Dreams

I've always dreamed lucid. I thank my mom. When I was a wee little thing, she'd leave music playing all night while I slept.

Last night's was vaguely disturbing though.

I found myself working at the local euthanasia clinic as a trigger man. Work consisted of running the legally mandated, hour long, ritual 20 questions 'shutdown' sequence with clients. Then if all went well, I'd push the little blue button. Big, poweful, magnetic field clamps down on 'em, and they just shut down. The whole thing wasn't quite as grim as I would have thought, though the younger, perfectly healthy people, made it hard to be impartial in administering the shutdown sequence.

To finish, I'd have to cart the bodies down to incineration. You'd be surprised how many chose incineration, rather than a burial. All the better for me though, as I rarely had to cart the things out back and wait for the mortician lad to show up. He was still sore at us for refusing to let him advertise in the clinic reception. We all felt it was a bit off putting. He didn't see it that way. At one point, he had a guy in a chicken suit standing outside with a projector, beaming his advert onto our window!

Anyway, one day I was out to lunch at the park, not something necessarily I did too often, and I heard this little giggle. Behind me, perched up on a tree trunk was a rather pretty girl, early 20ish, little white outfit, shock of red hair. She jumps down and we start talking abuot random stuff like, "what color are comets? If they're not red, they really should be" and ,"does gunpowder get completely consumed when it goes off, and if not, what exactly are the constituent parts of the residue?" We got onto the subject of our work, and when I explained mine, she asked me why I did it. I started to answer, but found I had no clue. That bit of my memory aparently just wasn't there. She said I was funny and skipped off across the water, which I didn't think was odd until I was home later.

I spent quite a bit of time after that trying to figure out why I worked at the euthanasia clinic. It wasn't until I moved flat a while later that I came across a box full of unmarked videos. As it turns out, when I went to sleep at night, I wasn't sleeping. There was another whole personality that just woke up and led an entire other life. The videos were attempts at us communicating with each other. He was studying to be a doctor, and hopefully find some way to cure us. We were on a collision course, with less and less downtime between our conscious time. He predicted we would smack into each other pretty soon (at the time of the tape, which must have been quite a while ago) and the consequences would be unknown. He'd been searching for a good few years, and there was absolutely nothing to explain what was happening.

I realised time was blinking a bit just then. I thought the video was broken, cause it seemed to be skipping, but so were the curtains blowing at the window. And the sounds from the street. And for that matter, the rhythm of my breathing. I walked over to the mirror and took a long hard look at myself, and noticed, well, differences. I started talking to myself, and slowly found there was an answer.

We talked for a while, familiar but estranged. We agreed that the condition was only going to get worse. That's when I realised why I was working at the clinic. I was working there to earn enough money to pay for the rather expensive procedure for us, as a worst case eventuality.

We spent the rest of the night coaching each other to try and appear lucid enough to pass the shutdown sequence.