Where the fuck am I?

What the fuck happened?

Why the fuck am I not on the glacier anymore?

I have a sensor on my finger. I can see my heartbeat on a monitor to the left of the bed I am on. At the moment it is pumping like I just ran a mile. There is a tube sticking out of my arm. As I start looking around, the answers to my questions are slow in coming.

The room is about 100 square feet. Illumination from the monitor and a single window—a round window—make bars of light through gently circulating dust. Two vents move a lot of air from the wall in front of me. Ribbons attached to the vents ripple to some beat that I cannot hear. There is some sort of humming that I can feel in my chest. The view out the window is oscillating like I am on a boat.

There it is: I am on a boat of some kind. Now to see about the other questions.

The last thing I remember was the sun rising in my vision as it set.

The exact how that is possible is another question added to the list.

That line of reasoning isn’t leading me anywhere. I must have passed out. The only dream that I can remember is one of extreme cold.

Jerking upright isn’t necessarily the most reassuring way to wake, but at least I wasn’t paralyzed: a good sign that my body must be ok. Touching my beard, I would have to guess that it has been at least 100 days since I shaved. My cheekbones are sunburned like I spent a day in the tanning bed. I lost a lot of weight on the glacier, and not the good kind. I wouldn’t recognize the scarecrow limbs as my own but for my scars that couldn’t be anyone else’s. Satisfied that I am in no immediate danger, I decide to go back to sleep.

Almost before my eyes are closed I step into a very familiar dream. I don’t know if you know what a lucid dream is, but they are very familiar to me. There are lots of different kinds of lucid dreams, but in the two most common I am aware that I am dreaming, in my own body, and a passenger as my dream me acts more or less like me in the crazy situation described by the dream. The other is where I am aware of what is going on, in my own body, and capable of controlling reality completely. The second is infinitely more fun.

This dream was the first type.

Leashes attached to three dogs pull on my hands; the only light comes from a streetlamp that blinks unsteadily. I am a CIA agent working undercover investigating three witches who are living down the street. As they have yet to break cover, our investigation has yielded little intel about their potential or motives. We are reasonably certain they don’t know who we are. The dogs have done their business and I am close to the base, hungry for some Thai food that I know is waiting.

I see the three witches appear from around the corner. My blood goes cold.

They are floating, their hair streaming upwards in a flagrant display of power.

The ability to control gravity is one of the skills that the CIA is most eager to gain, and one that holds an intense personal interest for me. I have no idea what to do. None of my training is present in my mind. I do the first thing that comes to mind. I pretend to faint. I lay without moving on the ground, but I can see with my peripheral vision that the witches have stopped moving and are looking directly at me. The confused dogs are tugging on the leashes that are pinned underneath me.

Eventually the witches turn around and go back the way they came. As soon as they round the corner, I pick myself up and rush back into the base. As soon as I enter, one of the witches, who looks a lot like Hillary Swank, calmly turns the corner from the hallway under the stairs and looks into my eyes. The dogs scatter and I sit back onto a bench with a mirror as the back.

I recognize it as one that was in the foyer of my friend’s house. My dreams are odd like that.

She tells me that she knows why I have been unhappy and is going to look into my soul. “But first you have to relax.”

In the dream it doesn’t feel like compulsion. It feels like I am pissed off about life or reality or whatever, I don’t know exactly what my motive was, but I decide that this witch can tell me something real and vital about my life. I keep looking into her eyes and the irises start to rotate around her pupils like plasma spiraling into a black hole. I feel something happening to my mind and the reality of magic existing in the world shocks and excites me. I focus and a deadly seriousness to improve my life suffuses every part of me. The witch says to me with a voice that sounds surprised, “You look good when you are justified.”

This is the point in the dream when it becomes completely lucid and I gain the ability to make anything happen. I am no longer the CIA agent, I am me. Usually at this point I lose focus by trying to reach a meditative state and wake up feeling as though I just missed out on something precious while the witch’s clear and beautiful voice twists with her eyes until I can’t hear it. This time I don’t do a thing, just keep looking at the witch.

