I think I am completely mad to post this rubbish. But I swear its a compulsion, I wouldn't if I had a choice. Oh. I really do dream like this.
Please read at least until the end of chapter 3 before writing me off. I'm still getting my sea legs here. Also comment :) How am I supposed to know how to get better if you don't?
Dreamer
Episode 1
I've always had very vivid dreams. For as long as I can remember I've had some measure of control and logical thought in my dreams. As a result dreaming has always been an adventure for me and I have experienced many amazing things in this way. But in my twenty-one years of life I have never had a dream so marvelous as the dream I had the night I met the Doctor.
I don't recall what led up to the point in which I became lucid. I was dreaming and then things began to fade into view. First I saw the weathered brick of the inner city row houses lining both sides of the street where I was standing. Then I became aware of the solid pavement beneath my glossy black flat soled shoes. Then there came a gentle breeze pulling against the knee-length skirt of my filmy sun dress and whispering against the skin of my bare arms and legs. Still it was all very vague and typically dreamlike until all at once everything came sharply into focus as my eyes fell on the tall, deep blue box standing just a few long strides distant from me near the wall of one of the buildings.
Everything else ceased to exist as far as I was concerned and I fairly flew across the ground to close the gap between me and this beautiful object. I had come to know and love this box through the television show and the fan fiction and the immense amount of hours spent ransacking the internet for every bit of information about the wonderful and fantastical Doctor Who. Part of me is acutely aware that I am dreaming, but at the moment all logic and lucidity is forgotten as the Tardis seized every bit of my attention.
I am drawn irresistibly and I let my fingers brush the rough, ancient surface. Then I spread my fingers, pressing my palm to the wood and close my eyes.
It felt safe. All the feelings of joy and relief, like those that come when in the heat of danger the cloister bell rings out all harsh and beautiful as it announces the arrival of salvation itself, rushes through me at the contact. It feels so inexpressibly right.
I feel as though I have found something utterly precious that until this moment I had not consciously known I had lost. But my heart had known and I stood immobilized between wanting to leap and scream or sob. My fingers are moving again, wandering over the sturdy structure until they find the door. They seem to be moving of their own volition as I traced the keyhole with my finger, before touching the delicate metal handle.
"It's locked and you don't have a key," whispers logic brain. But I am way beyond being touched by logic at this point. I was moving absently, my body just doing its own thing while my mind struggled to cope with all the varying emotions flooding it.
I gave the door a gentle push and a quiet click resounds as the door swings inward with a familiar squeak. I suppose I should have been surprised, but this is a dream right? Sometimes illogical and wonderful things just happen in dreams. Stepping into the interior, the control room of the Tardis itself, a wash of new emotions streamed through me. I had come home after a long, weary journey or so my feelings seemed to think. And I was welcomed if not with a physical hug then in a rush of feeling that seemed to come from an external source. From the Tardis? But that is not possible is it?
Can things be crystal clear and hopelessly muddled at once?
Now I am just standing here. A part of me hears the door click shut behind me and feels the constant quiet thrum from the machinery surrounding the heart that is the Tardis. But I can do little more than look and not even truly see for all is emotion. Unspeakable, indescribable emotions of joy so sharp it is almost sorrow, of knowing it is a dream and yet nothing ever seemed so real and right.
"I should be doing something. Questioning," I think. But I've had vivid dreams before. The same in vividness though hardly in intensity and I have learned to just go with the flow and right now I am just feeling all the assault of feeling with very little conscious thought.
And then, as if the universe is conspiring to turn me into a blubbering lunatic from sheer joy, the Doctor himself comes up from the mysterious inner rooms and stops in front of me with such a look of shock that, had I any semblance of mind left to think, I would have laughed.
I think that anyone who has watched the show would have known him because I did. In retrospect I don't know how because he was none of the reincarnations that I remember from the show. But as I stood there I knew him with never any question, because I could see them all at once though the three most recent were the most prominent. He was all of them and none of them in such a bewildering kaleidoscope of images that if my logical brain had been working I think it would have been obliterated by the impossible truth of it.
