Heart of the Realm: Ansem's Dreams

"This seems to be a pattern," the boy observed. "The only answers I ever need to look up are ones that are nowhere to be found. So much for others having walked the path of life before me! It's useless," he said, slamming the book and chucking it over his shoulder. He put his face in his hands, elbows on his desk, and ruffled his own, dark hair. After a moment, dark eyes looked up, unseeing, rather peering into the realm of thought, into the realm of his dreams...

In the first dream, he was on a ship that was only powered by oarsmen. Him and his father were trying to escape from a pursuing army, for they had just escaped imprisonment for some unknown crime. The oarsmen were no match for the superior forces driving the boats behind them, however, so his father ordered that all of the crew's hammocks be made into makeshift sails. While Ansem was helping him do this, however, he noticed a door ajar in one of the hammock rooms. The door intrigued him because he could not recall ever seeing it before, and he thought, though he wasn't quite sure, that whatever room it must lead to couldn't physically exist on the ship. (He was spatially aware like that.) In fact, there was indeed a window on the same wall through which one could see the ocean. Yet the door was swung inward, bearing entrance to a room lost somewhere in the darkness. "Is it a closet?" Ansem asked himself. He walked by it several times as he collected the hammocks, but did not go in-----something about it just didn't seem natural, almost as if there was no room behind that darkness.

"Dreams are full of errors, are they not?" the youth pondered out loud. "I think," he began slowly, "that maybe, I had not completed the dream. Maybe these doors and corridors that seem to lead off into areas of lightlessness are actual dead-ends where my unconscious imagination had yet to fill-in-the-blanks."

The trouble was, in fact, that he had seen this many times in his dreams over the past year, and could not put his finger on what changed. Was he simply becoming more aware, as is natural during adolescence ------or rather beginning to loose his marbles?

"...Nah," he said, and brushed away that thought. And once again turned his reflections unto memory.

In a more recent dream, Ansem could remember very little except for that he was in a church, and wearing roller-blades. Or was it a skateboard? The dream was so foggy in his memory he couldn't quite remember now. The building was deserted, though he never saw inside the chapel; he skated though the back rooms and out into a courtyard. It was very large, but he covered ground very quickly. This was fun! He even skated down a flight of stairs; this lead him to the foot of a bell tower. Seeing an opportunity for adventure, he went inside and was confronted only with two more staircases. One lead up, and the other, down. Obviously, the former lead up to the bells. But why on earth would a bell tower need a basement? Ansem found himself much more curious about the later, and decided to commence his adventure, there. He descended the sectioned flights that made up the whole-----one-------two------three... with the light from above growing ever dimmer, until eventually the total, impenetrable blackness awaiting below, showing no promising signs of there being anything at all down there, started to give him the creeps. This darkness seemed to be "thicker" than normal darkness, as if "condensed" somehow. (It was exactly like the darkness beyond the door in his ship dream.) He continued a little further, but it wasn't long after that that he turned around and abandoned his quest.

"Aagh. It was only a dream. I should have kept going," young Ansem thought out loud, now, awake, very frustrated with himself. "It's not like anything would've really happened to me."

The memories of several other similar dreams all presented themselves to him at once. He slumped onto his desk, half hiding his face behind folded arms as he ridiculed himself, mentally, for his own lack of nerve. "To think oneself brave to the core, only to be afraid of the dark in your dreams--------in the playground of the subconscious, are we not our true selves?" He groaned, and buried his face completely into his elbows, squirming under the torment of private humiliation.

In another dream, Ansem found himself studying for an exam in conjuring nymphs. Though he excelled in Theory, his application skills were not to his satisfaction. He scribbled the runes like he knew he should, and exactly stated the specified incantations, but for some reason or another, his spells always "shorted out" to no effect. This greatly irked him, because he knew that he was doing everything correctly, and yet... It just wasn't logical. It wasn't mathematical. "It's......magical," he realized. "Maybe if I mess up on purpose," Ansem wondered, amused by the notion but harried enough by failure that he was willing to try it. "Just as an experiment," he told himself. He opened his textbook and began to chant, changing the words. "Fat, aloof Santa Clause xerox!" (Originally: Fahtalof satumkra zer'ros.) The book in his hands began to glow faintly; His spell was working!

Or, so it seemed at first; He waited, but no benign spirits appeared. He swore, and decided to call it an evening. But as he put his things away and straitened the furniture, Ansem couldn't help but feel he was being watched. A prickle ran up his spine, and he turned around to see that the window was open. Night had already fallen, it seemed. But as he drew nearer so as to close it, the feeling got worse. The sky appeared pitch black, but with each step expecting a glowing horizon to appear, and being disappointed, fear began to nag at him. Three feet from the sill, he halted. It was pretty plain that there were no city lights below, but from where he stood now, he might still be able to convince himself otherwise. Beyond this window, the darkness appeared as a solid wall. He couldn't even approach it.

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AN: Highly obscure tribute to Billy Zane, did you catch it? The magic incantation here was swiped from an episode of Batman TAS, in which Zane voices a Medieval demon. I invented the spelling. :\

Also, the first "dream" was an allusion to the legend of Icarus, since I heard there was an alternate version in which it was not wings Icarus' father invented, but the first boat sails, where Icarus simply fell overboard and drowned. The second "dream" was one that I really had, but I changed several details to make it coherent, because it wasn't. I made the third one up completely.

The title of this short is an allusion to the book called "Einstein's Dreams", but I didn't come up with that until after I wrote it.