Chapter 2

Chapter 2

 

 

 

 

            Maggie looked at him, eyeing the cup in his hand. “Did you find a cockroach in the coffee? Because I would definitely believe that.”

            Jenson shook his head impatiently. “No. Remember that dream I was telling you about this morning?”

            “Vaguely. Something about killing demons?”

            “I dreamt about a woman who was some kind of demon hunter. And just now, when I went up to pay for the gas and coffee, I saw that the woman behind the counter was the same woman from my dream! She looked exactly the same, just dressed differently. And then you know what she said to me? She said that she’d had a dream about me last night and that she and I were hunting demons, and that she almost killed me in the dream. That was exactly what happened in my dream! It’s like we had the exact same dream in the same night! I’ve never even seen this woman before in my life!” Jenson was almost to the point of hysteria.

            “What? That is unbelievable,” Maggie agreed. “I don’t even know what to say. She just came out and told you that as you were checking out?”

            “Yeah!”

            “Did you tell her that you had the same dream?”

            “No. I thought she might think I was making fun of her or messing with her if I did. But she mentioned something about remote viewing. Have you ever heard of that?” Jenson wondered.

            “Is that where you see other places, like a psychic or something?”

            “I don’t know. I’ve never heard of it before,” Jenson said. “I’ve got to say, though, that my interest is piqued. I want to find out more about this. What could this mean? Could I be psychic?”

            Maggie raised one eyebrow. “It’s pretty crazy, I’ll admit, but I don’t know about you being psychic. Besides, how would you even find out more about it? It was one strange occurrence.”

            “When we get back home, I want to research it online. I want to see if anyone else has had anything like this happen to them. I want to know if it’s something psychic, or paranormal, or if there are any theories out there about something like this.”

            “Great, but let’s worry about it later. We’re half an hour behind schedule right now. We should get going,” she urged.

            Jenson spent the rest of the trip lost in his own thoughts, wondering how two strangers could end up in the same dream at the same time. He was bothered by Maggie’s borderline indifference toward the situation. How could she not be rattled by this? It was the strangest thing that had ever happened to him. His head was spinning with the possibilities, but he shared none of his ideas with her. Was it possible that he was psychic, and that the dream wasn’t actually his own? But he had been a part of it. It wasn’t like he was just dropping in and watching someone else’s dream. Or maybe he did drop in on her dream, and when he did so, he altered it somehow by putting himself into it. By the time Jenson arrived to the restaurant where his grandfather’s birthday party was being held, his head was reeling from more than just the migraine.

            He and Maggie hurried into the restaurant, as they were more than thirty minutes late for the party. When they walked into the back room where his family had congregated, Jenson was relieved to see that there were two open chairs for them at the long banquet table. He quickly wished his grandfather a happy birthday, then took his seat next to Maggie, as she had already settled in next to his tall, red-headed mother, Carla.

            “Sorry we’re late,” he apologized to his mother as he sat. “We had a late start this morning.”

            “That’s fine. The servers haven’t even been back here to take our orders yet,” Carla said. “So how was the trip? You look ill, Jenson. Are you alright?”

            “I’m fine. I have a bad migraine, though, and something really weird happened on our trip that rattled me a little. But other than that I’m ok.”

            “What happened?” Carla inquired.

            Jenson told her about the dream and the woman at the gas station. “Have you ever heard of such a thing?” he asked.

            “That’s wild!” Carla exclaimed. “Remote viewing, huh? Do you think it’s possible?”

            “I’m not even sure what it is.”

            “Don’t quote me on this,” she said, “but I think it’s when you mentally travel to another location and can see what’s going on somewhere far away from your physical body. I actually had a friend when I was younger who claimed that her father could do that. She even told me once that her father had accurately described what she’d done in school one day, like he had been there with her. I always thought she was pulling my chain.”

            Jenson was floored. “So this could be a real thing? I’ve got about a million questions floating around in my head right now, and if I could find at least one direction to start looking for answers I would be happy.”

            “I don’t know if remote viewing would exactly explain what happened to you, since it was all in a dream, but I think that’s where I would start looking to get some ideas,” Carla opined.

            From across the table, Pete took interest in the conversation. “Did I hear you guys talking about remote viewing?” After Jenson filled him in on what had brought them to that topic, he replied, “Man, that’s crazy! You know, I had something weird happen recently with my dreams, too. I kept having dreams with one song in them that kept repeating, the same song every time, and then a few days later I heard that the bassist for that band had died. It was weird because I’m not even a fan of that band, so it’s not like I would’ve been listening to their music or anything.”

            As Jenson was about to reply, his Uncle Rick stood up and gathered everyone’s attention for a short speech he had prepared for Jenson’s grandfather. When the speech was over, the servers began making rounds and taking orders, and the remote viewing conversation was put on the back-burner for the rest of the afternoon.

