Manchester, England; Sunday, August 5th, 2001; 3:03 p.m.Aldous had accepted the strangeness of the previous night as a particularly vivid dream. He remembered waking in the middle, or he thought he did, but he remembered that with the same clarity he remembered the storm in the forest so maybe it hadn’t happened at all. But all the same, of course, he couldn’t get his mind off it. Just because it was a dream didn’t mean it wasn’t worthy of contemplation.
His mother’s old textbook had made reference to an upcoming transitional phase in his life when he’d looked up the symbolism of a forest, which could mean just about anything. The storm gave a more visceral result: struggle and unexpressed turmoil. The snow could highlight the need to share and express himself, but it could also indicate a feeling of isolation, depending on the context.
“Well, you’re almost a teenager,” said his mother when he asked her at lunch, quite seriously. “That all sounds about right to me.”
Aldous looked down at his sandwich and sighed. The experience had been so strange and momentous-feeling that he’d almost be disappointed if it were to foretell something so achingly mundane.
To tell the truth, though, it was the people from the dream that had made it truly unusual, but he wasn’t sure how to translate them into symbols. Instead he decided to just let them inspire him. It was as if he’d created characters in their entirety without meaning to, and they were begging to be used. Zoé was much more interesting to him. All morning he’d been constructing a mythology around her strange magic: a secret society of witches and wizards who lived in cities carved into mountain caves and used icicles for wands. He didn’t have a good story for her yet. Maybe there would be a tribe of fire wizards too, or something. The professor and his hot cocoa could be one of them. Not that that made sense with how he’d been moving the rain… But he didn’t have to be entirely faithful to his subconscious mind, necessarily.
He sat on his bed with a pencil and his only notebook without lines, trying to draw. Zoé had just been wearing regular-people clothes, but he thought something more mystical would suit her as she was now in his mind. Often Aldous wished he could express himself better in more visual means, for the times when he couldn’t find the right words to describe what he was envisioning or the description was too unwieldy and detailed to include. His mum, a gifted artist, had tried to teach him some tricks. But mostly she said that practice was the best way to improve. Aldous had a certain degree of difficulty with working on things that didn’t come naturally. Maybe he’d just get her to draw him something once his ideas were more solidified.
Alice tried to stalk across his lap, and Aldous petted her head before lifting her off out of his way. He was trying to focus. After sketching in the collar of a fur-lined robe and the shape of a head with gently blowing hair, he closed his eyes, trying to recall Zoé’s delicate face.
He opened his eyes, and it was not the French girl in front of him, but Professor Ernie. And he was in front of him in an unsettlingly hallucinatory way.
Aldous gasped and jumped backward, startling Alice off the bed. He squeezed his eyes shut again for a second and opened them expectantly. But the professor was still there, no longer wearing his rainjacket from last night, sitting on the end of his bed somehow without putting weight on the mattress and looking at Aldous with a similar expression of shocked recognition.
“Did I fall asleep?” he asked, before quite realizing what a stupid thing it was to ask a dream.
@Ernest Franklin
