Where No One Knows Your Name
Jan
'08
Have you ever had one of those dreams where it seems suddenly no one knows who you are even though you remember everyone? You’ll approach your best friend and she’ll look at you like you’re insane, pass you a quarter, and hurry away. Your own mother shows less sympathy for your apparent insane desire to get into her house; she simply calls the cops or has your father aim a shotgun at you.
I didn’t have a dream quite that dramatic, but I woke up shaken and I’m still shaken, even though I’ve rejoined the real world and have been watching television for 45 minutes. I can’t explain why I’m so shaken except that it was very similar to those dreams where no one knows your name, those dreams from which I usually wake up stunned and heartbroken. I usually recover within minutes, but today that feeling has stuck.
Richard had talked us into exploring some local folklore. By “us” I mean myself and a random assortment of people we apparently knew but whom right now I can’t seem to recall. They weren’t “good friends” by any means, just the sort of acquaintances in the background whom you’ve gotten to know through other people. Some of them may have just been movie extras. In any case, we were to spend the night in an open field upon which there were two structure. They looked like wire shelves to me, very uncomfortable and extremely unstable, but his idea was to sleep on these things. To the sides were several benches and I begged Richard to keep company with me on one of the benches but he refused and we slept separately. Or at least, we woke up separately. This is one of those shady parts that most dreams have: I remember clearly falling asleep on the shelf underneath his, holding his hand which was dangling down and seeing a tuft of his hair peeking out over the edge. When I woke up, however, I was on one of the surrounding benches.
The point, he said, was to disprove some legend that witches and other magical creatures visited that clearning at night and devoured whatever was there. I’m not superstitious and usually don’t believe in this sort of thing, and my dream self was no different. I wasn’t worried about mysteriously disappearing in the night or waking up to find a gnome knawing on my foot; I was only cold, and I wanted to be close to the boy I loved in whatever endeavor he chose to embark upon.
Everyone was very excited and very hungry, so I brought out the prepackaged turkey sandwiches which somehow just turned out to be packages of lettuce that tasted like turkey, and we munched for a while - myself and the token fat kid in particular. I don’t mean that to sound mean, but he was larger than everyone, and if you would imagine his movie character, he’d be the gentle-hearted big-boned individual of which everyone was afraid because he could, if he wanted, crush your skull. Like me, he didn’t sleep in the wobbly shelving units because he was afraid he’d cause them to topple over. He didn’t want to ruin the fun for everyone else, so we camped on our benches (except that I fell asleep on the shelf).
We slept soundly, or at least I don’t remember any disturbance at this point in the dream. It was cold, and thus slightly uncomfortable, but somehow that didn’t matter as soon as sleep drifted in. It was dreamless and deep and wonderful, and when I woke up I felt very refreshed and ready to laugh along with the others that we had disproved this local piece of folklore and could go about our lives.
Except when my token large man and I woke up, everyone else was gone.
At first the shelving units were just as they were when we arrived - not in the best shape, but still holding up - but after walking around peering inside, looking everywhere for signs of life, they toppled over and came crashing to the ground. The surrounding area was perfectly silent, no noise except that which the crash made, and no sign of life, not even a bird. We looked at each other and started running, panicked, back towards home. He went his way and I found mine to my parents’ house where I cannot remember my intent. Was I going to call the police? Was I going to start a search for the bodies? Was I just going to hole up in my bedroom and cry for days?
Contrary to what the first paragraph in this post implies, my parents knew who I was. I arrived and started to frantically tell them what had happened, how my boyfriend had disappeared into thin air, without a trace, just like that, until I noticed the clutter. My parents’ house was full of broken dishes, socks that were lost, and miscellaneous objects that were indeterminable against the objects next to them. It was clutter with no organization, and it was everywhere.
My mother informed me that they were robbed sometime in the night and they were trying to pick up the pieces. Some of the things in their living room weren’t even theirs, and they wanted to find out whose so they could return them, but they couldn’t figure out why they would have so many things that belonged to other people. They couldn’t figure out how the robber came in with foreign objects, trashed their entire house, and left again, without taking any of their most treasured valuables, without waking them up (the bedroom was in a similar state), without leaving any trace of who they were or how to catch up with them.
I was shocked and devastated. I didn’t know what to say. Immediately my thought was that this was somehow related to the field in which I slept last night, that our spending the night there was as if we handed someone the key to my parents house and let them in to do as they please. There’s no logic in that, of course, and I knew deep down it was just a coincidence; but at the moment, I wanted something that I could blame on Richard so I could be mad at him. I couldn’t very well be mad at him for randomly disappearing, though it was his idea to sleep there in the first place, so I decided to blame him for the burglary at my parents’ house.
I went to my room and cried. I took in a few meals so it must have been days, maybe even a week. Time dragged. I slept through most of it, but it seemed like I’d wake up only an hour later.
Around this time, in my bed in my apartment in “real” life, I woke up. I was half asleep and tears were streaming down my face. I sometimes cry during my sleep if I’m crying in my dreams; I haven’t researched this at all so I don’t know if it’s normal or if it’s likely, but it happens. I looked at the time and while I was trying to determine how many hours I had been asleep, I fell back to sleep, back into my depressed, lonesome self at my parents’ house, crying over a lost love and wondering why no one else seemed to care.
It was true, no one had come to me, not even my fat man, to ask what had happened to their children that night, their friends, their loved ones. It was as if I was the only person in the world who remembered any of them.
“There’s a visitor for you down stairs,” my mother came in one day to tell me as she was still carrying loads of indeterminable smuck from one end of the house to the other. As I found my strength and crawled down the steps, I saw that not much had changed in the house. It was still a clutter, still a complete mess, still unlivable. I wondered why there wasn’t any clutter in my bedroom.
The porch was empty but I could see through the screen door that Richard was standing on the driveway with a few of the other people who went missing that night. He was clean. His hair was long, down to his shoulders, but it was combed down and dyed. His beard had obviously been washed and shaped into a bunchy lion’s beard; he looked perfectly kingly. His clothing was clean and nice. The others had similar looks - very pristine, untattered, shiny and pressed. For a moment I was so shocked to see him and so shocked at his appearance that I couldn’t breathe. No movement came to my legs and my heart pounded through my universe.
I walked silently to him with tears in my eyes. I wanted nothing more than to embrace him, to hold him close and never let him go, but he gave me a foreign look which I didn’t immedately translate. I approached him and he backed away, again, then once more. He didn’t know me. Our friends remembered me, but only as a friend, not as Richard’s girlfriend. My mother didn’t seem to know him either when she came out to offer everyone drinks. Here I was standing in front of the one person I ever wanted to be with, and only I remembered that we were in love. A future I thought I had lost but which was now standing just a few feet in front of me… Only to find out that I really did lose it, it was gone. Either I had made it up entirely and had never met this person, or I was the only one to be truly affected by the magic that night in the field.
I woke up again in my apartment bed and the tears were gone. My heart felt empty and I didn’t want to get out of bed, so I just stared at my night stand and sighed.
One person found this entry interesting.
Leave A Reply
That’s so weird! I’ve never had one of those dreams before, they sound horrible! :O
Mar
'08