            After the party, Jenson and Maggie headed to James’s house, which was in Brighton. It was about an hour’s drive from White Dove, where the party had been, but was a fairly central location for the brothers to gather for a night before going their separate ways again. That evening, once Pete and his wife, Rhonda, had put their children to bed in one of James’s guest bedrooms, Craig, Rhonda, Maggie, and the four brothers all retired to the garage to socialize. They sat in canvas camping chairs as James handed out cans of beer from one of the cases they had purchased from a gas station up the street. The ladies sipped rum-and-coke from tall glasses and talked mostly only to each other as the brothers and Craig talked about Pete’s latest car project �" his Subaru STI.

            As the evening wore on, the garage began to resemble a bar scene, with loud rock music blaring from James’s CD player on a shelf and noisy laughing and conversation. The air was filled with a thick haze from the cigarettes Pete, Craig, Billy, and Rhonda were smoking. Jenson wished he could partake in a smoke, but he knew that the second he lit one up, Maggie would shoot him an angry glare and give him grief the rest of the weekend. He liked to smoke when he drank, but Maggie found the habit disgusting and banned him from smoking in her presence. He hoped she would go to bed soon so he could open up the pack of cigarettes he had secretly purchased at the gas station when they’d gone to get beer. He knew she wouldn’t stay up past midnight, since she stuck to a strict sleeping schedule. He kept his eye on the clock on the wall, waiting for the hands to point to twelve.

            Finally, as expected, Maggie excused herself shortly after midnight. He waited until he was sure she had gone to bed before excitedly ripping open his pack of cigarettes and lighting one up. He sighed contentedly, watching the smoke roll away from him with his exhale.

            “She still won’t let you smoke?” Billy ragged. “Man, she’s got you on a short leash, buddy. You know, it’s only going to get worse if you marry her. Trust me, I speak from experience!”

            “Hey, I’m not ring shopping yet,” Jenson replied.

            “Do you think you two will ever get married?” Rhonda asked. “You’ve been together for like three years, haven’t you? Hasn’t she even suggested it?”

            “Not once. I don’t think she’s in any hurry either, which is fine with me.”

            “I don’t think you guys should ever get married,” Billy declared. “I mean, Maggie’s hot and all, but I think you’d regret it after a year or two.”

            Jenson was beginning to feel agitated. He understood why Billy felt the way he did, as his experience with marriage had left a sour taste in his mouth, but Jenson wasn’t seeking marriage advice. His relationship with Maggie was his own business, and he didn’t want to discuss her less-than-appealing qualities with everyone right now.

            Pete seemed to pick up on Jenson’s aggravation, and he quickly changed the subject to maintain the peace. “Hey, Jenson, did you tell everybody else about that crazy dream thing today?”

            Jenson was glad for the shift in conversation. He hadn’t told them about the dream, so he shared it then. When he had told his story, everyone was shocked.

            Craig asked, “Was the cashier’s name Kristine too?”

            “I don’t know,” Jenson replied. “I never asked her what her name was. I didn’t even think to ask! That would’ve been even better if I had found out that her name was Kristine!”

            James chimed in, “You should stop back at that gas station on your way home tomorrow. It would be interesting to know if she had the same name.”

            Jenson agreed. He wondered if Maggie would object to returning to the run down station. She probably would.

            “So why do you think that happened?” Rhonda asked.

            “I’m not sure, but Mom and I were talking about remote viewing and wondering if that was a possibility.” He explained to Rhonda what remote viewing was as his mother had explained it to him. “I just don’t know if that particular phenomenon explains exactly what happened to me, though. It wasn’t like I was seeing her doing things in real life. I was actually there, interacting with her, in a whacked out dream with demons in it. I think there has to be something else, some other way of explaining it.”

            “Maybe it’s some kind of psychic connection, where both of your brains somehow joined the same wavelength and allowed you to both interact in one dream,” James suggested.

            “Like some kind of extreme telepathy,” Jenson added.

            “Yeah, exactly like that!” James replied.

            “I can think of a few women I’d like to connect wavelengths with,” Billy commented.

            “I bet you can,” Rhonda teased, rolling her eyes.

            “What about the dreams you had, Pete? What do you think that was?” Jenson asked, trying to get the conversation back on track.

            Pete told everyone about his dreams and about the bassist of the band dying. “I think it might’ve been a premonition, but I don’t know how or why I would’ve been keyed-in to that information.”

            “That’s really weird,” Craig said. “I’ve had a dream like that, where you dream about something happening, and then you get Déjà vu when it happens in real life. I wonder if every case of Déjà vu is because you dreamed of it before it happened.”

