Hypnos

HYPNOS

By

Alexis M. Lewis

H Y P N O S

Alexis M Lewis

Copyright 2013 by Alexis M Lewis

Smashwords Edition

Table of Contents

Authors Note

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Epilogue

Authors Note

If you’re looking for a quick and delightful read about romance or fairy tale monsters put this down and reach for another text.  This isn’t a love story, although love does play a part.  This isn’t a novel about angst driven youths becoming immortal and circumventing reality, although there is a fairly angst driven youth involved.  This book probably won’t leave you pining for an ex-lover or fantasizing about impossible vacations and insanely expensive cars or homes.  It won’t give you a cut and dry battle between good and evil; though those quantifiers are impossible to avoid.  Happily, this also isn’t a book that once finished will leave you mildly depressed because you don’t have insane wealth, immortality, or an all consuming love affair near at hand.  In fact, with any fortuity my words will remind you that death and self reliance are things not to fear or find shame in. Instead, these are the very things that drive us, and as such should be respected inasmuch as we regard power in their opposites. On the whole, this is a story that asks more questions than it provides answers.  What my words will give you is a small glance into possibility, and perhaps some meager insight into another human being’s life. I wish to leave you with nothing more than a way to begin asking more useful questions of our shared reality.

You see, this is a story about people who live in the real world and share a common set of circumstances.  These are people who fight the same battle you and I fight every day, whether to be good or bad, and the ongoing struggle to find a definition of the difference.  Granted the persons in this story do have certain ‘talents’ that may make them seem like comic book characters at times, but in truth we all have and share innate abilities that are much the same as theirs.  It’s just that we on the whole have either the common sense or great good luck to suppress such gifts, whereas the people you’ll meet in these pages do not have such a convenient luxury.  They are still people however.  Rather young people, so try to forgive them their transgressions as you would an inexperienced new acquaintance.  For the moment, they are strangers to you, but to me they are very real and very well loved. If after this introduction you’re still interested in meeting them, (given that their tale is likely more similar to your own than you’d openly admit in mixed company) well, read on friend, you’re most welcome here.

How do I explain my purpose in writing this, my goal if you’ll allow, in sharing these events?  Hmm… If you’ve ever caught a wild animal watching you and just knew it was saying a great deal more than you could understand, than this is a book for you.  If you’ve ever had a personal experience where you understood implicitly what was going to happen before it did, with a total lack of evidence, this is a story you’ll relate with well.  If you will grant that the human mind and spirit is filled with odd but acceptable senses, such as ‘instinct’ and ‘impulse’, you’ll delight in my pages as a splendid read.  Let’s be honest with each other shall we? For in the words of Mr. Dylan playing in my study, …the hour is getting late…  As I sit here alone and tap pen to paper, I’ll assume you to be a kind and gentle companion reader, a trusted confidant and sounding board if you will, (despite our unknown differences) because without that assumption we won’t get very far together.  I would not offend you with my next words so accept for the moment if you can that whether you are Roman Catholic, or Neo-Pagan, whether you are religious, or spiritual, or moral, or simply unconcerned with the esoteric and ethical principles of belief; if you believe in working for what is good and right in this life, I name you friend, and if we met, I’d try to understand you in as far as you’d grant me the same polite grace.

If you’re the kind of person who would debate that there is still so much we do not know, and that in itself is magical, then this book will come across as a great deal less than fictional, and such is its intent.  Some of us find it hard to quantify certain inexplicable actualities, and yet cling to rationalism and science.  Heck, some of us accept that rationalism and science are what have given us true doorways into supposedly inexplicable realms, such as in the field of quantum mechanics.  Many of us entirely accept what others call ‘make-believe’ as a true and devout faith system above all scrutiny that gives us actualized depictions of the unknown.  Some lonely few avoid the mess altogether and label ourselves agnostic, while focusing instead on leading a good life.  I stand among those but, I do not hold to the ideal that my own conviction is the only one worth having; although I’d speak openly with you of my inherent bias.

