of like trying to catch smoke. The only thing you’re left with is the scent in your palms without a trace of a smoke wisp. A dream works the same way, dissipating seconds after re-entering consciousness. Some dreams, though, stick around like the stench after an Indian-food shit. And believe me, I speak by experience.

This dream was like one of those stinkers. It was inconspicuous at first, something you don’t even notice happening until you’re awake. I dreamt I was part of Anonymous, you know, the 4chan hackers. It was during that whole Anonymous hacking craze thing. Anyway, I’m wrecking some guy’s day in the dream and all is fine and dandy. My room was exactly like the real one except for one detail, my computer case was different. I didn’t pay the anomaly any mind t until I awoke and walked over to turn my actual PC on. It took me a second to realize that it was no longer the jet black, white trimmed, see through paneled beauty that I remembered. Just like in my dream, it was red with black trim. The see through panel was gone. I could have sworn I got that case in black, sworn. I don’t even like the color red. There isn’t a red shirt in my damn wardrobe, why the hell would I get the case of a color I despised? And yet, there it was on the floor, red as a baboon’s anus. Now, this is the kind of thing that will make you question your sanity, amigo. I went back to check my Newegg purchase history and even there, the son of a bitch was red. I was straight insane in the membrane for a good three days before I wrote it off as…I don’t know what. I just wrote it off. It took a month or two before I pushed it off to my mind’s back burner, but there was no way to forget about it altogether. A few months later, I would receive another reminder, and then another, and then again after that. I had no idea at the time that this was just the beginning.

At first it was a dream every month and then it ramped up to becoming a weekly ordeal. I had normal people dreams still, but every now and again, one of those bastards snuck in. Think of it like that guy at your party that you think you recognize but aren’t sure, so you let him stay since he isn’t doing any harm. This was why it was so difficult to tell the two kinds apart sometimes. I never knew which dream would result in an alteration and which one would not. It wasn’t till I woke up did I realize that the guy was indeed a random who just snuck in for a drink and ended up stealing my shoes when he left. Usually the changes were benign, a new flower pot here or a missing picture frame there, nothing catastrophic. Before I go on, let me qualify the catastrophic part; it was nothing catastrophic up until that point. Now is a different story though. Entirely different.

Every time I confronted my family, no one even noticed the switches taking place. They were welded to the fact that it was and always had been the way I found it in the post dream world. After a while I had to shut my damn trap and just absorb the blows to my psychology because it really was fucking me up. Still, at this time the dreams were flimsy. What I mean by that is that the alterations I was experiencing now were not always permanent. After dreaming, I would wake up to see the change come to fruition, only to see it revert upon having another altering dream. Over time these alterations continued ramping up from harmless changes to bigger ones. It went from alterations to objects and swelled to become alterations in relationships and in some cases, evolving into something paralyzing altogether.

The first true alteration occurred a year after I first started seeing the dreams. Not only that, the dreams I saw began embodying a metaphorical tone in their presentation. A younger me was standing in front of a picture of my uncle, dad’s little brother, from when he was in the Marines. He was a good looking man, tall and handsome. He always had been popular with the women folk, no doubt. But there I was in front of his smiling image. Then something strange happened. Have you seen those pictures on the internet where the face is upright but the smile is flipped upside down? No, not a frown, I mean when instead of being upright, the smile is photoshopped so that the top lip is on the bottom and the bottom lip is on top. It’s creepy as hell. Well, Uncle Ray’s image was doing the same thing.

His smile flipped upside down, turned back, and then flipped again. I stood there as it repeated this cycle five or six times. After that the sky became dark and it started to pour. I looked up and opened my mouth and some of the raindrops dripped in. It tasted like the ocean. I can still taste the tang of salt on my tongue if I think about it. After that, the rain morphed to floating granules of ash, like peppery snowfall. Well, the next day I asked Pa about Uncle Ray. He just stared at me for a few moments. It was like I was talking about a ghost. I was reminded, and I use that term loosely as in I had no fucking idea what he was talking about, that my uncle was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq fifteen years ago. My throat became desert-dry as though I swallowed dust instead of saliva.

My mother picked up the narrative after my father failed to answer any more of my questions. He stormed out of my bedroom part out of the grief and the other part rage since he thought I was being an inconsiderate prick. Ma reminded me how my uncle almost made it and how his heart stopped multiple times as doctors tried to resuscitate him before he flatlined. Don’t get me wrong, she was angry as well. Her cheeks and ears grew pink with fury as she told me how we were all at the funeral and the way I sobbed as I held on to his coffin. It reminded me of the salty rain in my dream.

‘How can you be so inconsiderate, David?’ I remember her asking me. I could do nothing but respond with silence. Then she said something which ground my core to powder.

’You walk by his ashes every goddamn day and you expect us to believe…’.

Ma trailed off in my head. What she said next didn’t matter a grain. I wasn’t listening. I walked…no, I floated down the steps and made my way to the den. I found dad with tears streaming down his face, reaching out and stroking a portrait hung above the fireplace with his fingertips. It was Uncle Ray, the exact picture as the one in my dream to the T, uniform and all. Next to him a scarlet urn, flanked by two black candles on either side, rested atop the mantle. Dad pulled the pot and clutched it with two hands as they trembled, rattling the lid on top.

I dropped to my knees. For all intents and purposes, I was talking about a ghost at least to them. Questions, like guppies in a bowl, swam to and fro in my skull. And why wouldn’t they? Here my family was weeping over this can of worms that I opened but I remember not even eight-and-a-half hours ago, Uncle Raymond was over for dinner. In fact, he sat across from me, smiling and laughing at the dinner table just the night before…

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