To Another World, The Dreamer Dreamed
From Laenif: Book 2, "And the Sun Let Go" - chapter two: "To Another World, the Dreamer Dreamed"
When I woke up again, I was still floating gently down the river. The locale had turned enchantingly green. As I became more and more conscious, I was slowly reminded of all the pain I endured in those chains and through that waterfall. But the flowers that were now smiling at me seemed to spiral towards their centers and it mesmerized the very core of my soul. My heart flew as it healed. I couldn’t have asked for a better bed than this now gentle river.
With no idea where I was still, or exactly where I was going. I imagined ridiculous things that I could’ve passed by while I drifted in my sleep. And I started to remember more and more about Earth, which now felt distant like winter is in summer. The water here was different, and friendlier. The waters back home would’ve swallowed me whole and chewed me up.
Perhaps this place had a different God, for the sky felt a different size and at a different angle. Even my mind felt different, like all hardships that had ever troubled my thoughts were suddenly cleansed… vanquished from the universe.
Still oblivious to the end of my destiny here and the whereabouts of the winged man, I continued to glide down the newborn river. I shut my eyes again to let pain and ignorance be consumed by the love I could feel overcoming me as I healed.
I had a dream of my dear Andrea back home. She was weeping. No one was around to console her in her sorrow. I wanted so bad to reach out and help her. I wanted to tell her I was okay, but remorse bit me too soon and I woke up.
It was a rude awakening for I could feel hands grabbing me and pulling me toward the edge of the river. I tried to resist, but my muscles ached in atrophy from their recent torture. “You don’t look good at all,” the creature mumbled. “There seems to be no escape from things like you. Weak and helpless beings that end my loneliness…”
Barely able to discern the features of this thing, I only knew its arms were tiny. His skin was a pale flaky brown covered in bumps, scabs, and moles. Stubborn and moody, he was nothing but bitter all the time. Yet his voice had a heavenly echo to it, pure like nothing I had ever heard before. What was this place?
After exiting the river, he dragged me across the floor of this forest. It was actually smooth and not as rough as I remember the forest floors of Earth. I tried to speak but could only force out a mere groan.
The thing mumbled again. “Don’t worry, you sad morsel, I mean you no harm. As I may sound irate, it is only because with you in my life now, my ever-precious loneliness is once again tarnished. It seems no matter what, another mind and soul finds its way in my path. And what else could I do but save you? If I had left you there to float to your death then the remorse would’ve eaten me up for my remaining days, and thus disrupted the peace of my loneliness.
However, saving you and doctoring you only disrupts my solitude temporarily for when you are healed and pushed along your path once more, I will feel strong and confident in my loneliness.” He laughed a little. “Dare I say I would even be proud...”
As confused as my mind felt, it could only laugh at such inconveniences like uncertainty and ignorance, such annoyances like perplexities and discomfort. Death was so close that it was almost nonexistent. I had no idea of what life and death meant in this brand new land. I had not even the slightest clue to where exactly I was in the universe. The only reason I still believed I was alive was because the senses remained intact. Whether or not I was real no longer mattered. I had somehow crossed the boundaries of logic.
There was no proof of a world like this, or the ability to transport to one in such a quick subtle way. What had this winged man done to me? And where was he now? Had he been watching me my whole life or was he nothing more than a delusion I made up in some kind of insanity? I still feared this whole experience to be nothing more than a very vivid and honest dream. But what was this dream worth?
I longed to wake up if it was nothing more than an illusion- regret would swallow me up if I never awoke to Andrea again, and all of this was but a dream in vain. Still, in the back of my mind, I somehow still sensed that this place was as visceral as it appeared.
Passed out for some time- it felt like an eternity, but who knows how long really? In my first moments of consciousness, I still questioned this whole world. I didn’t believe it was reality, but it had its grip on me. Shock washed over flesh every time I opened my eyelids to still find myself immersed in this alien realm. Vision focused to see a room with a fire burning in a far corner. Soon I noticed the mysterious puckish creature, who had retrieved me from the river, was scurrying around these cluttered living quarters.
He was very human-like, maybe five feet tall, rather shorter than myself. He was a hairy guy, wore rags that wrapped around an emaciated face. His whole body seemed to be withering away. Yet in many respects I owed him my life. Or at least, I owed him this experience in this room.
When I felt awake enough to speak, I asked of him, “Who are you?”
Remaining over by the fire, he didn’t seem to really acknowledge me at first. Eventually he sighed, but calmly stood up and hobbled towards me. I was lying naked in the sole bed in his home. It was a one-room shack somewhere out in these mysterious forests. “I am…” He paused and then took a seat on a log beside the bed to get even closer. Adjusting himself, he continued, “I am a lonely cull. I have never known parents, for my species rarely do. I have never had family. My generation is sadly one of the last. I never had any friends, only a primitive education from a drifter more experienced than I. Us culls are not favored anymore here in Threesah. Times seem to be changing.”
“Do you have a name?” I wondered.
“You asked who I am,” he said. “And that is a much deeper question than what my name is. Who I am is an intricate pattern of thought layered through the depths of existence. I have seen this world generous, but now…” He held himself back. After taking in a breath, he concluded, “Times are changing.”
“Where am I?” I begged.
