Where We Go When We Go to Sleep

Flash fiction that’s almost real … until it slips away

Times zones, Helms thinks. Sleep leans in close, whispering without words, like a lifetime lover who still knows how to surprise.

Time zones. Zoning out of time and into dreaminess, the dream that awaits, the dream just past, the dream that will never find form.

Fading now as his eyes relax under light-tight lids, eyes seeing but not looking out. Looking inward, looking inward for a way out. Looking to ride the wave, to fragment into multiple waves, to go here and there and everywhere and always come back by morning, self-contained yet still expansive.

To rise. To shine. To rejoice and be glad: Every day is the day the Lord hath made.

In his dream, Helms knows what time it is, but he isn’t sure of where it’s one o’clock and where it’s two. There is a clock face, a big one, right where it should be on a can’t-miss, full-size timepiece of the grandfather variety. Grandfather Clock stands tall like an unmistakable beacon in the center of a sparsely furnished room.

Its classically scripted Roman numerals, there at first glance, are quickly replaced with something else, with impossibly high numbers — more like equations than numbers — equations conceived of by genii of the spiritual realm, equations that finally, this one time, reveal all he could ever hope to know.

Helms tells himself he will study the equations later, that he must translate and comprehend, knowing they will provide many long-sought answers and a deep-reaching, indescribable comfort.

For now, though, he knows it’s one o’clock somewhere and two o’clock somewhere else. This is enough: the duality of time as a singular event. In the dream — the time zone dream that flirts with place — he hears a soothing voice. Wise. Comforting. Mellifluous.

“It is the same time everywhere, all at the same time.”

Oh, the sweet sagacity of that voice! The factual gravity of its audible message almost jolts him awake, enlightened.

Instead, One and Two introduce themselves.

“I’m One,” straight One says, completely confident yet exceedingly well-mannered. “Pleased to meet me.”

“I’m Two,” curvy Two says, like a straight man with perfect comedic timing. “Or at least that’s one way to look at it.”

Another wave comes, a great wave of stillness within motion, a consciousness-changing wave of interwoven dimensions and unfathomable depths, and One and Two are swept away like mere dream-props destined to be forgotten, important though they were as stand-ins for Time personified for those few precious seconds. Almost timeless at one time, but gone now like dissipated ghosts.

Then it’s winter. It’s snowing. It’s not cold but it looks like it should be, and Helms no longer cares what time it is, or even what time is, but takes comfort in knowing that the snow will melt into water, plain ol’ water. Water would be good now, he thinks, but wonders why it would be good as the wave breaks and does not return, drops instead into the encroaching light, absorbed into what can be seen, and the dream of snow that will soon be water gives way to something more direct, more tangible, more of a problem with a solution than a multilayered mystery: thirst.

Awake now, his sleep-mind no longer motionlessly adrift, Helms pulls the chain on his reading lamp and reaches for the glass he keeps on a coaster next to his digital alarm clock. It is 1:21, a number that reminds him of something from the dream, though he cannot remember just what that might be.

He sips water. He sips again. Helms, now in his mid-fifties, has learned — and forgotten only to learn again — that drinking too fast upon emergence from dreamtime can lead to coughing and gagging, to cleaning up spills when he should be writing in his dream journal before all insights and imagery slip away. This is valuable knowledge, no matter how many times he must relearn it. Just one more sip.

His thirst quenched for the time being, Helms sets down the water glass. He picks up the yellow legal pad and the fine point pen with black ink. Like a scribe from antiquity fast-forwarded into a brave or crazy new world where he is no longer obliged to copy text from ancient, crumbling scrolls, Helms is liberated once more by yet another awakening. He is free to share his own bubbling thoughts, his dream memories and juxtaposed observations, however imperfect they may be. Determined to retain something of his most recent journey, a journey that already belongs to another time, he begins to write:

There is a grandfather clock in the middle of a barely furnished room. I know the numbers or symbols on the clock face are important, but I am unable to make any sense of them …