Distorted Chambers In The Realm Of Dreams - Chapter 5

'Nowhere' Roadways
 
Days and weeks passed, then months. Smaller circles were made up of ones living in the West and ones living in the East.

I yearned for the breaking away of any ties. I was never meant for this world. I used to be all about sticking together and growing the overall numbers. But deep down that was not who I was. I felt that freedom was somewhere in outer space, or somewhere faraway and a sanctuary where only I could dwell. That's where my spirit was, I never longed for things of this world. My body was always tired, but my soul had learned where all the lines were, and I navigated them with ease.

There was a distinct sadness of things that I could still reach in the past, but I could only go there where they were already decayed. Some places and things having not aged, and some having aged so much that they would crumble at the slightest breeze on the wind. But wind was rare in so many places of the past. Everything was still.

I would dream of being totally alone and without a navigational sense of what borders I could reach and what ones were too far away. They would be stretched out over fairly organized cities and suburban areas. Stopping would bring the infinite ways to measured area and location within any place I'd halt and travel by foot. Any whim to flee once taking to ground would be difficult without knowing the hour, or a tune.

The grounds were solid but there was something frail about anything above them. I could see time within walls and windows, but it was slow and tedious, as if they were taking long amounts of time to fall into dust. It wasn't in everything, but mostly it was.

I would find myself in the middle of all these house and neighborhood roads that were all strewn together like giant spider webs. I'd be looking for our house but then I'd stop and think 'Wait, we don't live here anymore. Why am I here? I want to stay here always though. I loved this place.'

But any house in my pathway was there as we had left it. But things were missing. I would look for them. I remembered things and the place itself, that just wasn't in the waking world. Feelings really. Just remnants of memories that took on times of their own. Like a hidden layer of experiences that only happened in dimensions accessed through dreaming. Where a table would have been polished in ordinary waking life, in the dream, it was used to place things on from nearby trees and old flowerbeds, an ancient stone or a lost ornament from a chime, and restored with ghostly hands. Things that never were, were very real here. I repaired so many things that others had carelessly broken.

Sometimes I'd walk, but other times I was riding a bicycle. It was faster for me to walk because the bike only slowed me down.

I would be getting so near to a place that I went to before. I was almost sure this is the right street. I'd think I remember all these houses. I'd come up to what I thought was our old house and upon closer examination I would find that it was the wrong house, and then to my horror I'd find that it wasn't even the same neighborhood. I thought I'd navigated the right area and found that it wasn't so. Everything looked the way I remembered it. But it wasn't my living memory exactly.

Long deserted roads, they were. Lonely grey-brown pathways. Then I returned to the wrong place again and there stood someone or a few family members and they'd be looking through the same place, too.

"It's so abandoned now, did we actually used to live here?" I'd say, approaching them.
"It wasn't taken care of once we moved." Rachel answered.
"Why does it look so dead? The walls are so decayed that it'll all need to be rebuilt." I pointed out.

I felt like crying because it seemed so lost, so utterly gone. Whatever memories we had were dying and I tried to remember what songs we sang there. What we did and what games we'd play. Yet amid the sadness I would be marking points in a sub-conscience way to remember the pathways. I was still navigating. I have found there were many places that I remembered in dreams that never were in real life.

So, slowly I began to touch the walls and they'd give way and beams that still stood suddenly were shrouded in a shower of sparkles and there would be a faint blue light that allowed us to see into the other rooms in the gloom.

"Look! Hey that old icebox is still in the kitchen!" Rachel exclaimed happily.
"I wouldn't open that." I said back.

For several long moments we stared at the thing and didn't move an inch. Finally the silence was broken. "Are you going back?"
"Yeah, I have to get back, I think it's getting close to four."
"Do you wake that early?"
"Yes. I mean no." I looked around the place again and said "The hour of four is the way out of here."

And with that we left the area. But I knew we'd always be back to this zone, a place, long ago given to the memory of being nowhere.