PARANORMAL FICTION
Dream a Little Dream of Me
And I’ll dream a little, too
Sunlight filtered through the window, dancing its weak warmth across his cheek. Impatiently, he tried to brush it away, as if it was an annoying insect skittering over his skin.
Damn! Why? Daylight was making its earliest appearance — there was at least an hour before he had to hit the shower and then scramble for the bus. Facing the reality of another day was bad enough without having his time with her cut short.
Arun pulled the covers over his head but it was too late, the best he could conjure up was a wispy outline of golden hair framing a petite face, slim arms reaching out as if imploring him to stay, before that image also drifted away to the place in his mind where dreams are stored for another day, awaiting the magic that resurrects them in the darkest hours of the night. That was the magical time when Leilah came out to play. It was the time when Arun felt he had finally found his place, his destiny, his life’s purpose.
When he first discovered her in his dream, she was resting beside a softly singing stream; a water lullaby tippling over shimmering stones beneath the moonlight. The sky was so dark it was the colour of pitch, the moon so aglow it cast an eerie light, mimicking the earliest hours of dawn. He felt as if he had morphed from sleep into a scene so unimaginably magical it caught his breath in his throat and cast a spell over his senses.
Looking up from whatever had held her attention on the mossy rocks, Leilah sighed, smiled an “I knew it,” smile and reached out her hand.
He had stumbled forward, clasped her long, cool fingers in his sun-browned fist and helped her from the ground.
“What did you know?” he whispered, afraid to use his vocal cords for fear of frightening her away.
“That you would find me here.”
Arun gazed into the face of an angel and noted her pale complexion; so pale he wondered if she had ever seen the light of day and then reasoned, perhaps not because this was, after all, a dream and dreams typically took place at night. He found amusement in his attempt to make logic out of an illogical situation.
“You are amused,” she noted, an unspoken question lingering in her eyes.
“I’m laughing at myself trying to make sense of this.” His arm waved to encompass all he could see. “How, though, can one find normalcy in a dream?”
“You think this is a dream?” she murmured, reaching up to stroke Arun’s cheek, in the very place sunlight danced in subsequent mornings, always wrenching him back to the realities of a new day.
“Of course, it’s a dream,” he felt the roughness of his fingers brush his face as his hand covered hers.
With her free hand, the girl drew his lips down to hers.
“Your name?” he muttered as if it mattered that he was about to kiss a total stranger.
She giggled, “Leilah,” then gently placed her lips on his.
And so it was nightly. Arun could hardly wait to continue his love tryst in the clearing bathed in moonlight, beside the whispering stream.
Sometimes they ate a picnic prepared, Leilah said, by her grandmother, although Arun never saw anybody else in his dream sequence. On those occasions, they sat with bare toes brushing the lullaby stream, swinging their legs gently in contentment.
Other times, they ventured away from the clearing, holding the other’s hand as they pushed through dark foliage to find privacy. Celina giggled as she confided in Arun that her grandmother sometimes visited the clearing because it had once been the matriarch’s place to sit and ponder life’s events.
“Fortunately for us, she doesn’t come here very often these days. Her legs are too wobbly and she is growing afraid of the dark,” instructed Leilah. “I don’t like the idea of becoming a lonely old crone,” she added. “But I like less the idea of her finding us in an uncompromising act.” Her cheeks glowed softly from their forest activities and Arun spun her around for a final embrace before involuntarily leaving her to greet the growing dawn in his bedroom.
And so it continued for several months. Arun would fall asleep in his bedroom and wake to find himself in Leilah’s clearing. He never tired of her company and the delights they shared, both from a picnic basket and also their entwined bodies.
Around the fourth month of nightly visits, the young man began to notice a lethargy that was unusual for him. At first, he attributed it to disturbed sleep patterns and shrugged it off but it wasn’t long before he began feeling unwell all of the time.
When he was at his worst, Arun arrived at the clearing one night, staggered, and fell to the ground at his lover’s shapely feet.