This book is for all of us who hold the understanding of being receptive to possibility as paramount, differing points of view aside.  It’s for those of us who keep an open mind.  When it comes right down to it if the universe is kind there will be a person beside us at the end of life, and we won’t care what their claimed beliefs are when it comes.  All that will really matter is that we know them to be willing to fight for what we ourselves fought for.   The narrow minded will not be able to comprehend most of this story in any meaningful way, and so will call it fantasy.  That’s fine, fantasy has its place in the world, and in my experience, the most bigoted among us are usually the most apt to be adherent to it in our daily lives.  The open minded though, those who can look at the lives of the people described herein and find similarities to their own experiences…well, those readers will return to the prologue later and believe what I now write.

This is a story of fact, not fiction.  It is a truth, one of many.  This is how it happened once, is happening, and will happen again.  It’s how it was made known to me and how it’s meant to be read.  You don’t have to believe it to enjoy it…but if you are anything like me, you will find yourself doing both.  The uninhibited can find great commiseration here.  Take that from my words if you would be a thief, for heaven knows I strive to be a joker.  I’ll meet you again friend…at the end.

Chapter 1

You shouldn’t be here, he says. 

I glanced around the room, picked up some fuzzy details I wouldn’t remember upon waking, and gazed back at him listlessly.  Why not? 

Sitting cross legged in an overstuffed leather chair a few yards from me, he looked up from the book he was holding, annoyance flitting across his features and surprise entering his tone.  Because I don’t know you…now leave. He replied. 

Yessiree, I thought to myself, definite exasperation in that demeanor.  An overwhelming sense of certainty filled me. This was a real person speaking directly to me.  A very real, very annoyed stranger, instead of the vague ambivalent strangers I was used to meeting when I slept.  His was a face I would remember. He had an off-putting voice that existed somewhere beyond this dreamt-up room.  I continued to look at him and felt the truth of the fact that he was looking right back at me.  No, scratch that… He was looking through me.  He took in my naturally waved, slightly longer than trendy black hair.  He appraised my patently slender frame.  He noted my light freckles, recklessly large brown eyes, toothpick arms, symmetrical features.  He took in my too flat backside and longish legs.  He quantified my attributes and seeing everything to be seen was not overtly impressed. He looked at me as if a human female was an artifact rather than a person.

I didn’t hear his thoughts as if they were spoken; I simply knew his present contemplations and could sense the general vein of his emotions; emotions which weren’t inspiring a great deal of generosity in my inventory of him.  Much like being aware of the fact that I was asleep, these cursory impressions of his surface mental state were both familiar and reassuring. I usually understood what people in my dreams were thinking or feeling at any given moment.  His sudden withdrawal of his emotions however, was not reassuring.  It felt like a blanket had been pulled over him which rapidly smothered the general tide of feelings I had perceived moments before.  Somehow he had drawn a drape across the window of his mind to block the light.  It was like losing the ability to touch, incredibly disconcerting, and it only heightened my conviction that he was in fact another actual person dreaming at the same time as me. This hostile youth not only existed outside of my sleep state, but was capable of interfering with the information I could usually tap into in these environs.  ‘Well, this is novel,’ I smirked thoughtlessly.

Now you do know me, I’m Madison. I replied out loud, my insecurity rendering up a strong false bravado. ‘So there Mr. Grumpy,’ I added silently to myself.

It felt like I was being forced into an awkward conversation with a friend of a friend, when introductions have been made and proximity enforces polite interaction but you don’t necessarily care who the person is or what they think of you.  Since he was staring me down silently I had to interpret his intent from what his body language was continuing to convey.  Cold stare, shoulders shifted forward, both feet were now planted firmly on the floor. I couldn’t help but reflect to myself, ‘Well, someone never learned to share the blocks in kindergarten.’  Rattled slightly but buoyed by my own sarcastic wit, I continued to stand casually and stare across the room right back at him.  There wasn’t much else I could do.  My dreams usually propelled me forward, not the other way around, and, at the moment, there wasn’t any impetus to go anywhere, given that I had yet to notice a door on the premises. I wasn’t afraid of him.  He was just unfriendly, and I was unsure... Another oddity for me when asleep.  It was much more commonplace for my dream figures to spontaneously turn into monsters who tried to eat me when I began getting emotionally shaky. 

