Life is but a Dream

 

Sandra examined the mug through tired eyes. She’d been up all night, arguing with her cat.

“Mmrow!” The cat yowled.

“No,” Sandra retorted.

It went on like that for hours.

Some hours, she managed to drown him out with a constant brown-noise played over her earbuds. Other times, she’d awake to find her earbuds had fallen out. As if fully aware of this, the cat would start his rant up again within minutes of her emergence from the sea of sleep.

Despite the disruptions, Sandra never felt too tired. Or, rather, she always felt exactly the same amount of tired she’d been her entire life. One would expect constant interruptions to one’s sleep schedule to lead to some obvious detriment, and yet there was none. None that had not already been present, anyway.

So, she awoke, trekked downstairs (while the cat slept soundly on the edge of the bed, snoring, the little hellion), and poured herself a cup of Stok-brand cold brew. Pre-made coffee in hand, she was left to examine the mug. She could have downed a gulp of the liquid—but the mug. The mug.

I am a dream, the mug read.

Sandra had no memory of purchasing the mug. She’d never seen it before in her life. I am a dream, it insisted. Frowning, she set the mug down and pinched her arm. The pain was definite. Exact. A red mark remained when she pulled her fingers away from the plot of skin she’d attacked.

She tried a few grounding techniques.

She could smell the coffee, if she put her nose over the edge of the mug. She couldn’t smell much else; she had a weak olfactory. But she could feel the cold tiled floor under her bare feet. She could feel the handle to the refrigerator, sloping and curved under her hand. She could feel the neck of the Stok bottle as she set it back on its rack, and she could feel the cold air wafting out of the refrigerator, too.

She could feel her heart, beating lazily in her chest.

Ba-bump, over and over.

She sipped the coffee. It was bitter; she hadn’t sweetened it. She could have kept going, but she was convinced by then that she was awake.

I am a dream, the mug seemed to whisper.

Words were supposed to change in a dream. They were supposed to be mutable. You could read a book, but when you re-examined it, everything would be completely different. She crept into the living-room, knelt, and extracted a book from the shelf on the floor. Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief. She flipped it open to the first page.

“Look, I didn’t want to be a half-blood”, the book read.

She closed the book, closed her eyes, and drew in a sharp breath. She held it. After four seconds had passed, she opened her eyes, opened the book, and read.

“I am a dream”.

Sandra dropped the book, stood, and traced a path back to the kitchen.

She was dreaming.

How was that possible? What could she do?

She tried to fly, and found she could not. She tried to grow an extra pair of arms, and failed. She tried to conjure a long dead friend.

Something in the basement thumped, as if a heavy tome had toppled from a shelf and slapped angrily against the floor.

Without thinking, she raced to the basement door, shut it, and locked it. And then she slumped there, her head resting against the dark brown wood, and thought. She thought for an eternity. She thought for only seconds. She thought until a scratching, leaking thing began to slither its way up the basement stairs. Hearing it, she bolted up and raced to the counter, snatched the cursed mug from where she’d left it, and downed her coffee in several quick gulps.

The liquid was cold and heavy in her stomach.

She deposited the mug in the sink and half-jogged upstairs. Her cat still slept on the edge of the bed, indifferent to the fact that it, too, was a dream. She’d heard that cats could ward off evil spirits. Surely whatever lurked in the basement was one such spirit. She knelt at the foot of the bed, placed her hand over the cat.

Its eyes opened.