Lost in Drowsy Dreams
fantasy by Cat Rambo
Bill couldn’t sleep but his wife Marianne could. It drew him to her at first, the way she’d close her eyes and slide into sleep, even sitting upright or curled in an armchair, no matter how much noise surrounded her. She’d smile, serene in her slumber, and he could tell she was far, far away. On their honeymoon, he slept as well as she did. They curled in each other’s arms and dreamed and made love and dreamed again of making love.
Back home though, Bill’s usual insomnia returned. It wasn’t that he was too energetic to take time to rest. He yearned to do it, lay there trying to relax, to pin sleep to the mattress so he could escape into it. He stared at the ceiling through the darkness and ached for the oblivion in whose embrace Marianne lay, breathing deeply, evenly, irritatingly, in the bed beside him.
He was jealous. He’d yawn during the day and angry thoughts would dart through his head. Marianne wasn’t sleepy, she’d consumed every scrap of sleep available to her. In the evenings they would eat and watch reality television and he would glare at her from the corner of his eye as she nodded off.
But what could he say? “Don’t sleep so much!” It seemed petty and pointless. Something a smaller man would say. So he didn’t, although every once in a while, he’d nudge her leg with a toe as they lay in bed. She’d wake up for a few seconds but inevitably sleep reclaimed her.
Infuriating.
He couldn’t identify the source of his jealousy whenever he sat down to contemplate it. It was something more than sleep. She was escaping, she was visiting other places without him.
He interrogated her about her dreams. Where had she been, and with who, and what had they done? He found that she dreamed in stories, full of cliffhangers and character development and adventure. He listened to them each morning, enthralled despite himself.
He began to write them down, to blog them at the domain mywifedreams.com. People liked them. She developed a following, an Internet presence. There were rumors of book offers.
Bill charted her dreams, drew up maps, created ancestral trees for recurrent characters. He used their family room in the basement as his office for this. The paneled walls, the Ichiro poster, the Budweiser sign, were all covered with sheets of paper and white boards necessary to the project. He set up a wiki and enlisted the help of Marianne’s readers. That made things more manageable.
He resented her sleep still, though. Why couldn’t he enter that land of drowsy dream with her? He tried melatonin and valerian root, lucid dreaming techniques and bead and feather-strung dream catchers. Exercise. Masturbation. Stretching an hour before bedtime. Warm milk.
Sometimes, every once in a great while, he saw himself in sleep before the Gate of Dreams, an enormous arched construction carved of yellowed, ancient ivory. Across it stretched brass-headed spears. Past their barbs he could see the slopes of Mount Demod, where Marianne had once picnicked with the King of Centaurs.
Every night he lay down beside the sleeping Marianne and closed his eyes, willing the Gate to reappear, that it be open to him this time. At length, he noticed there was a little space towards the bottom, and each time he stood there, he stretched out his dream hand and picked at the dirt with his fingernails, trying to enlarge the hole.
Years passed. The stories spread, became a book, a movie, a television series. He grew less and less involved as he transcribed the dreams each morning and typos crept in like ants spotting a smear of ice cream on the sidewalk. The vision of the hole and what it promised consumed him.
Finally it was large enough. The first night, he missed his chance, awoke before he could move. The next time, aware that he was at last dreaming, that he must act before a chance noise or his wife turning over beside him made him wake, snatched him away from the Gate’s very foot.
He dove, scrambled, pushed hard with his feet, felt the bottom of the Gate scrape over his back, pulling at the fabric of his pajamas.
He stood on the other side, finally in the land of Dreams, but the sense of urgency still consumed him. He began to run towards the mountain.
As he ran, he vanished. In the bed that had once been his, the woman who had been his wife murmured some farewell into her pillow. She had dreamed him as well, and when she finally woke in the sheets’ drowsy depths, he’d be gone, and difficult to remember, like the remnants of a dream you forgot to write down.
Copyright October 2011 by Cat Rambo
Cat Rambo lives in the Pacific Northwest. Her stories have appeared are Asimov’s, Weird Tales, Clarkesworld and Strange Horizons, as well as many others. Her collection, Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight was an Endeavour Award finalist in 2010 and followed her collaboration with Jeff VanderMeer, The Surgeon’s Tale and Other Stories. She has edited anthologies as well as critically-acclaimed Fantasy Magazine, is a board member of feminist science fiction group Broad Universe and a member of the Codex Writers’ Group. She blogs about writing at The World Remains Mysterious.