Dreams

What are dreams?

A question asked by many.

A dream is defined as a series of thoughts, images, and sensations occurring in a person's mind during sleep.

What would one see when their mind is essentially broken in one or many ways?

To answer this we must look into the mind of an elderly man trapped in a comatose state.

The man's name is Harrold Harmen he is seventy-two at this moment and is stuck in a comatose state with no hope of awakening.

Harold's wife is currently speaking to the doctor concerning the options ahead of them one of which is unplugging the life support.

Before we enter the mind of Harrold to journey into his dreams we may need to understand his background.

Harrold Harmen was born in the year of 1951.

Harrolds mother and father were named Bartholomew and Birtha.

Harrold was raised poor and stayed poor his whole life. As his friends who were raised more well off became more successful he became more resentful of those who were given the world at birth.

Harrold attempted to climb the corporate ladder once when he was thirty-five years old but was quickly shoved back down by a trust fund baby and decided it may be better to simply stay in his own lane.

He went on with no incident until he met his first wife Juliette Sombra at the age of forty-one. The two were divorced by the time Harrold turned forty-two due to the fact that Juliette was physically and emotionally abusive, often hitting and belittling him.

Harrold met his second and current wife at the age of sixty-four.

His entire life is completely uneventful in any extremely impactful way.

Now that we are completely filled in with the most important points of his life we may now journey into his mind, into his dreams.

Harrold stands there, his body now young and youthful, somehow returned to the age of twenty. He stands there confused as to what was happening. He attempts to speak but quickly realizes that he is unable to speak or utter any sound whatsoever.

"Can you see anything?" He hears a man's voice ask. Harrold stood shocked to hear a voice from the skies then looked around to see what was around him. He sees that his childhood home had suddenly appeared right before him. It is a bright ideal day but Harrold feels no heat from the sun or any breeze. Harrold looks around him frantically attempting to see anything but he is in a blank void except for the front yard of his childhood home and the house itself.

"Go through the door honey." A voice says seemingly coming from the skies just as the man's voice had earlier.

"I know that voice." Harrold thought to himself not able to remember the name of the person who spoke from the heavens. Harrold walks into his childhood home. As soon as he enters the home the entirety of the world around him changes morphing into a massive nightmarish maze made of soup cans. Each wall stretched up to eighty feet tall and thirty feet thick.

"Eat your… drink your… yes honey." The voice from the sky says in a voice that is actually many voices jumbled together in a medley of strange broken voices.

"I have to get out of this place." Harrold thought as he began to walk through this planet sized maze. His movements felt strange and unnatural as if he couldn't control his own movements. He lurched forward then stayed on a constant course stumbling forward at a constant rate. He somehow knew every inch of this hellish maze even though he had never seen it he had never even imagined a place such as this. Harrold suddenly stopped in his tracks. Suddenly a bright red door slowly appeared looking like a mirage. He was unable to move anything other than his hands which he used to slowly open the door. What was in the door? Nothing, a void of pure unchanging darkness. Harrold walked through the door. As soon as he walked through the barrier of the door it disappeared and the massive maze was dissolved into nothing. Suddenly the room that he stood in lit up to reveal it was a museum. The void was all around him but there were now small lights shining on hundreds of thousands of museum exhibits. The exhibits were all spread out about twenty-five feet from each other with a small light somehow stuck in the air. In-between the exhibits and their dim lights with a range of ten feet was nothing but the inky black void. Harrold walks to the first of the exhibits and sees his childhood home. Harrold walks to the next exhibit and sees his dog Bonnie that had died only two years ago running to grab a stick that was thrown for her; the scene was replayed once, then again and again. Harrold suddenly understood.

"Memories." Harrold thought as he was dragged all the way to the very last memory exhibit by an unseen force. He was almost instantaneously dragged to the exhibit. He looks at it and sees a dinner table. Chicken, mashed potatoes, corn, sweet peas and wine.

"Why am I so hungry?" He wondered to himself.

"Eat your… drink your…" said the voice that had told him to enter the door mere seconds before. Or was it minutes or even hours since that moment?

"Who are you?" He thought as he stepped into the exhibit. Suddenly the floor and everything in the exhibit other than one wine glass dissolved into hundreds of dried and dead leaves. Harrold and the wine glass fell for what felt like days before he was suddenly stopped by what felt like a huge gust of wind and gently placed onto the ground. Harrold looks around and sees that he is now in an underground cave that looks up directly to the moon above him. Suddenly the wine glass landed. The glass shattered but was instantly reformed but it was not the same as it had been.

The wine glass was now an eight foot tall hollow glass statue of a large muscular man; its head was now the rim of a wine glass connected to the perfectly chiseled neck. The statue was clear and perfectly see through and filled to the middle half of its brim with dark red blood like wine. Harrold walked to the statue and looked at it. It reminded him of the statue called the thinker because of how expertly chiseled it was.

"How could something made of glass be so perfectly crafted?" Harrold thought as he put his hand onto the arms of the statue. As soon as Harrold touches the statue he is thrown up out of the deep cavern, through the floor of a house and onto the ground. Harrold looks around himself terrified by what had just occurred.

"His heart rate… too high… lost." Says the voice of a young man from outside of Harrold's field of view. Harrold stands there. Then he realizes what is going on.

"I'm in a dream." Harrold said finally able to speak. Harrold looks at the home he's in, finally realizing it is the home he currently lives in. He looks towards the front door of his home. Suddenly the glass man exploded through the door and whipped its eyeless, mouthless, pure glass head towards him obviously on a warpath. As soon as the creature looked towards him he was his proper age seventy-two. Harrold was now slower and weaker.

"Drink your wine honey, it's good for you." A voice said from the glass creature.

"June?" Harrold asked, finally remembering the voice of his current wife. The glass man leaped on him and held him to the ground.

"You did this to me June?" Harrold asked in disbelief as he remembered. Suddenly the glass man was gone and Harrold laid on the floor of the exhibit he had entered years ago. He stood and looked at the scene.

Harrold sits at the table, food and wine sat in front of him.

"Eat your food, drink your wine." She had said. She was June Harrold's wife who was now forty years old.

"Yes honey." The only answer Harrold ever gave. Harrold realized now that he was meant to die. The wine had been poisoned. Suddenly the glass man was by Harrold's side hand on his shoulder. The glass man leaned his head down allowing Harrold to drink one last time as the inky black nothing took over.

Harrold's wife stood by his bed crying as his heart stopped beating and he stopped being. But was this all a part of the dream or was it reality? The aspect of dreaming and what a dream truly is is still a debated topic even after this brilliant look into the dreams of another. So next time you dream, remember to take notes and to fear lurking memories.

A dream is defined as a series of thoughts, images, and sensations occurring in a person's mind during sleep.