And Nights Bright days

All days are nights to see ’til I see thee,

And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.

- William Shakespeare, Sonnet 43

She dreamed him, and he was perfect.

Before he appeared, she was dreaming that she was attending a luxurious party as the date of a mafia don, and she looked amazing. She felt lovely and sensual and wholly mismatched with the fat, greedy man next to her. As she walked through the crowd of people-- packed, somehow, into a friend’s house she had not thought of in years --a pit formed in her stomach. She was suddenly aware, with that funny certainty that comes with dream-logic, that she was secretly a police informant. If the don found out, she would surely be killed.

She bumped shoulders with someone and turned to apologize. But when she looked upon her heart’s creation, she said nothing, sensing the dream begin to shift, a different sort of tension bleeding into her friend’s old living room.

The figure graced her with a bright smile and made his own apology while she stood speechless. He was modeled vaguely after an athlete she’d seen make an amazing catch earlier that day. His team had won and she knew, in the way you know things in dreams, that he was at the party to celebrate the victory.

Despite her lack of response, he asked her to tell him about herself. She finally returned his smile, but warnings of danger flickered across the projection screen of her mind. Forget being an informant-- and she would, in a few more moments --her date would kill her if she was caught flirting with this stranger.

She walked on into the party, but he turned and followed her, pressing the question, and she found herself answering. She talked about herself, a strange mish-mash of the self she was living in the dream and her waking self. Whatever she expressed, he was interested in. He always had something fun to say, something that made her feel heard and seen and connected to. And he was always smiling, always finding a chance to touch her, respectfully but meaningfully.

She wanted him very badly.

They chatted as innocently as she could manage on a couch as other people danced and laughed around them, the party no longer about a mafia don or a sports victory, just a background soundtrack of fun and pleasure. After a few hours, or perhaps only a few moments, he leaned in and kissed her. His lips were soft and welcoming, but also a little insistent, as if he was begging her to forget the party, the friend’s house, the mafia don. A quiet plea to focus on him.

She wanted to. But the dream began to fade, even as she clung to it. Soon it became nothing…or almost nothing.

She woke with the memory of his lips on hers, his smile, his eager interest.

And thus he earned a little home in the back of her mind.

* * *

But he could do nothing for her from the back of her mind.

The little dream sat uselessly as she did not recall him, did not summon him in her sleep. He could only watch her walk through her days, or sit in the theater of her mind and evaluate her dreams. He watched her suffer through several particularly unfortunate years as her job became more stressful, as her marriage crumbled, as the very earth under her feet shifted under the weight of global disasters and shortages.

He could do nothing to help her. And though he had no physical form, he somehow felt a dull ache for her.

Then, one night, she called for him.

There was no party this time. Instead, she was desperately trying to get onto a flight to Houston, where she was scheduled to take a shuttle to the moon. But she kept arriving at the airport and realizing she had forgotten something vital: her suitcase, her cell phone, her wallet. By the time she was there and ready, the plane had left without her.

He stood at the airport counter. He still had an athlete’s build, but this time his face mimicked an actor’s from a Korean romantic drama she’d recently binged. If he’d had a heart, he thought it would have skipped a beat as she marched up to him, a resigned expression on her face. He scheduled her for the next flight smoothly, and though she was uncertain whether she would make it in time for her space adventure, the tension in her face relaxed a little, and he felt like a superhero.

He insisted on escorting her to her gate, pushing away a nightmare that threatened to hold her at security and blocking off a distracting fantasy of seeing her own work of art on sale at an airport shop. If she wanted to go to the moon, he’d do his best to get her there.

They stood in front of the jetway, where the plane waited for her, and she turned to him. She smiled at him, and the warmth in her eyes made him feel…made him feel real.

“Thank you for your help,” she said.

“I would do anything for you,” he tried to say, but the words that came out were “Have a nice flight, ma’am.”

She quirked an eyebrow and he wondered what she’d heard him say, but she turned and entered the jetway.

She woke to the sound of her dog making whimpering noises in its own dream.

There would be no trip to the moon that night. But something had changed.

* * *

This time she remembered him after she woke, and he found himself being called to her mind throughout the rest of the day, always with a wistful fondness, or occasionally a fantasy of meeting him in the waking world. At night, when she lay her head down to sleep, she would take the latest fantasy and build on it, adding depth to his character, adding tension to their shared story.

