God and Man

“There are more things than god and man. Let it be that there is only one. This I pray.”

Before our minds were connected, she made us say this prayer. It was meant to protect us from the sapphire demon that would plague our dreams at night. She said that if we recited this prayer, the demon would not appear. This was a lie. I tossed and turned each night, the heart rate monitor blaring, catching the attention of the nurses. Elizabeth, Jackson, Tilda, and I shared this nightmare.

The four of us, only four years old, strangely orphaned, were strangely connected. Luckily Ms. Main took us into her home… a spiritual scientist she believed if she could just get us past the demons of our dreams, we could do amazing things.

“Just think of the possibilities of four people who share a dream,” she would wonder out loud.

“If you four can share a dream, you can share a hope, you can change the world,” she told us as we got older. She would strap us down and place electrodes upon our heads and with a flick of a switch, we were in. The only bad thing was, when we arose from our slumber we all collectively spoke of this creature with sapphire-like skin.

The demon always only said one thing. The exact opposite of what she had us pray exactly...

“There is only God and man. This is fact.”

It never made sense to me why that was so frightening. But Ms. Main knew exactly what to say instead. When the demon would show, we would stand round and recite her words, then we would wake up.

When we arose, we would see her standing at the head of our beds with a small smile.

“If you looked closely at mother,” Elizabeth would say in absence of Ms. Main, “you can see a tinge of blue under her skin, no?”

“Stop talking nonsense,” Jackson would mutter under his breath.

But we all knew Elizabeth was right. I saw it too…

Another night, another flip of the switch to dream land, another recitation of her prayer as a chant, another evening, defeating the demon, or so we thought.

One night, when we all went to sleep, we dreamed an unusually peaceful dream and the demon was not there. A feeling of loss could be felt between all of us. We had gotten so used to this sapphire being disturbing us that it felt disturbing that it was not there. Something was wrong.

We got in a circle in the field we often visited in our dreams and Tilda decided to pretend to be our demon to keep us company that night.

“There is only God and man. This is fact,” she said as sternly as possible to impersonate our demon.

And as usual we repeated, “There are more things than god and man. Let it be that there is only one!”

But this time, we didn’t wake up. For there was no demon at all, making our recitation useless.

“Wait, what if that thing had a point?” my inquiry got the attention of the rest. “What if there is only God and man, which means that there was no demon to begin with?”

“What are you saying…” Elizabeth, the one who usually has her head on her shoulders, looked as though a ghost took over her.

“What I’m saying is...what if the demon we think we saw was...”

We woke up…but looking at our bodies lay limp in our beds.

The power of four minds dreaming together… I thought.

“Can really create an awesome reality,” Ms Main said in response.

Ms. Main, who was at the bedsides of our bodies, turned her head to look at our essence across the room.

“Why are we out of our bodies?! Why can’t we go back?!” Tilda shouted.

“What a marvelous thing you four have become. There are more things than God and man. Welcome home my children,” she spoke in a comfortable tone.

A faint glimmer of sapphire twinkled in her eyes.