<USS Banshee> "In the Meaning of Dreams" Chp. 1
- From: "Brad Ruder" <GroundZero@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: ussbanshee@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 16:30:17 -0800
?In the Meaning of Dreams?
by Lieutenant
Joshua Asper
Chapter One ?
?Nightmare's
Epilogue? His mind absorbed the scene
before him, so quiet and calm and ? normal.
It was the life he
had always wanted, a gathering of family and friends ? he knew that
they were just that, though the only one he recognized was his dear
mother.
This was the way it was supposed to be. The warmth
and the love, the laughter and the quiet times. This was how he had
always dreamed it would be, how he had always prayed it would be.
The warm, inviting smiles. The pleasant conversation. The gentle
pats on the shoulder.
But most of all there was the smile of
his beloved mother, so happy now, no more hidden behind the shroud of
a lost son. When she looked at him, he saw all of that and more, saw
how proud she was of him, how joyful her life had become. She moved
before him, her face beaming, her hand reaching out to gently stroke
his face. Her smile brightened, and then widened some
more.
Too much more.
For a moment, he thought the
exaggeration was a product of love beyond normal bounds, but the
smile continued to grow, his mother?s face stretching and contorting
weirdly. She seemed to be moving in slow motion then. They all did,
slowing as if their limbs had become heavy.
No, not heavy, he
realized, his warm feelings turning suddenly hot. It was as if these
friends and his mother were becoming rigid and stiff, as if they were
becoming something less than living and breathing humans. He stared
back at that caricature of a smile, the twisted face, and recognized
the pain behind it, a crystalline agony.
He tried to call out
to her, to ask her what she needed him to do, ask her how he could
help. Her face twisted even more, blood running from her eyes. Her
skin crystallized, becoming almost translucent, almost like
glass.
Glass! She was glass! The light glistened off her
crystalline highlights; the blood ran fast over her smooth surface.
And her _expression_, a look of resignation and apology, a look that
said she had failed him and that he had failed her, drove a sharp
point straight into the helpless onlooker?s heart.
He tried to
reach out for her, tried to save her. He tried churning his legs in
a constant running movement, but it failed to move him any closer to
the target in his foresight.
Cracks began to appear in the
glass. He heard the crunching sounds as they elongated.
He
cried out repeatedly, reached for her desperately. Then he thought
of all his inner strength that was lying dormant. He sent all his
thoughts there with all his willpower, reaching for her with all his
energy.
But then, she shattered. *****
***** ***** ***** *****He sat up as straight
as he could, his eyes darted frantically around the room that was
darker than his eyes would be able to sort through. His head was
sweating from whatever inner heat was burning. His heart was beating
so loud he thought the occupants of the quarters down the hall would
here. Josh prayed as he cupped his hand over the part on his bare
chest where his heart would be ? hoping that by doing so the lurching
sensation would subside.
After a feeble attempt at repressing
his emotions, Josh exhaled deeply and struggled to climb from his
bed. The sheets were twisted and tied in many different ways; he
assumed that this was because of his running movements in the dream.
He stumbled into the bathroom as his bare feet collided with the
floor rather harshly. He splashed his face with cold water and
doused his chest with some as well ? he felt like he was on
fire.
The images flooded back without warning, the look on his
mother?s face and that terrible transformation from his dear mother
to the crystalline entity that shattered before him. Josh gave
himself a long, stern look in the mirror as he stood before it
dripping with water. Focusing on the fact that it was just a dream,
Josh returned to his living area to relinquish himself back into a
peaceful and nightmare-free slumber.
Dreaming wasn?t what he
wished to do at the moment, and the fear of having another nightmare
of the previous sort scared him more than anything. Josh couldn?t
knock out the images of brutality and death that riddled his
subconscious. He laid himself down on the mattress again and tried
to unbind the sheets from their skewed state. With his eyes locking
on the ceiling and refusing to close for even the smallest amount of
time, Josh realized that he had a problem. Even though the pillows
were soft to the touch and supported his head and neck, he couldn?t
find himself comfortable or ready to sleep.
Realizing that
meditation would probably be his best bet, Josh rose from his bed and
walked quickly to the glass table that made up his eating surface.
He used a chair to push himself up onto the table and it supported
his weight well. He grabbed the picture of his mother and set it on
the chair so he could look down upon her as he tried to soothe his
emotions and anxiety.
As soon as he locked eyes with that of
the picture, more images flooded back. The picture, like the
motherly figure in his dream, began to transform and mold itself into
something he didn?t want to see. Josh slammed his eyes closed and
smacked the picture off the chair. It dropped to the floor and
skidded a couple of feet; all that followed in the trail of
destruction was some shards of glass.
His stomach dropped
out from its normal position and his heart leaped into his throat.
He found it hard to breathe and he had the sudden sensation that
something with someone close to him ? not necessarily his mother ?
was in peril or had met an untimely end. Not prone to having
accurate premonitions, Josh tried to blame the sudden rash dream on
overworked nerves and a rise in his stress level.
Appearing to
counter his own counters to the dream his body seem to instantly, in
an indescribable form, inform him that that wasn?t the reason and
that he wasn?t stressed at all. The ?Sara? issue had long since been
resolved and not to his likable outcome. He figured, being the time
span between the end of the relationship and the dream was rather
large, that that wasn?t the reason either. Nothing could explain his
current predicament; at least nothing logical and
obvious.
Josh returned to his bed and he laid down on the
mattress ? again. His eyes searched the ceiling again, but nothing
caught his eye. His eyes bobbed with weight as if they wanted
nothing more than to close. Apparently his soul was over the
atrocious mentality that his dream imposed, but his brain
wasn?t.
The dream would be a thorn in his side; he hadn?t the
time to scratch at it or to find a way to get it out. Faster than it
had taken him to fully awaken from his nightmare, sleep retook him
and pulled him back into the world of fancy. In the last waking
moments before his lids closed, Josh thought that the world of fancy
had been corrupted and evil lurked in the shadows.
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