Dream Cycles

Dream Cycles

By JeanTre16

Another routine day concluded with the ritual of sleep. With half-lidded eyes, I lay on my bed and watched my husband, Chad, quiet and already unaware of the room around him. The soft moon’s glow reflected off of his short-cropped hair — the current choice of styles he’s had in the time we’ve been married. On his face I saw the shadows of lines — lines etched there by repeated motions of smiling, worrying and occasional shedding of tears. In my near comatose state, I was pricked with a numbing question: What inner dreams drove this man that I’d spent all these years with?

Thinking about how little I knew him, I faded quickly. I closed my eyes and sunk deeper into my pillow. The stark question slipped from clarity. It was replaced by a jumble of phantom-like voices and images that flitted into my consciousness. I couldn’t discern what they were, but as sleep claimed me I was ghostly aware that one of those voices belonged to my husband.

***

“Roger, come over here,” Chad’s voice rang from beside me in its telltale energetic tone. “I’d like for you to meet my wife, Jean.”

Feeling that I was suddenly hurled into a world that I had no bearing on, my surroundings filled in all at once. The air was fresh and thick with the scent of pines. The evergreen giants I smelled lined a monolithic rockface that jutted upward into the cleanest of blue skies. I was in the mountains … somewhere vaguely familiar, but not exactly placeable.

“Hey, Chad,” a deep, resonating boom returned, jolting me from the skyline to notice that a large man in a biker outfit was approaching me. From a motorcycle-filled parking lot, he stepped up to the wooden deck where I stood and extended his hand to my husband at my side. After a hearty shaking of hands, Roger’s eyes focused on me. “Dude,” he was still directing his words toward my spouse, “you weren’t exaggerating when you said you had a beautiful wife.”

I felt my skin blush as the stranger offered his hand to me to shake.

“It’s a pleasure to finally meet you,” Roger exclaimed.

Habitually, I took his hand to shake it. “Pleased to meet you too, Roger,” I replied, still at odds with where I was and what I was doing there.

“Bill and the others are already here,” Chad informed. “I’ll go inside and let them know we can hit the road. Man, I cannot wait to take that racer out on the mountain asphalt,” he chimed. “One hundred and eighty horse power, twin cylinder engine. It’s hot.”

“Racer?” I echoed, feeling my forehead crease. Since when did Chad have a race bike? I marveled. I knew he’d been drooling over one for the past month. But he couldn’t be serious; he had to be dreaming.

In my assessment of where I was, my husband’s appearance had escaped me until that moment. I turned to face him, wanting to ask him to clarify his comment about the race bike and my mouth dropped agape. It was Chad, all right, but he was different – taller, younger, more buffed, and with a good deal more hair. To say that he was the man of my dreams wouldn’t be exactly honest; I’d never thought of Chad in any other way than how he was. No, the man that I was seeing and hearing was more the man of his own dreams than mine.

He smiled at me. “And Jean’s got her brand new sport bike over there that she’s pretty hot on herself,” Chad added, while opening the door to the lodge.

With that last comment, I nearly lost it. “What?” I shrieked, causing everyone in the vicinity to halt in their tracks. “Me, on a sport bike, complete with an adjustable 43 millimeter …” I stopped my rant, flabbergasted at how in the world I knew what kind of motorcycle I supposedly owned. I sounded like the female version of my husband, regurgitating those specs.

“You’ve got to be kidding?” I superseded my personal feelings over the mindless babble that had come out of my mouth. Quickly, I scanned the parking lot and looked for the vehicle that I was sure must be there for me to drive. There was no way that I was riding out of there on a motorcycle, even if I did seem to know every detail about it.

Both men shot me a disturbed look.

“Jean, are you all right,” Chad asked. “We’ve been planning this ride for months. You can’t change your mind now.”