The human mind cannot quite comprehend just how tiny our corner of the universe is. There aren’t just thousands of other planets; there are billions. Millions of solar systems, most of which we know little to nothing about. The universe is so large that it may as well be infinite, and yet within our own world we’ve occasionally caught glimpses that suggest that our universe is not alone. Call them different dimensions, alternate realities, whatever. As massive as our own universe is, we can’t help but suspect that it is only a tiny fraction of reality. As small as we are to the universe, just as small is our universe, if not smaller, to what is.
Picture, if you can, the layers of universes. Countless little specks of light, each holds an entire creation within it. Choose one small glimmer, and move within it. See our universe as it spirals out into the darkness. Move closer to one portion of the outer edge. There a small glowing mass reveals itself to be the Milky Way Galaxy. As you look closer, it too is so full of detail that you could never hope to see it all. A tiny glimmer catches your eye, and you realize that it is our sun. Around it planets and their moons spin in complex patterns. Comets chase their own, unique paths. The third planet beckons you. It is familiar by now; its continents and oceans hold names in your mind. As you concentrate on one continent, the endless variation of its terrain, life, and climate nearly hold you in thrall. Near the edge of one ocean, a city becomes visible. Traffic circles it and moves through it like some crazy electricity. A portion of the sheer mass of humanity moves within it, giving it life. They create endless almost-patterns with their movements, repeating over hours, days, and years in ways that are almost, yet never exactly, the same. You can almost hear the steady hum of human life, feel the pulse of the city beneath your hand. In a quiet neighborhood on the edge of the city, a single family makes its own patterns. If you wanted to, you could continue moving in closer to seethe patterns of blood and cellular activity in each of these people. You could examine the very molecules that make up the human body as they go about their own frenzied, almost patterned activity. You could look closer at the very atoms themselves, and the subatomic particles that make them up. Would they remind you of that first mass of universes you saw? Would they bring you back to the beginning again? What is an atom to the planet? What is one planet to the universe? What is one universe to total reality? Try to hold that in your mind for just a moment, the utterly incomprehensible size that I’m trying to get across, and you’ll almost begin to understand infinity, and infinity is what concerns us here.
Or rather, infinity is what concerns one girl in that house in the city by the sea. She has no choice but to try and comprehend it, because it will not leave her alone. So far she has managed to keep the days her own, but every night, when she looses her control over her conscious mind, she is visited by harbingers of infinity itself. Images come to her. Names and places that she later struggles to translate into language. Each night she finds herself a visitor in other lives, in other minds. She will find herself suddenly another person, with another name and another life. For a time she will forget the waking world for this other reality, will forget, in fact, that it exists. In ways she cannot define, she is still herself. The decisions she makes in these other lives are truly hers, but they are made entirely within the framework of those alternate lives. At night, while the girl sleeps, she exchanges her own reality for others completely. In the morning, when she wakes, she tries to pick up her own life where it left off, but her own life is not nearly the only one she has ever lived. She calls it the law of infinite infinities: taken that all things are in the end infinite, then every thing ever imagined or dreamed must have its counterpart in reality somewhere, somewhen, somehow. She knows that in her dreams she taps into these other places just as real as her own, or they tap into her. In each dream there is a crisis, a moment when she must make a decision among roads. In every case, there is also some kind of self-discovery that changes the life of her other self forever. Upon waking, often she cannot remember or understand why that one moment was important at all, but she knows that some infinitesimal aspect of reality has changed.