  He was just some mildly rude guy sitting in a dated opulent chair, I reminded myself.  It wasn’t as if he were attacking me.  I granted him the benefit of the doubt on the latter for the moment since a book didn’t seem all that threatening of a weapon if it was meant to be one.  Whatever fear I had was induced by my own lack of perception, my inability to understand what he was doing in my dream given that he was a real person and not just some neural fragment given life by my subconscious.  ‘Yippee’, I thought.  An unconscious meeting of the minds and it was just my luck to get stuck in a room with some angst filled wallflower; some dull, mean guy who wanted me gone.  If I had to meet a real person while I slept, why couldn’t I accidentally run into Steven Hawking?  That would be a conversation worth having.  This guy was good looking in his own way; bright green eyes, black spiked hair, thin, pale…sort of a heroin chic rocker thing going for him, but he was no internationally acclaimed genius. Feeling stupidly courageous now that he hadn’t spoken further for a few heartbeats, I decided to question him, "You’re really here, aren’t you? This is bizarre to have someone else’s consciousness in my dream. Do you know you’re in my dream? Do you know your poorly masked anger is rather boorish?  Perhaps you should leave. How is this possible anyway?"  Had I just called him ‘boorish’?  I was such a nerd.  Would it be asking too much to sound normal in my own dreams rather than sounding like the bookworm I was?  Was that requesting too much brain?  Really, was it?

I stopped rambling for a moment, both out loud and internally, looking around a bit in the hope that ignoring his accusatory glare would make it go away.  I noticed a lovely burgundy Persian rug underfoot, but couldn’t make out much more than indistinct objects in the rest of the room. I challenged the images around me to come into focus, hoping they might provide some useful information as to my locale, but nothing clarified so I returned to appraising the carpet.  I couldn’t help but wonder briefly why these sorts of runners were so often that red color. Easiest dye to manufacture or culturally significant maybe?  Well, at least the only thing with any detail to it was nice to look at.  Repeating pirouettes of vines and abstracted floral patterns twined each other in a tradition dance.  Being asleep, it never occurred to me that staring at the floor was less than acceptable behavior.   Besides, everything else was still blurred, and therefore demanded none of my attention.

There were obviously walls, a floor, and other furniture type things around us, but a kind of grey gossamer haze obscured all of it.  The strangeness of the distortion didn’t bother me. It was fairly common.  When I dreamed only important objects jumped into focus, while unnecessary ones were acceptable background noise without definition.  I lost interest in the rug and returned to watching him instead.  Unfortunately the look he gave me hadn’t altered, and my questions hadn’t induced any verbal response.  It had been worth a try.  Bolstered by the precedent of his rudeness, I began analyzing him.  He wore a tailored jacket as black as his hair.  His store-distressed jeans were dark too.  I hoped that I was wearing clothes of some kind myself.  A quick glance down to verify. I was, jeans and a t-shirt, nothing odd about that.  Gratefully, I sighed.  It wouldn’t have been the first time I showed up someplace without pants while sleeping.

He was still glaring at me.  This had to be the most tedious nightmare on record, if it was one. Time wasn’t elapsing while we looked at each other, so I relaxed despite his attempt to make me uncomfortable.  Nope, I was sure I didn’t know him from my waking life.  NIN meets Sherlock Holmes in the body of a twenty something?  Not likely. I’d be hard pressed to get the time of day from someone half this good looking on campus.  Everything about this guy screamed counter-intuitive and not easily dismissible. 