Leilah bent to administer care but soon realised that Arun was unresponsive. Weeping softly she ran into the forest to return a few minutes later with a strange, elderly woman.
The old lady lowered her portly frame and cradled Arun’s head. Tut-tutting, she dribbled fluid from a flask, forcing it between the young man’s lips. All the while, Leilah was whimpering her concern.
“I warned you about this,” admonished the crone, waggling a bent finger in Leilah’s direction. “Did you not tell him that this was likely to happen?”
Ashamed, the young woman lowered her eyes and shook her head. “I wanted him to keep coming to the clearing.”
“Selfish!” snapped the grandmother as Arun began to stir.
When he recovered sufficiently, the old lady told Arun he could no longer visit his beloved because he would grow weaker and weaker until he finally succumbed and died.
“Your name means, Sun, in ancient languages,” instructed the old lady, “and that is where you belong, in the land of light. You are not equipped to spend so much time here.”
“But it is only a dream! It’s all in my mind!” Arun protested, which prompted an outburst of cackling and vigorous disagreement from the grandmother.
Leilah began weeping softly. “I am sorry, Arun,” she whispered, “but you cannot continue to visit. One day soon you will die, never to wake up in your room again.
And so, Arun awoke to the sound of his alarm clock, hours after the sun had danced across his bed and no matter how hard he tried to summon Leilah in the dark of night, he never made it back to the clearing, to sit with his sweet companion under the glowing moon.
Several months later, Arun had fully recovered physically but the memory of Leilah was still a persistent ache in his heart. He was wandering on his lunch break, around a popular park dotted with lunching picnickers enjoying an office hiatus.
As he meandered, a half-eaten sandwich clutched in hand, the welcoming sound of a nearby fountain caught his attention. The sound of the flowing water triggered a flash of Leilah and he imagined she was sitting waiting on the stone boundary of the fountain’s pool.
Arun shook his head to try and dislodge the image of his lost love and moved slowly towards the fountain. Blinking rapidly against the sun, he saw a girl sitting on the stone wall, her hand trailing in the water, a soft smile playing across her features.
Arun’s legs almost failed him as he staggered towards the vision he dared not believe to be real.
“Leilah,” he croaked, dropping his sandwich and falling to sit beside the lovely young woman. He resisted the urge to pinch himself, instead, he reached over to lift her chin and stare at her lovely but wan face. Her skin seemed almost translucent; her eyes lacked the lustre he was used to gazing into.
“It really is you,” he breathed.
Leilah moved into Arun’s embrace and they sat clinging to one another beside the fountain, in the blistering midday sun.
“I cannot stay,” she whimpered. “The daylight affects me far more quickly than the night affected you.”
Arun drew away from her and made to interrupt.
She raised a delicate finger and hushed him.
“Listen to me, please. Right now, I am dreaming of you in your world, but I cannot remain.”
“I don’t want you to be harmed,” he murmured, anguished that he was about to lose her for the second time.”
“Arun, you are the sun, for that you are named, and I am the moon for which I am named. We cannot be in form together for our worlds are detrimental to the other.” She reached up and kissed her lover gently.
“I can never return to you but you will hear of me again. Go and live your life, as I will live my life. Be assured, I can never forget you.”
With a gentle press of her lips, she faded before Arun’s eyes and he understood that this was how he must have left her on his many visits to her nighttime world, wherever that was.
Over the years, Arun’s memory of Leilah slowly faded until he was able to put the memory of her aside, never completely forgetting; a cherished hallucination, stored away for when he was old and had the time to dream.
The years passed and he met a lovely girl who had a small son from a previous misadventure. They married and became a happy family, living in a quaint cottage with a white picket fence.
When the boy, Cyrus, was about 14 years old, Arun and his young stepson went on a tramp into the bush to camp for a few nights. Arun chose a site to pitch their tent, right beside a lovely, slow-moving stream that somehow made him feel both heart-sick and poignant.