            “What I want to know is how things like that happen,” Jenson said. “After what happened to me, I’m kind of obsessing over it. There has to be more to dreams than just your mind cycling through the information you picked up throughout the day. I mean, when I was little, I had a dream that my godfather was on a train with a bunch of people I had never seen before, and it was like I was just floating there, watching him. Then suddenly the train exploded, and I woke up. A few days later, he died of an aneurism in his heart. The strange thing was that I hadn’t even seen him in a long time prior to having that dream. Why would I dream that? What would’ve made my brain just suddenly bring him up, especially when he wasn’t a big part of my life anyway?”

            “You dreamed of Uncle Ed dying before it happened?” Billy asked. “You were so little when it happened, I’m surprised you remember him, let alone a dream you had about him.”

            “Yeah. I always remembered it because I always thought it was weird. His funeral was the first one I had ever been to.”

            “Maybe it’s God’s way of preparing you for something before it happens,” Rhonda conjectured. “He shows it to you in a dream so it’s less devastating when it happens in real life.”

            “But why would He try to prepare me for a bassist dying? I didn’t even like that band,” Pete countered. “I don’t think my dream was any kind of divine message. Maybe some are, but I doubt that mine was.”

            “Ok,” James jumped in, “this might be the beer talking, but I have a wild idea. What if there is an inherent knowledge, on some other plane of existence, that we can all tap into without even knowing it. Knowledge of what has happened, what is happening now, and what will happen in the future �"“

            “Like a physical manifestation of destiny?” Pete proposed.

            “Sure, why not. And what if we sometimes accidentally tap into that information when we’re dreaming, and that’s how we get our premonitions? It could happen all the time, but we only take notice when it affects us directly in our own lives.” James took the last swig of his beer, then pointed to no one in particular. “Wrap your mind around that one!”

            “Let me get this straight,” Billy said as he lit up a cigarette and handed James another beer. “We psychically connect with other people while we’re dreaming and we look up the skirt of destiny? Maybe that’s why I’m always still so tired in the morning when I wake up,” he joked.

            “That’s kind of a funny way to put it, but seriously, have you ever noticed that sometimes when you’ve had a lot of dreams in one night, you do wake up tired?” Craig said.

            “Yeah, that happens to me!” Jenson exclaimed.

            “Me too!” James said.

            As the conversation slowly shifted to less theoretical topics, Jenson thought about all the things he wanted to research online when he got home the next day. He wondered if he would be able to find anything that would satisfy his questions, or if he would just end up with an even greater obsession for answers. He had a feeling that he had discovered something of great importance, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to stop obsessing over it until he figured out exactly what his brain was doing while he was sleeping. There had to be more to it than what he had learned about sleep in Psychology 101.

            The next morning, everyone went out to a local restaurant for a greasy breakfast to remedy their hangovers. Maggie, of course, had no such ailment, and she had a fine time teasing Jenson about his puffy eyes and sallow complexion.

            “You look like a zombie,” she jested after they gave the server their orders.

            Jenson looked around the table at his brothers, and, for once, he had to agree with her. “We might look like s**t today, but we were geniuses solving the mysteries of the universe last night.”

            “Converting alcohol to urine isn’t exactly a mystery of the universe,” she teased.

            James overheard their conversation and chimed in, “We might’ve been drunk, but it doesn’t mean we didn’t have an intelligent discussion. Well, at least until Pete decided it would be cool to turn my deodorant can into a flame thrower. It was all kind of downhill after that.”

            After a fairly quiet breakfast, the brothers said their farewells and Jenson and Maggie hit the road. Jenson’s head was pounding, again, but he insisted upon driving. He wanted to stop at that same gas station and find out his cashier’s name, and he knew that if Maggie was driving, she would probably turn down his request to stop. He was afraid she didn’t understand how important this mystery was to him.

            Jenson waited until they were only a few miles from the exit where the gas station was before he revealed his plan to Maggie. She didn’t seem as irritated about it as he had expected, but she wasn’t overly supportive either.

            “Is finding out her name going to change anything?” she asked.

            “Yeah, it is. If her name is Kristine, then that’s even more evidence that my dream was something out of the ordinary. I just need to know. It’s important to me.”

            As he pulled off onto the correct exit, his heart began to race. When the small, dilapidated gas station came into view, he felt adrenaline begin coursing through his veins. With shaky hands, he steered the car into the drive and parked at the pump. He gassed up the car, frequently looking at the building, trying in vain to see the cashier through the window. Finally, the tank was full, and he headed inside.

            His heart dropped when he saw a young, short, pudgy man standing behind the counter. He looked around the small store, but there was no one else in the building. Disappointed, he grabbed a candy bar and went to the counter.

As the attendant initiated the transaction, Jenson asked him, “Wasn’t there a woman working here yesterday? She had short, curly blond hair.”

 “You mean Kristine?”

            Jenson felt his stomach turn.