This feeling of importance drives the girl to try and remember everything she can of her dreams. Long years of practice have allowed her to slowly retain more and more of each night’s dreamings. Although she cannot always, or even half the time, understand why she has touched the lives she has, she can do her best to chronicle them. Perhaps someday she will understand why her dreams are never her own. Perhaps someday she will be able to take as much wisdom from those other lives as she somehow feels those lives have taken from her. In the meantime, she tries to write down as much as she is able to remember. Steadily, her memory begins to serve her better. Her journal, which begins as more a collection of seemingly disconnected fragments than anything else, gains detail and depth. It evolves toward a kind of window into other lives and worlds, snippets of other realities recalled clearly as memory. In time, perhaps the picture will clear completely, and the truths that the girl learns in her other lives will finally become plain. In the meantime, she drifts off to sleep every night knowing that her own life is only one of untold billions, and that for a time she will live another life, and hopefully influence it for the better. While she dreams, wakes, and tries to understand, let us watch her through her journal. What may yet confuse her might strike a chord in one of us.
It was my dream, but not mine. If you believe in past lives and such things, you may want to know more, but there’s not much more I can tell you. Here’s all I know, and all I saw, and all I felt.
There is a mirror that I sometimes kneel at, because the light is good. It’s a normal mirror, with a medicine cabinet. But behind the wall there is a crawl space accessed by another room. Because of an experience when I was very young, I am always acutely aware of that crawl space. That awareness may have contributed to my dream, or then again, if the dream had always been a part of me, perhaps my preoccupation with the crawl space stemmed from the dream instead.
I was kneeling at the mirror, and I knew I was dreaming. It was as if I was thinking two things at once. I was thinking about how strange this dream was and trying to figure out what was going on, but at the same time I was remembering being drawn out of bed by some powerful force, a force which was still influencing me now. That part of my mind was unaware that I was dreaming. As far as it was concerned, this was really happening. I didn’t have any time to puzzle over that, though. As I looked into the mirror (that one part of my mind straining to hear something and my eyes focused through the mirror, as if I expected it to become a window), I realized that I was not me! I could not focus on my face, because the part of my mind that thought this was real seemed to be in charge of my body, but the face in the mirror wasn’t mine! It was the face of a girl, maybe 14 years old, with dark black hair and large, dark eyes (though I couldn’t tell their color). Her face was a pale oval framed by her hair; her nose was narrow and fine. Those thoughts that controlled the dream, that knew not of the dream itself, were hers, not mine! I was only an observer in another person’s head. She wore a white nightgown in the style of a long time ago, and the mirror was not mine but hers, similar but not the same. It was framed in brass and oval instead of rectangular. She was listening, and then she heard what she was listening for. It was the same thing that had drawn her from her bed. Faint and faraway through the mirror came the sound of singing. The melody was strange, and the few voices singing it were extraordinary. The high and lilting, ethereal voices seemed to echo as if through a long corridor. The song was somehow magical, filling the hearer with and intense yearning desire to be a part of the song. The sound drew nearer, and its power grew. Finally, with a voice wrenched with emotion, the girl/I cried out, “I want to sing, too!” That begging, pleading voice would have drawn pity from anyone, and I suppose it did, because the next thing I knew, she/I/we/whatever was falling through the mirror, and in one great climax the singing stopped, and all was silent.
My/Her eyes opened, and there was a door not three inches from my nose through which soft candlelight flowed in a golden stream. I/She sat up (she had been lying on her side) and gently pushed the door open. Through her eyes I could see that she had been in some sort of a cupboard. To her left on the same wall was a door, and on the adjacent left wall was a case like in a museum, within which gleamed a hundred small bits of gold and tiny jewelry cases of polished wood. Some of the objects looked like tiny medals, others like jewelry or coins. On the opposite wall to the left was another door. To the right of the door was an old-fashioned sofa. There were two windows on the right wall, but only darkness through them.
The next part is hazy. I remember their 19th century gray dresses rustling as they moved toward me, then steered me (or rather, the girl I was in the dream) toward the case by the wall. They were going to grant my/her request, but she/I had to do something for them first. Then she could join them.
When the deal was made, the girl turned to leave, and stared in consternation at the empty cupboard. The women laughed and told her she was silly, that she should leave by the door, of course. So she opened the door, stepped through, turned around and shut it. When she turned toward the hallway she had entered, she was amazed to find that she was in her own hallway, and the morning sun was streaming through the windows.
