Prologue
Have you ever had the dream?
You know the one I'm talking about, the one that is so realistic that you wonder whether you are sleeping at all. It feels, tastes, even smells like reality. You are not sleeping, but wandering through a world of endless possibilities. And the best part is that you get to wake up. You can have a new adventure every night, and no matter how bad the dream is, how horrible the monsters or terrifying the heights, you needn't worry, since you would be waking up in a few hours anyway. And no matter how good the dream is, you just can't wait to wake up, for the pure satisfaction of knowing you had it.
Well, I had those all the time. And even better, I knew the perfect recipe for a life-like dream. The trick is to stay up late enough. If you stay up till one or two in the morning and wake up at six, you sink into a deep, restful sleep in which dreams go uninterrupted by passing cars or barking dogs.
My parents knew it was bad for me, and I knew it too. Eventually the lack of sleep would catch up to me. But I was having a helluva time, while it lasted. It was an addiction. A secret luxury that I hoarded, because it was so incredibly rare. None of my friends could do it. My parents never understood. Even my brother looked at me strangely. But it was worth it. All the teasing jokes, the whispered comments, the curiosity; it was worth it, because I had something nobody else could have.
Some people read books, because they want to escape life. Some people watch TV. I used to be like that, desperate to numb my waking hours because life was too bitter to look straight in the eye. I used to read, to watch TV, to find old movies that nobody else had seen, just so I could escape the confines of my restricted life. But that was before my first walking dream. When I woke up, I struggled to find some way to replicate it, to make it happen again. And by some miracle, I discovered the formula for it. It was an experience that was perfect, unique, and entirely mine.
One of the best things about my dream world was that I could decide what to dream before I went to sleep. Well, almost. Whatever I fell asleep thinking about was inevitably what I would dream about. It's a gift I've had since I was little, when I used to dream about nothing more harmful than big bird or the cookie monster.
Unfortunately, I couldn't control what happened in the dream once I got there. So while my fantasies had me floating higher than air, my nightmares would drag me all the way into the depths of hell's fiery oceans.
But there is a price to pay for everything. Like they say, there is no beauty without pain. And some of my dreams were beautiful. So beautiful that I could hardly stand thinking about them in my waking hours. In my dream world, I could walk across the velvet sky and whisper to the stars. I could stand in a tropical rainforest and see every tiny movement of every animal surrounding me. I could dig to china and never get tired. It was incredible.
Some of my dreams focused on the intricacy of nature, or the brotherly love I had for my friends and family. But some, (most, if I was being honest with myself) focused on a different kind of love. Deep, passionate, breath taking, loyal, infuriating, healthy love. And it tended to settle on one guy. One specific, perfect, and horrifyingly unreachable guy.
Specific because I knew his name, his looks, his childhood, and his personality. Perfect because he was tall, broad, muscular, and dashingly handsome. He had mid-length blond hair and irresistible brown puppy dog eyes. He was perfect because of his charm, humor, mild intelligence, and argumentative temperament. His shy crooked smile and fierce faithfulness made me swoon. He was absolutely perfect for me, someone to grow old with, someone who would never leave me. And he was fully unattainable. Unfeasible, unlovable because he did not exist. Because he was a fictional character in a 1980's cop show. Because he was Doug Penhall, undercover officer at the 21 jump street chapel.