He stood up, tossing the book back onto the leather cushion of the chair with a casual flip of the wrist, never once looking away from me. Striding forward, too fast for comfort, he approached with all the swift delicacy of a snake.  I backed up, my nerve faltering. I was well aware that the last thing I wanted was for this weird and oddly intimidating guy to get a hold of me.  His eyes were less angry now but extremely intense as he approached my personal bubble.  ‘Oh my god,’ I thought, stumbling backwards away from him, ‘only I would meet up with some sleeping creep who looks like a model but actually is a psychopathic killer. Thanks a million brain!  What, was the Dhali Lama busy this evening?’

Your dream? he questioned although I hadn’t spoken aloud, his eyes focused on what felt to be the back of my skull. Your dream?  You could cause significant damage here! You shouldn’t know you’re asleep.  You shouldn’t know I’m real.  Bloody hell, it shouldn’t even be possible for you to have gotten inside in the first place.  

There was open inquiry in his voice now, and a fair amount of violent alarm.  A slight British accent colored his speech.  Standing he was a taller than me, taller than I had expected him to be, since I was taller than most of the men I knew.  It was one of the many obstacles between me and the opposite sex, but it was a personal characteristic I was familiar with. One that I noticed abruptly, I didn’t like the loss of.  This spooky kid wasn’t a kid at all.  He was older than me, and he was making me feel self-consciously small. I revised my earlier assessment of his age. I’d thought he was around twenty-one like me but he didn’t move or act like a fumbling college student. He had to be closer to twenty-five at least.  He kept walking forward, faster now, and for some reason, although he had never stopped approaching, the distance between us wasn’t reducing.  I kept stepping back but I wasn’t receding in relation to him either.  It had become rare for me to not have some control, some influence on the shape of basic physics while asleep and now this twisting of spatial perspective was making me uncomfortably queasy, downright nauseous even.  I flashed on an image of the hallway in that ‘Poltergeist’ movie, where the girl runs and runs but the length of the floor never shortens and she can never reach the end, not a reassuring reference.  This was quickly becoming a Grade-A nightmare and I wanted out. 

I was still backing away and getting nowhere.  I put my hands up as if to somehow ward him off and replied in a shaky voice, Leave me alone! I don’t want to be in your lousy room!

Wait! he yelled at me.  He was reaching out for some unfathomable reason.  As if I would accept a hand from him?  I’d rather pet a burning wolf. That was the instant when my foot finally did decide to interact with the dimensions around it, by catching on a bump in the damn beautiful Persian rug.  I yelped unattractively and arms pin-wheeling I stumbled, falling backwards, most likely towards a concussion.

Chapter 2

I woke up late, fumbled for the cell on my desk.  Since I only used it as an alarm clock, its permanent home was next to my bed.  My roommate was constantly begging me to get something less outdated to actually carry around.  Upon seeing the digital read out through bleary eyes, I winced.  11:30, almost lunch time for normal human beings and a very late morning even for me, a super night owl. Lumbering out of badly twisted sheets, I snagged a bandana off the bedroom floor and shoved my dark waves under it chaotically.  My hair is my only great vanity, but I would never admit it, and today I was in no mood for primping.  I was exhausted and blamed my dark sense of apathy on falling asleep in my jeans, again.  Trudging down the stairs towards the bitter, rich smell of coffee rising from the kitchen, I wondered if it might be possible to drink the nectar of the gods and shower at the same time.  Nah, unrealistic... The caffeine would get watered down, diluted, a sacrilege. Blindly reaching for a mug in the cabinet, a glance out the kitchen window revealed sunny skies for a change, rather than the constant pervasive fog that usually drowned out visuals of even our closest neighbors’ homes.  Still probably around 55 degrees and windy though.  What my classmates at San Francisco State University would dub, ‘A nice day.’ 

