Chapter One - It would solve everything

Avez-vous jamias en un cauchemar?

It’s called a dream-initiated lucid dream, and it would solve everything. Effectively, the person dreaming can go from being in an unconscious, seemingly uncontrollable dream-state to being able to accept it’s a dream and control the parameters of their subconscious - control the content of a dream.

 

Now, it’s exciting, but not easy.  What you have to do is train yourself, just like learning how to whistle, except you have to train your mind, you need an extreme level of mental discipline, which is why you shouldn’t do this without clarity and fidelity, or it will punish you.

 

Each day, when you wake up in the morning, you need to take a black pen, a thick black pen, and draw a symbol on your left wrist, like a stamp when you go into a bar, only bigger and the symbol should be important to you so you remember it.

 

Andy chose to write an alpha and omega symbol " because he used to see it on books at school and because it means from beginning to end, which he thought is how love should be " not ephemeral and temporary.

 

He would spend hours, in class and at home, retracing the symbols with his pen, the letters becoming more and more colored, the skin on his arm getting redder and redder under the ink, and him looking forward to when he could disappear under his sheets and fall into her like he used to, he couldn’t wait to feel like he was no longer alone.

 

The first time it happened it was about a month of grinding the symbols into his arm. He was at his grandmother’s house, walking around, examining her wine cabinet and books, and came across a copy of the Bible, marked with an alpha and omega " from beginning to end.  He realized he was asleep. He was in his dream, and he knew it.

 

Andy panicked, he thought of Marie immediately, and woke up in a cold sweat, his arms locked around his blankets, his pillows on the floor and his face contorted. He had seen her, for a split second, walking around in a long white dress, her earthy hair tucked meekly behind her left shoulder, and her right arm sitting at a ninety-degree angle, jutting out of her ribs. She was just how he remembered, glasses perched on her head, delicate tanned fingers cradling a cup of tea and a mellifluous French drawl spilling out of her mouth and washing over his ears.

 

Of course she was how he remembered her - it was his memory, but nonetheless, it came like a fresh breeze off a vast ocean of loneliness. It made Andy more determined, more enthusiastic. He took the pen and traced the same lines he had dozens of times - his next encounter with Marie wouldn’t be so fleeting.