I saw in him madness, and brilliance, laughter and intensity, love and the oncoming storm. I saw David Tennant one moment, Christopher Eccleston, Matt Smith and others and yet his face remained the same. Am I making any sense at all? I suppose not. But it is like when you are watching the show and it's the most recent doctor but all of a sudden you can sense a previous doctor through something that is said or done or felt. I wonder if anyone besides myself will ever understand this utter madness.
"What?!" He exclaims, and it was David Tennant. "How did you get in here?"
I opened my mouth, but nothing was coming out.
He raised his sonic screwdriver and proceeded to scan me up and down and my mind seized upon the whirring. It was so familiar and wonderful and that safe feeling possessed me. My eyes were following him as he circled me, his movements scattered and full of frantic purpose as he took in me and the readings of his sonic and all the world at once and he was Matt Smith.
"Well you're human at any rate," he continued, coming to a pause in front of me, towering head and shoulders over me with all his gangly beauty as he peered into my eyes as if to find the answers carved there. "But how did you get in?"
"The door just opened." O look, my voice is working!
"But it was locked!" he exclaimed, and he was off again sonicing the door, dancing to the console fiddling with something. And then he was back, those impossibly intense eyes boring into mine and I glimpsed the storm in his soul.
I suppose he was trying to intimidate me into confessing to whatever I had done, but instead I began to smile with utter abandon.
"This is a lovely dream! I can hardly believe how real it seems!" its logic brain again, but I'm still far too enamored with what is going on to pay much attention.
He looks confused, the storm winks out and he looks a little lost.
"Why are you looking at me like that?" he demands, but his tone is more curious than angry now.
"You're the Doctor," I state matter-of-factly. As if my brain were not on the brink of exploding everywhere.
He holds himself a little straighter with that self-assured look that we all know is not really egotistical because he truly is all that and some. "Yes I am," he says cautiously.
"Hi, I'm Lillian," I say, holding out my hand.
He takes it though I'm not sure if he knows why. And I'm not sure how or why I'm not exploding or, more importantly, why I know that I'm supposed to be here and that he will accept it.
"Hold on," he interrupts the moment as he remembers that I had just walked into the impenetrable Tardis.
I break away. There goes my body doing its own thing again.
"I don't know how it opened it just did," I said. My tone said it should be obvious to him that I belonged here. But I don't even know why it should be obvious, all I know is that it is wonderful.
"But if you didn't break in, which is nearly impossible by the way, and you don't have a key…" he processed. And because he is a wise old Time Lord, he concludes that such an obvious lie must be the truth. "Then…" and he is looking at the console or, more specifically, at the Tardis. "Do we trust her?"
He is not talking to me.
And then "Why do we trust her?" He doesn't get a complete answer I assume, because although he no longer exudes danger in that oncoming storm way, he still looks terribly confused and I imagine that there is a fierce struggle in him because it is not often that he does not know something.
He is looking at me and though I don't know how, I sense his feelings and thoughts. He sees me as a mystery, that much is clear, one of those things that the Doctor will get to the bottom of eventually though for now he will seem to accept it. But there is something more and for an instant I see me through his eyes, as if for a moment I've switched to his head instead of mine.
Confusing isn't it?
"Who is this human child who has stolen into my Tardis like a ghost?" He takes me in with those impossible eyes. He takes in my petite frame, my golden hair and my dancing blue eyes. My entire body seems to gush joy and child like wonder. "Though not a child," his thoughts murmur. "Who is she really?" There is a stirring in his heart, a whisper of something forgotten.
I am myself again. Is that how he really sees me? I was beautiful, almost fairy like through his eyes. My thoughts are still. I am fully lucid for the first time since touching the Tardis. I am looking up at him, my breath coming slow and heavy, keeping time with his as he stares into my eyes. I return his gaze with my own smiling but intense look.
"Why do I trust you?" he whispers, but he doesn't seem to really need an answer.
I feel as if his eyes are devouring me even as my own try to absorb him with their own heat. His breath is hot on my face and my heart leaps around making it very difficult to breath.
There is a loud noise and I jerk into wakefulness, my hand slapping for the alarm on my bedside table. As I flop back on the pillows with I sigh I think.
"What a wonderful dream."
