May's Workshop Stories

The Dream

It all started with a dream, a dream wrapped in the gentle wisps of fog that I couldn't shake away. It drilled its way into my very soul, and I had no idea why.

I could never fully remember the dream. Yet, the feeling it caused lingered with me through every moment of my waking life. It made me want to keep on dreaming, to unravel the mystery, to find out why this one was so different than all the others.

"Have you considered therapy?" Rebeca, my friend, asked me one day when I told her that I had had the same dream once again.

"No, of course I didn't. I am not crazy!" I yelled at her, feeling I was once again overreacting.

However, each time she used that tone, it rubbed me the wrong way. She couldn't understand that something about that image of the figure on a horse's back obscured by the heavy snowfall spoke to me. It was like that shadow of a man was a whisper in my mind, telling me things I needed to know, helping me see the truths I couldn't see on my own.

"I know you are not crazy, but maybe they can help you interpret the dreams or something," Rebeca said patiently. "Maybe they could even help you remember the figure that you saw, and that way, you might stop having the same dream every single night."

When she said it like that, it did start to make sense. Even though I was against some shrink poking around my head, I could see the logic in her reasoning. If I could find the way to remember everything, to see the man clearly, maybe I would finally be able to close the book on that chapter of my life.

"Fine, you might be right," I admitted grudgingly.

As I got up to leave, she caught my hand, stopping me in my tracks.

"Are you finally going to see a therapist?" she asked hopefully.

"No, I am going to find a way to remember my dream by myself," I said with far more confidence than I felt.

I didn't hear the following words that came out of her mouth, but I could guess what they were. She would see my independence as stubbornness, and whether I like to admit it or not, she might be right.

Either way, I scoured the library for all the material I could find on dream interpretation, remembering one's dreams, and started my exhausting research. Although it's a slow process, it gave me hope that I would finally be able to unravel the mystery behind the hooded man. It felt crucial to do so, and I wasn't sure how I knew that.

On that winter eve, I put on my hooded cloak, took my weapons, and left my wife and young child unaware that I would never see them again. Don't let the same happen to you.

I startled awake upon hearing those words and quickly jotted them down before they could be erased by the waves of wakefulness that were bound to sweep the shores of my mind. The words didn't make much sense to me, but they were all I had except for the image of the weary traveler, and that had to mean something.

It wasn't much to go on, but it was a start. The fact that I had neither wife nor children doesn't change the feeling that those words are meant for me.

After trying several different techniques to remember my dreams over the next few days, I finally found one that yielded some results.

I am starting to get used to the horse's gentle trot, its rhythm lulling me to sleep, when a loud crunch of a branch behind me snaps me rudely out of the sleep's enticing embrace. I turn around quickly, my weapons at the ready, only to see my best friend on his stallion catching up with me.

"Joshua, what are you doing here?" I ask, my voice sounding gravely from the cold weather that caged everything around me, even my throat. "Was there a change of plans? Did my orders change?"