It's not possible to jump out of a dream, but Ben is trying. His arms and legs whirl around, restrained by his bedding. He is a scared blanket octopus thrashing around. His breath comes to him only with effort, making a loud suck sound as air hits his lungs for the first time since waking. Soon, the room is filled with the sound of his panting. Everything feels hot and terrifying and too small. "Goddammit!" he yells as he finally gets to his feet, the sheet still gripping one ankle possessively. He kicks it off angrily. He glares at the mess of bedding then at the clock. The red 2:28 glares back.
He'd gotten, what two hours of sleep? It felt like he'd been stuck in that nightmare for an eternity. He'd been hurting that man, choking the life out of him with just his will, and he'd liked it. What kind of fucked up person has dreams like that? He'd heard of nightmares about falling. What he wouldn't give for a falling dream. No, he has to have blood and death, chaos and violence. And why do they always seem to happen in space? He doesn't watch sci-fi movies, has only seen the first two series of Star Trek! He kicks the pile of mashed up sheet and blanket with one socked foot. His other sock seems to have been lost to the great night battle.
Snoke, the oversized twisted demon who commands his dream self, was telling him that he was being sent to a new place, a ship where he was to oversee the construction of the greatest weapon ever built. Ben, as the space warlord Kylo Ren, had bowed his head obediently to his master, who looked like Hugh Hefner if he was in the Thriller music video, but then lost his goddamn mind when the transmission had cut. Ben doesn't even know why Kylo was angry, but by extension, he'd been as well. He'd choked someone, it was getting harder to remember but he thinks maybe it was one of the weird brainwashed soldiers that surround him because of his involvement in the First Order. Because Kylo can use the force, a sort of mishmash of telepathy and telekinesis and psychic abilities all rolled into one, he could choke the man with his mind and then feel the physical sensation from both sides. It was almost like choking himself, because he was getting that feedback, hearing the brain crying out for air, even as he was also feeling the surge of triumph and power to be able to end someone's life without consequence, without remorse.
Ben decides to go for a walk.
It's a stupid idea, because there's feet of fucking snow on the ground, but he bundles up, big snow boots and padded water-resistant orange coat. He completes the utilitarian but silly ensemble with his red and white Red Sox beanie.
The whiteness of the snow creates a sort of ground glow so that he isn't just wandering around in pitch blackness, which would creep him the hell out with the current place his mind is at. Instead, the serene quiet of winter creates an artificial atmosphere of vast peace. If the Buddha was a landscape, he'd be a wintry field in New England.
He mars the smooth terrain with his crunching steps and ruins the peaceful atmosphere by looking at his cellphone. Even with the brightness turned down, it cheapens the road, like Walmart lighting. Facebook: political commentary spoken in only absolutes (and if you disagree with me, you're a fucking idiot), pet pictures (the modern equivalent of forcing people to look at how cute your kids are), pictures of teenagers doing shit that Ben hasn't even done in his 30s (how kickass can black belts be if a thirteen year old has one?), and vague emotional cries for help ("I guess I'm doomed to be alone forever"). Still, the constantly updating stream is addictive, studies have proven that, always encouraging its users to long for perpetual affirmation. So, even though he puts his phone away after becoming annoyed with the lack of content, it's back out again only minutes later.
Every night, well, most nights, Ben sits down for 30 minutes of meditation, usually following a brief yoga routine. He's never had a shrink that didn't recommend meditation, though they think that it should ease his mind enough to maybe stop the nightmares. They're wrong, of course, but meditation is so pivotal to his well-being, so interlaced with his sense of self, that he can't imagine his life without those moments, even if they have never been able to stop Kylo Ren or Snoke or Han Solo from ruling the unconscious near-third of his life.
Technically, it's not the nightmares that keep him in therapy, but the "daddy issues." Everyone else seems to have them too, but his subconscious can't deal with it like others do. He doesn't have dreams that a wild bear that's actually his dad rips into his heart with long adamantium claws or anything. No, instead he dreams about killing people in space. How does that relate to his daddy issues? Who the fuck knows? Certainly not the therapists his insurance company throws wads of cash to.
Ben's heard the phrase "correlation, not causation," and is by this point pretty damn sure that it applies. It would be easier if the daddy issues caused his nightmares. Then, working through his issues would fix the dreams. He's pretty much come out the other side, he feels, with how he functions after his fucked up childhood. He's examined the damages with a psychological magnifying glass, released the demon of taboo and secrecy by sharing it with others, and pretty much forgiven his parents, even if the absolution only goes one way. Does what he went through still mess with his interpersonal dynamics? Yeah, of course. Does he still indulge in wishful thinking, wasting precious energy to thinking about what could have been? A little, but it's rare, usually around the holidays when he sees happy families epitomize what he didn't have. But he's nowhere near as bad as he used to be. He's not even as bad as he was only a few years ago when he was still wielding humor like a weapon, joking about his abuse, preemptively wounding himself so that no one else could. He met tons of people with shitty upbringings of their own, so they'd throw their own ill-timed and inappropriate humor into the works. Just two damaged human beings trying to be whole.