Ah, the joys of living in San Francisco, I whispered to myself setting down my mug to cool while I turned towards the living room in search of a cozy hoody to wear.  At least the air smelled fresh.  My roommate, (who rose before me without fail) had a habit of opening every blind and window in the townhouse when she woke up.  It made for some curious looks from passersby on the street when I forgot and offhandedly walked around the first floor in a cotton tank top matched with men’s shamrock covered boxers and knee high striped socks. I’d never mastered the art of pajama wearing. Her OCD oddity did mean that the air always smelled clean; damp sure, but clean.

Sweatshirt in hand, (it had fallen behind the couch) I questioned the rationality of even having a season called summer in this city.   What was that quote natives were forever repeating? ‘The coldest winter I ever spent was summer in San Francisco’…or something like that.  Was it Twain who said that?  I wasn’t sure.  My brain was full of dust bunnies. Sarah and I had opted not to take the very condensed summer session off. We both wanted to get our credits banked hard and fast so we could graduate sooner, rather than later.

Madison! My roommate was calling all bright and perky from the landing above me. Morning people, or rather ‘afternoon people’, I corrected myself, making a quick mental note to get to bed earlier tonight. Earlier than three a.m. shouldn’t be too hard to manage after all.

Are you down there Sunshine? Sarah called to me again. Bring me some java with sugar would ya’ Mady muffin? Her voice lingered sweetly on her favorite nickname for me. She had an endless list of them; muffin, cupcake, sweat pea, honey pie.  Always food descriptors. She loved to cook.  

Shafts of light reflected off the parquet floor as I went back to the kitchen to reclaim my own cup and get her some brew.  I often forgot how warm and pretty the wood looked (since there was almost never any direct sunlight through our ceiling length windows to make it noticeable).  The rare illumination changed the space. It was glowing with hospitable openness; a great deal more appealing than the dismal fog enclosed dungeon it usually appeared to be.  ‘Why couldn’t it be sunny just a little more often?’ I wondered.  ‘It’s because Twain criticized it, and now in a self-fulfilling prophecy, it’s taking its vengeance out on the rest of us’, I thought.  I cursed him under my breath.

K. Coming. I croaked back at my friend. As I poured another cup, I went through a checklist of what I needed to get done this weekend.  My school workload was light, midterms over, no new material for finals’ prep yet. I wanted to get down to the pier at some point for fresh produce at the farmers market, and Sarah and I had plans to go to a club with our mutual friend Adam that night.  I also needed to call my Aunt and make arrangements for a quick visit home to the Santa Cruz Mountains next week.  I had a short but well deserved four day break in my course schedule coming up, which translated to a full seven days off in a row from school.  It had been ages since I’d left the city to hit the beach or go hiking through the redwoods with her.  After my parents died when I was nine, she had taken me in, and raised me as her own.  She was my mother for all intents and purposes, but being my blood mothers’ youngest sister, people often mistook us for being sisters ourselves. Besides my roommate, my Aunt was all I had ever known as family, and I was lucky in that she was quite simply the single best human being a person could hope to meet, let alone be raised by.  She had always encouraged my severely independent spirit, and since I had always been a fierce academic, she liked to say that I had never given her ‘a single night of worry’ growing up.  Right up until I had moved here, on those rare occasions I did interact with the world, it was always with her or my best friend and roommate, Sarah Fennore, by my side. Even after two years of college, I was still having a hard time adjusting to being away from Tina so much.  I was really looking forward to staying with her for the week.   

Pet names aside, living with Sarah had helped me with the transition from severely small town girl to college student.  We had been friends since elementary school. Living with her, rather than with some complete stranger in a dorm room, for the last couple of years had been a relief.  We were lucky that both of our families could afford the expense of sending us to school, and paying our rent on the old rundown townhouse we leased across from campus.  My parents insurance had left my Aunt Tina with enough to get me through four years at the state level, and Sarah’s parents were both extremely well off M.D.’s. Unlike Sarah and I, most of the students we knew had to mortgage their future with insanely overpriced student loans.  Casey from my Ethic’s course liked to quip that the high-interest borrowed money was more akin to indentured servitude than a ten year plan. He made a great study partner and it was his only consistent complaint about college. I felt for him.