Swirling like mad dervishes, the irises of her eyes are orange, black, and red; the pupils expand and contract in tiny rapid oscillations, yet her hypnosis seems to have reached a plateau. I notice that I am no longer in the foyer of our base, and all that remains from the earlier dream is the bench-mirror. In the way of dreams the rest of the surroundings are undefined. I sit down without breaking eye contact. When had I stood up? “You are still here.”

“Of course. I’ve gone through the glacier. Why should I still be afraid?”

She responds, “That isn’t the question that you really want to ask. How long have you known that there is nothing to fear but the cage?” The question is disdainful; I assume it is rhetorical but answer anyways, “Long enough to know that there are some cages that I can’t see.”

Saying nothing more, hoping that she offers me something, anything to help me help me understand what is happening to me. When I turn to the mirror behind me the world contracts and buckles until I find the witch’s eyes are reflecting off it, larger than they would be in reality. Her face is oddly blurred, and through the face I can see what appears to be the room that my body is sleeping in. My sleeping body cocooned within seems to be resting softly enough, but my eyes are twitching like mad in the grips of deep REM cycle. She smiles at me and all of a sudden I am afraid, for it is a loving smile and full of pain and pity. “You want me to answer a question but you don’t know what it is.”

I don’t say anything, but she knows that she is right because I look her directly in the eyes. The power of the dream allows me to put the mirror behind me and the witch in front of me without breaking contact. “What is the question that I want to ask you?”

Her smile hasn’t changed until now, and it deepens with both joy and sorrow as she answers, “That isn't how it works.”

I laugh.

As soon as laugh broke out, the whole dream spins in time with her eyes. Again I don’t do anything, think anything, desire or question why the room dissolved or is slowly recongealing. Her face shows the joy receded and the sorrow grown. “You don’t understand.” It isn’t a question. “You are an expert at answering questions with the truth, but you don’t know what question will teach you to understand.”

Now it is my turn to frown. She’s right, of course.

“What should I do?”

“What you should do depends on the space-time you are in.” Uttered like I am a prize pupil who just misspelled her name, the words drip from her tongue like angry cautions. “Do what you want; don’t make more mess that you want to clean up; don’t waste anything; decide what is important to you; and for the love of god think about what you do before you do it.”

After each phrase the circles of her eyes expand and the direction of spin changes instantly. I am spellbound like I was at the dream’s beginning, a passenger in the witch’s thrall. “The first one will contradict the others more than you expect, that’s where space-time comes in. Every time you make a mistake, you’ll remember not remembering to do the last one.” Her face is almost angry now. Thinking is the one thing that I haven’t done in this dream. I smile at her anger, a habit from a childhood of getting out of trouble, and see the anger deepen into lines that seem to almost extend past her face.

“Now it is my turn to ask you a question.” Her eyes are getting brighter and now her face is monstrously large. “You are the prophet who answers questions with the truth, it should be easy for you to do.” The brightness is starting to hurt. Her face has passed angry to a cold aloofness that is even more disconcerting. “My question is this: “Why are you the Tripping Prophet?”

I don’t answer: in the dream I am struck by the profundity of the question. Sensing weakness, she persists, “Why do you seek and speak the truth? Who are you helping? Do you even want to do it? Does it beautify your life?” Each time she finishes a question a pulse of light spins from her pupils, accelerating the rotation of her pulsating irises. I can no longer bear to look into her eyes. Besides her, the only thing that that the dream allows me to look at is the mirror, which still bears the reflection of those glowing, spinning orbs. In it I see my little hospital room on the boat.

Instead of seeing my supine form, I am see myself floating above the bed in lotus position with closed eyes.

Seizing on anything that is not she and those bright, spinning eyes, I watch my mirror-head turn to face me and the eyes slowly open. My opening eyes fit perfectly into her reflected pupils, so that the inside of her irises meet the outside of mine. The irises of my eyes are spinning with the same glowing light, at the moment that my eyes fully open, the masses of spinning, undulating color match perfectly, like a lock opening and my consciousness flees flash a blinding white.

I wake up in my hospital room. There is a nurse in the room who begins to tell me how I got onto the ship.