The shrinks have helped. If they didn't, he wouldn't keep seeing them. They ask him if he wants to hurt people in real life, like he does in his dreams. Honestly, sometimes he does, but Ben thinks most people do. Someone cuts you off in traffic, you think about smashing into the back of their car, that sort of thing. He's never, like, covered his house in plastic and then invited someone over for stabby time or anything. It's only when he's asleep that he gets bloody thoughts. Most of the time he's hurting others - slashing into someone with a sword (a space laser sword of course - because he's a fucking nerd even in his dreams), choking someone, commanding a ship to destroy other ships, all kinds of things. Other times, he's getting hurt. He has a recurring group of nightmares about his training with Snoke, the physical and mental abuses that he endured to become a master of the force. There's also when his attacks on others don't go unpunished, when he's hit hard by a fist or shot with a laser. Two of his shrinks were way more interested in the dreams where he gets hurt, probably seeing it as a self-harm style cry for help or something. And, he can't even say to them that he doesn't get some kind of enjoyment out of the feeling, at least while he's in the dream. There was one where he'd had broken ribs and the pain was, rather than debilitating, empowering. He'd deliberately pressed on it, pounded on it with his fist, and felt a surge of power fueled by hate and pain, betrayal and rage. The details were fuzzy, like dreams tended to be, but he remembered acutely how good it had felt, how he'd fed off the agony and felt almost reborn from it.
His foot destroys a hidden branch, triggering a particularly loud snap. It resounds across the snow. The suburbs, where he rents the top floor of a house, are quiet tonight as always. It's the kind of street that perpetually contains children on bicycles, as though they come with the properties. The neighbors get to mowing their lawns when they feel like it which ends up somewhere between meticulous golf course and hedge maze. They're good people, quick to strike up conversation with him, but not overly nosy about why a man his age doesn't have a wife. Perhaps that's another reason why the rage only comes at night. His daytime hours are pretty damn good. He likes his job delivering insulated glass units to commercial distributors; it allows him a lot of time to listen to music or audiobooks. After he gets off, he heads to the gym then crashed out with TV or stays up late painting. On the weekends, he tends to hang out with a friend or two, maybe take in a game or eat fried food, and head to the bar in the evening to scrounge up a bedmate.
He wants to try to sleep again tonight, just because it's been so many too short nights in a row, and he might try, but the imagery of tonight's dreams haunts him even out here where the world seems so beautiful. He wishes he could take some of this and bring it into his brain, maybe pretty up that fucked up violent space world from which he can't seem to escape.
"Hey Dumbo!" calls Gwen, the CEO of Phasma Windows. She comes out of the warehouse rolling a rack behind her. Her short bobbed blonde hair is pulled into a chaotic ponytail. Her work uniform consists of a white short sleeved shirt under pea-green coveralls. The coveralls are always pristine, to the point where Ben wonders why she doesn't just wear street clothes. Considering that Ben has never seen her outside of this environment, those could actually be her regular clothes.
"Hey Lesbo," he shouts back to her as he jumps down from the truck. The snow has been shoveled from the asphalt so he doesn't fall on his ass, which is nice.
She eyes his truck. "Goddamn, am I your only customer this winter?"
The haul is pretty sparse. In the summer, when everyone is doing construction work, he has trouble finding room for everything. But, jobs dry up when the snow falls. Luckily Ben doesn't have to worry too much about that since he doesn't run the company. They're small enough that any orders that they do get, Ben will be the one that delivers them. "You're the mouthiest."
She smiles at him, face cuter than it should be when she does. They set to work transferring the units onto the rack. There's only three for her today, but he doesn't rib her back about the lack of business since that actually is hurting her finances.
"Have you thought about my offer of Thanksgiving dinner?" she asks.
"Didn't I say no?" He had been perfectly clear about being busy this Thanksgiving, having already been asked by two sets of friends to dinner, but it's nice that she's pushing the issue; it makes him feel wanted. Not that she would ever invite him if she didn't actually want him there, but the persistence is flattering.
She pushes one of the ponytail's stray strands behind an ear. It'll drop back down in less than a minute. It doesn't appear that she gives much thought to her appearance. He's never seen her wearing makeup. She fits in with that "bull dyke" stereotype. Not that being girly was really ever an option since she's over six feet tall. "You did. But, did you change your mind?"
"Pretty eager to have me over, huh?" he asks. Then, flirtatiously, he leans in a bit towards her and says, voice low, "I didn't think I was your type, Gwen."
She laughs and punches his shoulder, probably a little harder than necessary, but that's kind of her style. "If I did swing that way, you think you'd be the first one on my list?"
He rubs his arm dramatically. "Well, I'd like to think top three, at least."
One of her employees comes out needing her help with something. She assures the other woman that she's coming right in with the delivery. Then, with an almost shy tilt of her head, she says, "Seriously though, you should come to dinner. My fiestas are epic. I'll have a bird the size of a Buick and all the shots you can handle."
"Thanks," he says, and he means it. "I'll let you know if my current plans change."
It could be more awkward, since she's a client, but it's been easy between them over the couple of years that he's been dropping off units for her. There's a lot of personality there. She can be, misogynist though it is to think, a ball-buster. He's seen her interacting with her employees in frank and demanding ways. Not everyone can handle that kind of forthcoming honesty, complete lack of sugar-coating, from a boss. She'd warmed to Ben immediately. who
likes to think that he takes people as they are, won't even judge a rice paper-white woman who throws out the word fiesta to describe a Thanksgiving dinner party.
"See ya!" she says, not even bothering to look back over her shoulder at him as she walks the cart back into her factory. It's the second most southern stop that he's got and if she didn't order with as much regularity as she does, Empire Glass probably wouldn't go so far out as the last one on his South run. Gwen's probably his favorite client, definitely the best he'll meet up with today, but there are still more on his route that he might shoot the shit with a little bit as well.
Now if only he'd gotten some fucking sleep, his day would be just about perfect.