Mugs over-full in both hands; I snagged my sweatshirt back off the couch in the living room with my teeth and tiptoed back up the stairs carefully. I focused on my feet rather than the Dali poster prints we had tacked on the wall, trying not to spill, much.  Nudging Sarah’s door open with a free knee, I proffered the black super saccharin liquid to my always immaculate, well dressed, and blindingly platinum blonde friend.  She played the violin, majored in business, and somehow had never allowed her good looks or her parent’s insane expectations, to interfere with her intellectual pursuits or her genuinely caring and humble nature.  Sarah had an amazingly quirky, kind sense of humor, which was often at odds with what she deemed to be my very dry wit, but other than that, we were amazingly well suited to each other.  We had spent more than a decade honing our friendship into a veritable art form. 

We both preferred board games to videogames, read newspapers instead of magazines, and could live on coffee and diet soda for months.  When we had the cash though, Sarah was a health nut who made everything from scratch; I didn’t mind, the girl had skills.  Last week, she’d cooked butternut squash soup with lemon herb fingerling potatoes, and I’d probably eaten my own body weight of the stuff. She was definitively the more outgoing and modern of the two of us, but we both watched a lot less T.V. than our peers. We were rarely criticized by people for anything other than being joined at the hip.  Our closest city friend, Adam, had taken to calling us the ‘Mopsy twins’ (whatever that meant) and almost anyone who stopped by the house would ask, Where’s your shadow? when on the rare occasion they caught one of us alone.  I was very grateful that Sarah was around today, given that I was still in zombie mode and oddly shaken from my bizzaro dream.  At the moment, she was lying in bed on her stomach with her head buried in something titled, Managing the Mid-Sized Company, Concept and Cases, and I had to passively grunt a second time to get her to look up.

Oh! Thanks beautiful. Sorry, I didn’t realize you were juggling. Sarah took the mug contritely.  So... Sleep well? she asked, lightly mocking as usual, looking me over none too subtly.  You do realize you put those clothes on at least 24 hrs ago? She frowned at my wardrobe. I was in the process of pulling on a threadbare black hoody, over a cotton t-shirt (too long and not quite white), matched with a pair of (now too loose from being slept in) very old jeans.  Sarah scrunched up her nose hinting that I smelled funny, and silently I agreed.  I had mismatched my socks. A seizure inducing green tye-dye bandana was knotted behind my ears. To top it all off, I was distinctly pale when devoid of make up or sleep, so at the moment I could have given Casper a run for his money.

Yeah, yeah, I’m aware. I answered.  I actually didn’t sleep well at all, huge surprise. I feel like death warmed over.

Well, you do dress the part. Sarah responded, smiling brightly, flashing her perfectly white chicklet teeth at me. Finish your coffee and then let’s go do something. 

I sipped obligingly and plopped myself down cross-legged next to my pristine roommate on her bed.  My backside caught the corner of a hard cover management text, and I shoved it towards the wooden base board with my feet.  Trust Sarah to be doing homework on a Saturday.  It would be good to get out of the house for a few hours before tonight, especially since it was ‘such a nice day’ and all.  I’m fairly comatose before coffee, so the prospect didn’t enthuse me much, but Sarah was watching me, bright-eyed and expectantly hopeful. I simply couldn’t deny her the outing.  I’d tried it before and the feeling was similar to what I imagined kicking a puppy would be like. 

O.K. We can go downtown. I feel kind of strange though so give me a minute to wake up. I wondered which Mozart sonata we were listening to at low volume.  Sarah would know but I didn’t voice the question. I just let the chords wash over me lightly.  Very joyful yet soothing, maybe I should copy this from her music library to play when I was writing essays.

Strange how?  Like, physically strange or like psychologically strange? 

Sarah tipped her head to the side like a curious sparrow when she asked questions.  It was cute, as was her anything but carte blanche mix of California girl vernacular