She/I ran downstairs and around the outside of the house to the adjoining apartment. Going through a side door left unlocked, she/I ran toward some dusty, unused stairs. Before she/I could run up, she was halted by the sight of a very young, maybe six-year-old, girl with white blond hair down her back, who stood silently in the doorway to a room to the left, gazing at me/her sadly with her huge sea-blue eyes.
Turning her back on the girl, the person I was raced up the stairs, flung open the door, and stepped into the very same room the women had been in. The sofa was gone, but the cupboard was still there, and everything was covered with a thick film of dust. There were no footprints on the dust-covered floor.
After a few moments of complete shock, she/I turned to the right to gaze upon the glass case. It, too, was dust covered…and empty. Except for one small piece unidentifiable under all the dust.
Here the dream ended. I don’t know what any of it meant, if anything, or what bargain the girl made. The scene that remains clearest in my mind is the child’s eyes staring into mine (or the dark-haired girl’s, anyway). That child knew. She knew of the bargain, and was sad for the dark-haired girl. I have a feeling the deal was dark.
I had felt all the emotions of the girl. Her decisions had been mine. And I wonder fearfully, now, if I did not make that bargain as well. And whether the child’s sorrow was for the dark-haired girl…or for me.
“I dreamed this stairway.” At Randolph-Macon Women’s College there was a circular stair in one of the towers. The handrail was thick and plain, like someone had just cut away the inside wall at elbow level. I had dreamt of those stairs once. In a glass building I was climbing them. There was a landing across the way, by the windows, that I had to reach. But the only way I could do it was to climb all the way up, across, and then down again. After the top there wouldn’t be anymore staircases either.
I got to the top. I remember. I remember that it was very high. I don’t think I could really see the floor anymore. I had to go across a beam. I began and…I don’t know. Did I make it? Did I just wake up? Did I fall? I can’t remember.
What happens when someone’s house becomes a part of fantasyland? Toys come to life under the sofa, threatening like Chuckie. 1 ½ feet of snow, home for Christmas break. The Eckerts are over. Krist and Wimpy sleep on floor in family room because Wimp saw one of the toys on the stairs and knows something’s up. I go to bed, there’s a little boy on the roof outside my window. I let him in to sleep on my bed. He lives in a castle in 1869—not sleepy, surprised at how warm the house is. A dreamer.
2.
Something about some society where some people were in color and some in black and white. I was one of the black and white people, but I started to gain color. The colored ones were afraid of me because your status wasn’t supposed to be able to change after birth. I hid it as long as I could, but they eventually confronted me. I was brighter than any of them, in part because every colored person who died passed on their gift to me. The color represented some sort of power...I’m not sure what. But in the end, I was strong enough to lead all of them if they didn’t kill me first. And I was especially suited because I knew how the slavery of being gray felt.
3.
I was staying in some town because I had nowhere else to go. My hosts were vampires and werewolves. Honore was one of the vampires and the owner of the house where I was actually living. I was a little bit in love with him, but I couldn’t admit that even to myself. I held my own humanity too dear to risk it by loving a vampire. The other two vampires in the house scared me, and they knew and enjoyed it. They were brother and sister, related to Honore. Elise and Pomiser. They were also lovers, and delighted in flaunting their relationship for me. As though it weren’t hard enough for me to watch vampires play with each other that way, the incest angle bothered me more than I could ever say. The werewolves, who lived down the street I think, were a large and varied crowd. The youngest of the litter was Olivia, and they neglected her terribly. Most of them were coarse…straightforward and occasionally unthinking. They were honest people, moral people, but they just weren’t all that subtle…or so I thought.