He shook his head, looked at me and then stood up. He made his way back to the fire and his solitude. He left me with this final reply: “You’re wherever you think you are…”
I didn’t want to bother with him anymore. How was I supposed to trust him of all things? The answers I wanted were probably going to come from the winged man who led me here. In all truth, I didn’t know what to think. I was someplace new, someplace in the universe that I had never been before. The reasons for such an occurrence were sadly veiled by ignorance. Was there something I missed in my life? My mind remained constantly contradicted within itself. It didn’t know which reality to believe… the present one, or the one back on Earth, which my blood was so familiar with. How was this place supposed to be trusted? I didn’t even know by what science I had been transported here. The only way for my thoughts to absorb the absurdity of my situation was to disregard what they knew of gravity and physics. And then what’s left?
Through what felt like the next couple of weeks, the quiet creature and I continued to share long lapses of silence and sleep. When we spoke, it was brief and forgettable. He thought of me as an annoyance, like a lump on his back or a log in his path. He hardly paid attention to me, but his tendency to ignore, I began to believe, was not for the sake of bitterly ignoring me. He appeared so wrapped up in his lonely contemplation that there wasn’t enough time in his mind for me. Or anyone.
Once a day he started a fire. And every day he prepared the same bland soup, the main ingredient of which was crushed nuts. It appeared to be his only sustenance. I am not sure if he stayed in his hut beside the fire all the time, or if he did this only during my stay because he didn’t want to leave me alone. But I only noticed him wander off for a prolonged period of time once. I was outside urinating when he finally returned with handfuls of those odd shaped nuts.
Every day that I awoke it felt like I was somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be. This world seemed intact with none of my familiar frequencies. What was I supposed to believe at this point? It grew intolerable how much I relied on uncertainty. When I felt healthy, or at least well enough to retreat from this pungent creature, I arose from my place of rest. I headed for the exit.
When he took notice of me fleeing, he stood up abruptly. “Are you leaving?”
“Yes.” I tried to hide any trepidation in my voice.
He nodded, took a step back, and then declared, “You are a being of intelligence, modesty, and greatness. I hope you find your way. For your mysteriousness to me beckons something of phenomenal change in this forest. Your path may become a treacherous one, but at the very end… you will become one with a great spirit again.”
I paused from making my way out to face him and ask, “Why would you say that?”
“Because it is what I feel to be true.” He nodded again and gave a muffled sigh, then made his way back to the room’s crude fireplace.
“What planet is this?” I questioned, seeing if now he would be more vulnerable to answering my questions. Although it is still a mystery to me how we understood each other, or communicated for that matter, at all.
Regardless, he remained vague and subtle by seizing a strange object from a pocket buried under his rags. “All I know of reality is this forest we call Threesah. I am what we call a cull. My species had a culture, we had a society once, but we never had… dominance. Our weaknesses got the best of us in the end.”
“I don’t know what any of this means,” I stressed to him.
“Whatever it means is meaningless. All I can say to you now is that when I look upon you, I see hope for an intelligent future. Our sun and this forest have always been our Gods, our majesties and mysteries, but it was by their divine whims that my kind fell. I am one of the last, and when I see you… I see hope. Hope in what? I don’t know, but that is what I feel makes life so interesting…”
“Oh, I don’t think I can take much more of this place,” I muttered to myself. My mind felt sick as it started disbelieving the reality which was sustaining it.
“Take these.” He handed me a pair of dirt red mushrooms. “They will help you.”
“Am I going to, like, get high?” I questioned, figuring this fungus was like psilocybin mushrooms on Earth. I hadn’t done anything like that in quite some time.
The cull gave me his last small smile and said, “You will find your way. I suppose getting there will be quite a trip. Yes.”
That was the last time I saw that creature. I walked away and ventured out into the woods. I probably should’ve asked if he knew of a winged man, but the cull’s answers never seemed to satisfy my questioning. And that question seemed to be constantly burning me. For I knew deep within my brain that the man with wings was responsible for this whole experience.
I ate the mushrooms after I found the river again. I never really knew why, but I felt that the direction this water flowed was the way I was to venture. I guess it was because the river was where the water I awakened to led. It was the only reasoning I had for every direction deserved equal justification.
When the sun set, stars invaded the sky. It was so much more tremendous than the view of stars on Earth, especially in the brightly lit city where I owned my bar. My eyes watered up, and I experienced a powerful force brew inside my chest. It was overcoming me and crawling from the depths of the night sky into the perspectives of my mind.
I had something on my mind, a thought of some kind. I didn’t know what it was yet. But like a dragon burrowing through a deep cave, it was breaching the deepest tunnels of existence. It crawled around infinite depths of consciousness, but remained too far down to define. I would witness that serpent’s true form on the day of reckoning. When, I hoped, all of my doubt would be vanquished.
The mushrooms kicked my stomach. I didn’t know if this world already had three moons or if I merely perceived three moons. Emotions got caught up in rivulets of electric thought patterns. Energy invaded to transform every piece of my psyche.
I ran along the dim river, sprinting nude into oblivion. A boundless spirit dashing all around the universe- I was naked dancing truth, but with no idea what truth meant anymore. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was I was alive and headed straight towards the void...
But could I smile in the face of death?
Written by BW Derge, All Rights Reserved 2024
© USA
This was an excerpt from Laenif: Book Two (2017), chapter two: To Another World, the Dreamer Dreamed