She would imagine him as a new coworker who would start the next day, or perhaps a wealthy celebrity she would meet the next time she got a first class upgrade on a flight. Sometimes he worked at a rival company, sometimes she simply met him on the bus. Sometimes he was tall, other times short, sometimes a woman, sometimes a mystical creature.

It didn’t matter. It was always him.

And when he was with her in her mind, she believed utterly that he was real, that he would find her in the waking world and turn her world lovingly upside down, just like in the stories she had read and watched and heard all throughout her life.

For the dream, those days and nights were an unmatched pleasure. Spending so much time with her after years in the shadows of her thoughts was a heady experience, a little like the sensation he had observed in her when she drank too much champagne at a work party, or had danced at a club one unusually impulsive evening. It didn’t matter which version of the story she wove; as long as he was among the threads, he felt full to the brim with bliss.

These imaginings continued regularly for the next year. The frequency declined a little, but he remained a recurring fixture in her dreams; she was always just a whisper away from recalling him. She did not remember most of these dreams, but they would work together, or vanquish a deadly foe, or go grocery shopping, or have a sensual adventure on a distant beach.

His proximity let him do more for her. He worked to shield her from the nightmares of her waking and sleeping lives, he cast off the doubts and intrusive thoughts that normally nibbled through the edges of her mind. He was thrilled to see the results impacting her reality. She finally felt free and at ease enough to leave the memories of her ex behind, to take an exciting new job, to move across the country and build something just for herself. Soon she was content with her work, with her new friends and coworkers, with her dream-lover, and he took pride in her quiet joy.

Until one day, when she met someone at work and developed an immediate crush.

He was a real flesh-and-blood person who her mind would never connect to the fantasies she’d held so tightly for so long.

The transition sharp as a knife as the little dream was once again relegated to the back of her mind, once again a mere observer. It hurt, or at least he felt it as hurt, being only a figment of her imagination.

But he took some pleasure as her stress gave way to the fluttering anxieties of fresh love. She confessed her feelings to the coworker a few months later, the two embarked on a relationship. When the pair married two years later, she relaxed into the world in a way she’d never done before.

He was happy for her.

So happy.

* * *

Decades passed, and he sat mostly unused, like a dusty book on an untouched shelf in a forgotten attic. He found he could still nudge his way into her dreams perhaps once every year or two. It was rare that he was a prominent figure in the dream, rarer still that he was her closest partner in life—but oh, the euphoria when he was. But no, he was more often as a side character in a larger adventure, like in the airport dream.

But he took shameless advantage of these occasional meetings nonetheless. He would send away the nightmares, he would give her encouraging thoughts and advice on whatever was going on in her life. The words would always come out as whatever the rest of the dream required, but he tried anyway, hoping she could hear his true meaning.

He never knew if she did.

Then, on one grim day, he felt himself summoned to her dream. If he’d had a heart, he thought it would have turned a somersault to see her. In the dream, she lay in a hospital bed, wizened and elderly, succumbing to the wickedness of aging—but to him, she looked as beautiful as she had the night she’d made him.

“This is my last dream, isn’t it?” she asked, her voice cracking.

His delight dimmed and he stilled, looking around them. He sat in a hard chair next to her bed in a hospital room that seemed never to end, and yet was shadowed by fractured edges that flickered in his peripheral vision.

“Yes,” he answered helplessly.

She reached out for his hand and he took it. “You were always there, weren’t you? In my mind?”

This time he could only nod. He was not sure why his throat had seized, why his imaginary voice wasn’t working. He had no body, but he felt dry and cracked.

“It must have been a hard job,” she sighed. “I’m sorry I made you for something like that. It was selfish.”

“I’m not,” he croaked out. “I’m not sorry. I loved you every moment.”

She smiled again, putting a hand to his face. “You were made to. It wasn’t really real.”

He shook his head furiously, tears springing to his nonexistent eyes as he put his hand on hers. “Yes, it was. It may have been in your mind. But it was always real.”

She gazed at him with unfocused eyes, nodding. “I guess it was, in its way, wasn’t it?”

He smiled through his tears. “Hey.”

“Hey what?” she answered.

“Do you still want to go to the moon?”

She blinked at him, struggling against her own mind to stay with him, to call back up the memory of that dream. When she did, she grinned. “Yes. I still want to go to the moon.”

He stood, still holding her hand, and gave a pointed look to the jetway door that now stood behind him.

“Then let’s go.”