CHAPTER 9

“Humans need to dream, you know. It's how the mind breathes.”

- Max Gladstone -

Since I'd moved on from the foster system and gotten a place of my own the one thing that struck me the most out of everything (besides the obvious freemdom and space because of it) was how much my dreams seemed to change, almost evolve, when I had more time on my own and with my own thoughts.

I was never much one to deep dive into dreams and what they meant to me, and how much they affected me; but lately with reality seeming to appear not quite a solid as I had once thought it was, an unconscious part of my mind must have been reviewing them constantly, as images started to appear from them whenever I would close my eyes.

I lay awake in bed after we split ways earlier before our plan to pretend to be normal school kids again the next day (I guess technically we still were), and for some reason found myself hung up on my brain recycling this recurring dream I'd had on and off for years but had never really understood.

It went a little something like this.

My dream dropped me straight into what seemed to be a fairly straightforward platformer, three lives to go, one 16-bit dream to achieve. It was more Metroid than Mario, a bit futuristic with some sci-fi elements, a somewhat tricky boss or two but honestly I mostly just breezed through until the end.

And there, without fail, I died, quickly, tragically, and dishonorably every time. I say dishonorably because I tried literally everything I could think of, from tricks to possible glitches, and the problem was so frustratingly dumb that I've woken up many a morning in a state of tired fury.

One simple crevasse jump, but so far that I couldn't make it.

That's all folks. Nothing complicated, nothing extreme, I just fell short every single time. No hidden blocks to jump on, no enemies to bounce off of, no pipes to wander down into. The closer I got to the perfect jump to get my to the final boss, the farther off I felt, since I had though that was the one that would get me there. Everything is easy until things get hard, I kept telling myself, but no matter what I did in dreamland it was never enough, and to this day I still wake up falling just short it of.

Long story short is that this dream felt like the life I was currently living in, where everything feels just out of reach and I feel like I'm always short one piece of the jigsaw.

Where is Sarai, and is she ok?

What is the actual deal with these bosses and how did they end up in our reality?

How do I beat them in their reality, or even find a way to get as far in the game as to where I can?

How in the hell do I make that actual jump?

Literal leap or metaphorical, it had my brain spinning, and I wanted answers sooner rather than later.

But, and a J-Lo sized but at that, the dark night beckons, and my brain was a bit fuzzy already, so a return to the world of dreams it was, then.

Until tomorrow.