He had been told that he wouldn’t dream while he Slumbered. Not just that he wouldn’t remember the dreams, but that the physical activities that normally take place in the brain during sleep would not happen at all. There would be no more dreams.
So throughout the day’s work he quietly went through the routines — checking the ship’s status, reviewing the surveying reports, performing small configuration adjustments, issuing new task directives — while only half concentrating on what he was doing. Perhaps it made him a little more careless than he normally was. For anyone but him, that might have caused problems. But he was, after all, the most qualified pilot available. He could do this stuff in his sleep.
In his sleep.
In his dreams. How could dreams be possible now? It couldn’t happen. Could it? What did it mean?
When he awoke that morning, he had paused for longer than normal. He sat at the side of his bed, his feet dangling haphazardly. He had been surprised to see the sterile grey floor beneath them. Where was the grass? Where was the dirt? He had blinked and looked around the room. It took him a few moments to understand where he was. Hadn’t he just watched the afternoon sun casting its lengthening shadows across the hills surrounding his home?
His home? No, it couldn’t have been his home. He had lived with his mother in the city. Just one more faceless family, privately mourning out the remainder of their days in a black tower filled with other faceless neighbors. A dearth of humanity lost among the surfeit of humans.
Yet he knew, without quite understanding how he knew, that the small and simple cabin nestled among the still-slender oaks and gently rolling hills was his home. It was more his home than the apartment he had shared with his mother had ever been to him. And yet he knew, looking around him at the walls he now recognized as his Slumber Chamber, that he had never been to a house in the woods. He had barely even had time to think about the woods during his busy childhood.
And so he spent the day brooding over this dream. Dare he call it a dream? But what else? A vision? No, no, it was definitely a dream. He had known too many dreams to doubt that. But he had tried, several times throughout the day, to stop thinking of it, to lose himself in his work, to push it out of his mind. Yet still it came back to him.
And even as he was wrapping up his work, fully awake and with a full day’s labor between him and his dream, his heart still yearned to return there, to return to his home. He had only seen it from a distance, from the top of the hills as he had sat lazily enjoying the afternoon. The cabin wasn’t a major element of the dream. It was just there, standing unobtrusively, almost unnoticeably at the foot of the hill. And yet of all the beauty surrounding him, the variegated pattern of trees and shadows, the bright blue sky dotted with silvery clouds, the wildflowers and grasses growing underfoot, of all that, his heart was drawn more to the cabin than anything else he had seen.
Its lack of prominence in the dream gave him a sense of stability, of comfort, of familiarity. The home was such an integral part of his dream-self’s life that it didn’t merit any attention during the dream. And that excited him. His feet were anxious to tread the path down the hill, his hands to press agains the entry plate, his ears to hear the not quite silent whoosh as the door slid open to admit him.
But that’s where it ended. He hadn’t dreamed about what was inside the cabin, and he couldn’t, with his eyes currently filled with instruments, readouts, charts, and reports, peer through those walls to see its interior. Although he found himself many times throughout the day standing at the door, about to enter, the door opened only to blankness. He had no idea what was beyond the door. He only knew that he wanted to be there, that his journey would end at that place, that he would finally be able to rest, if only he could arrive intact.
But where was it? He didn’t know. How would he get there? The way was hid from him. And yet he was certain, in a way that he couldn’t quite describe, even to himself, that he would one day stand in front of that door, and when the door opened, he would be at home, finally at home.
And so he approached his Chamber once more, his day’s work completed, to Slumber once more. To sleep.
And, perchance, to dream.