Just Once: Side Stories: Albus's Dream
#13 of Just Once
Dreams can be really weird
An interesting thing to note is that the passage of time in a dream is different from the passage of time in real life. It can be faster, or it can be slower. Another thing to note is that Albus Kane's dreams are, by default, complex in narrative and often surreal. This story is narrated from Albus's perspective, retold to his therapist.
The night of the day I lost my virginity to Jem, I had quite the dream. I dreamed that, among other things, my entire lifespan, decades of time, passed by during a single night in real life. I also dreamed that I spent it with Jem. The dream started all the way back at the UTI board meeting where I met her for the first time in years. Instead of fainting, I told her exactly how I felt. "Jem, I just want you to know one thing: ever since I was 10, I was madly in love with you, and I want us to be together. Please tell me you feel the same way, so that my life can truly be complete." She was silent for a few seconds in the dream world, which felt like hours to me in the dream, before tears rolled down her cheeks and we started making out. We went back to the apartment and consummated the relationship immediately. That was one time in the dream I remember having sex, and it was slow and passionate. The rest of the times it could potentially have happened, save for the ones I mention, I just blacked out, as far to my memory.
Of course, unlike real life, neither of us cared about protection, so she was pregnant with twins, one brown lion and one blue fox. Just when we were worried about how we would support them, we got the news I got later in the day, but from Wesha instead of Jem: we were being paid salaries in the millions. We spent about three months together before we, not knowing that the other would propose, ended up proposing to each other and saying yes. We had passionate sex again. Six months in, we married, and at nine months, the twins are born. When that happened, everything felt like it was perfect, at which point I thought that it was genuinely too good to be true, and then I realized something: if it were just a dream, I never wanted to wake up and be confronted by the disappointments of reality.
About two years in, the bliss went away, and we both started worrying that the love was gone. We panicked to get it back, until we finally went to couple's counseling. The counselor noticed that we were still inseparable, but the bliss was all that was missing. He explained that romantic love does not need bliss to exist, and we went back, had sex a third time, and sexually AND romantically, we could easily tell that the spark was back. We then watched as our children grew up, found love, and had children of their own. Then, we noticed we were growing old. We felt no urge to have sex (that must correspond to when the "wet dream" part of the dream served its purpose), we had trouble walking and our senses started failing. Eventually, we were both confined to hospital beds, but we asked to share one. We were granted that request.
As we quickly got weaker and weaker, we contemplated whether or not there would be an afterlife, and if our lives mattered if there wasn't. We-I-then realized something: moments like the ones in my dream, moments where you truly feel alive, are the thing that give your life meaning, not some bullshit journey to an afterlife that may not even be there, and probably isn't. We finally concluded that we were perfectly content with dying together at any moment, having said goodbye already to everybody we loved and cared about, but that neither of us wanted to live without the other. We didn't have to. We both died in our sleep, and I know that because I had a dream within a dream that I shared with her, of us walking towards a portal, leading to an empty void, with flowers around it. We both walked into it together, and as we did, I felt the life leaving me. When we crossed through that portal, I woke from the dream within the dream, next to her, then we both died in each other's arms, and then we woke up, or rather, I woke up.
I asked if there was anything about the dreams she had last night that she felt like she wanted to talk about, and there were tears in both of our eyes. She said no, and we both went back to sleep, not having any dreams before Wesha woke the two of us up. I now feel like no matter what happens from then on, the moments in the dream, even though they weren't real, were more than worth it.