The Dreams

Chapter Five

She had another dream.

They were coming more and more frequently now. Some she remembered more clearly than others, but she was aware that she was dreaming every night now. Before she probably would have said she only dreamed once every few months.

Not any more.

At least once a night was a more accurate description now.

The ones she remembered too — those dreams did not fade away. As far as Rina knew dreams were supposed to be the brain working through some subconscious issues or something along those lines. Dreams were not something that needed to be stored in the waking memory, so they typically faded away soon after waking up, but now she had dreams that she remembered as clearly as what she'd eaten the day before. Sometimes some of the details might be fuzzy or she might forget part of it but she was confident she remembered it happening and she got the general idea of these dreams right.

She found the subject matter of these well remembered dreams to b a little odd. They seemed so ordinary. The only part she could really consider to be truly odd, considering these were dreams, was that she was not in them herself at all. It was not even a matter of being herself, but someone else at the same time. She was experiencing the life of someone completely separate from herself while she was asleep, and that person was, while definitely a person, not a human being.

As she often did when she did not understand something she turned to the internet to start her search for answers. Her search suggested her dream memories might come from some sort of anxiety in her life causing her sleep to be disruptive and somehow this anxiety might be causing the dreams as well. This seemed like a possibility to her. Some days she did wake up in the morning feeling more tired than she should for the amount of sleep she got, but she had just chalked that up to being a teenager in college. Everyone around her was exhausted too so it did not seem to be anything out of the ordinary.

Her search for explanations for the subject matter of her dreams proved to be a more difficult task. She found herself dropped down the rabbit hole into a myriad of links to pages providing instructions on lucid dreaming. None of it seemed to actually have much of anything to do with having dreams that did not even include her as some part of the dream. She knew she would probably need to do some psychological digging to get an explanation for what was going on in her mind. Even then she doubted she would get much of an explanation since she was pretty sure that most of the studies on dreams came to a lot of similar conclusions that no one really had much of an understanding of what was going on in the dreams people had. She would love to be wrong about this though so her search would continue onward.

She struggled to put her motivating force into words, but she found it to be extremely compelling. The logic behind it pretty much could not even be called logic in any real sense. A better word for it would be a compulsion. She felt a compulsion to figure out where these dreams came from, and why she was dreaming about someone other than herself.

Thinking of it that way made her feel as though she was being very self centered, expecting all of her dreams to be about herself, but to her it felt strange to be dreaming about someone she did not know. These dreams did not make it so she was living the life of someone else while still in some way herself. As far as she could remember there was no trace of herself to be found in this dream world. She was not sure she wanted to find herself, if she could.

This was a matter she knew she could easily spend hours dwelling on, but she had more important, or rather more responsible things to do with her time. Going to class was one of those things, and if she did not hurry she would end up being late to her first class of the day.