Olivia and I got to be good friends. No one else had the time to hug her, and that little girl needed lots of hugs. Her older brother Roc bothered her a lot, in the way of some older brothers. When she came to me in tears one night, I led her across the street and a little ways down to a little doll shop. I brought her inside, and she was almost scared to come. Her family had never brought her there before. I was appalled. I introduced her to the clerk, a nice old woman, and bought her a doll. Then we left again, and I thought nothing about it.
The next night, I heard Honore, Elise, Pomiser, and the older werewolves talking about something that had them worried. I walked into the room just as someone said, “But who would have shown Olivia into the shop? Who would have been so foolish?” When I told them that it was I who had taken her there, and asked why that was a bad thing, I thin Pomiser almost jumped at me, and the father werewolf, the leader, looked at Honore and said something like, “How dare you let her stay here and keep her ignorant?” and stalked out. I looked around and saw a lot of people who wouldn’t meet my eyes, and the only thing I was sure of was that Olivia was in danger. I ran out of the house and down the street toward the shop, ignoring Honore’s cries telling me to wait…that it was too dangerous.
Back in the room, they talked for a few more seconds. You see, the doll shop was cover for the werewolves (mostly). No supernatural being could enter without being showed in by someone else. In the back room, unbeknownst to me, there were hundreds and hundreds of relics that held power that they could harness and use for their own ends. It was a sort of safe. They had collected the things in it over centuries, trying mostly to keep them out of the hands of others who would use them for evil. They were used very rarely, because that much power is easy to abuse. The werewolves had a policy of not showing the shop to any of their children until they were sure the children were old enough to understand the responsibility. They were afraid that Olivia had sensed the power in that store and had gone back to use it. They were especially afraid because, again unbeknownst to me, Olivia was going to be stronger in the use of those powers than any of the rest of them. She already showed signs of psychic abilities that they coulsn’t match, and she scared them a little. That’s why they had avoided her. Only I was oblivious enough to befriend her fearlessly, and ignorant enough to chase after her now…
When I entered the shop, Olivia was sitting by the cash register holding her doll and crying. I could hear crashing and banging from the back room. I ran to Olivia and she fell into my arms.
“I only showed him the doll you gave me,” she said. “He told me that he wanted to come with me and look at all the other pretty dolls. He was being so nice! Roc’s never that nice! I just wanted him to keep being nice!”
I held her as she cried onto my shoulder and tried to soothe her. I realized somewhere around this point that I was in over my head. There was something going on that I didn’t understand in the least.
Suddenly I was thrown backwards away from her. Over us both stood Roc, not human at all at this point and obviously enraged. He was almost glowing with power, so that even I could feel it. He said something I could barely make out about killing the little bitch, his freak little sister, and started toward her. I threw myself at him. He couldn’t be allowed to kill Olivia!
* * * * *
When the crowd finally got to the store behind me, all unified and armed to the teeth, they found Olivia alone again in the front of the shop. She told them what had happened in fits and bursts as they approached the back room where she said Roc and I had gone.
“If she fought Roc, she’s dead,” the lead werewolf said to Honore beside him. Honore looked stricken.
Perfect silence reigned in the back room as they quietly pushed the door open. Both Roc and I lay in a huge pool of blood on the floor, but even as they watched I began to stir. Roc did not. Honore ran to me, and helped me to sit up. Everyone else just stood there trying to figure out how I could have defeated Roc, especially as he was then. I just looked at Honore, stared into his eyes (he had beautiful eyes), and laughed a little.
“How?” he asked. He was too shocked to say anything more.
I laughed again, just a little bit, and looked around the room in dazed wonder.
“How?” I repeated, and the silvery tone in my voice must have startled him. It was just a little bit different from before, as though I was matching it to music only I could hear. “How? I said again. “Easy. Roc had no idea who or what he was dealing with. Turns out I’m no more human though you are…a little less, even…I just never knew it before.” And I threw my arms around him and kissed him, because nothing could threaten me now that I realized I’d never had anything to lose. Olivia, who had wandered in after the others, clapped and laughed.
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