They enjoyed lighting a fire and cooking sausages on a little camp stove before Arun showed Cyrus how to wiggle into his sleeping bag and turn off the insect-attracting lantern.
The sound of the trickling stream soon lulled man and boy into a dreamless sleep until an ancient instinct caused Arun’s internal alarm to ring and he sat up, ears alert for any signs of danger.
He fancied he could hear soft voices floating through the night air.
Struggling to clear his head of the deep sleep he had been enjoying, Arun realised that Cyrus was no longer in the tent. The man scrambled through the tent opening, panic ripping at his insides as he searched for the boy he called his son. Looking toward the stream, he saw a very young girl sitting on a rock, her feet dangling into the water, swishing the ripples in a way that tugged at his heartstrings. Sitting near the young girl was Cyrus, deep in conversation.
Cyrus spotted Arun and called out to him, “Come on over, Arun,” he urged excitedly. “I have a new friend. Her name is Neoma!”
Arun fleetingly dealt with an old tug of frustration over Cyrus’s use of his Christian name. On many occasions, he had invited the boy to call him, Dad, to which the boy had strangely answered that it would be, “kinda weird”.
Arun walked hesitantly toward the girl and stopped in shock when he realised she was almost the spitting image of his dream love, Leilah.
“Leilah!” he spluttered, disbelievingly.
“I am Leilah’s daughter,” she giggled, a tiny tinkle that threaded its way into the music of the stream.
“Her daughter?” Arun gasped.
“Your daughter,” Neoma replied matter-of-factly. “I came to your dream to meet you, and Cyrus, of course.”
“You are our daughter?” repeated Arun in shock. “Why did she never tell me?”
Neoma smiled a gentle smile so reminiscent of her mother. “She died giving birth to me. Visiting the Sun world through dream weakened her devastatingly, childbirth did the rest. My great-grandmother raised me, but she has passed, too.”
Arun stared at his daughter in disbelief. “How did I know to dream of you? And how did Cyrus manage to be included?”
The girl threw back her head and laughed. “I am the flesh of both the sun and the moon. I can dwell wherever I wish. This is not a dream. Not the way you think, anyway.”
“Then I can see you whenever I want?” he asked, a slow happiness beginning to grow within his chest.
“You could,” she replied offhandedly. “But that would have to be what I wanted, too.”
Neoma’s comments were like a brutal slap in the face to Arun.
“What do you mean? You don’t want to see me, your father?” he asked, disbelievingly.
“Now I have seen you but I came for Cyrus. This is the beginning of us. In the daylight and the moonlight, our paths will weave together, forever. You and I may meet now and again, but I have no interest, to be honest.”
Arun’s face revealed the deep confusion he felt.
Neoma lifted her face to gently kiss Arun’s lips, then she turned her beautiful countenance to her father. “You should ask your wife, Solana, to explain. She has a truly amazing story of meeting a strong, handsome man beside a stream, through her dreams, for many months. When their time ended, she was pregnant and alone in her world of sunshine. Cyrus was the result of that union.”
Arun began to register the meaning of his daughter’s words — a meaning that gradually seeped into his befuddled mind and began to grow with an alarming sense of doom.
“What will be the result of this future union?” he asked, fear growing in his belly, swelling to his chest and his brain.
“Cyrus and I will create a new world, not one that will be experienced through “dreams” but through living reality. A world of perpetually combined twilight and dawn, where all creatures will no longer resemble those that live in the space you recognise as Earth. Our children will be the first of a species, thanks to you and your lovely wife.”
Suddenly, Cyrus reached for Neoma’s hand to guide her to his side.
As the two beautiful youngsters began to fade into something other than mortal, Cyrus tauntingly whispered, “See, Arun, I told you it would be kinda weird to call you, Dad. Kiss my mother goodbye for me.”
The stream’s flowing melody and the wildlife ceased their night cries as Cyrus’s words drifted through the still forest.
When the night sounds slowly resumed, Arun had the briefest vision of a beautiful woman reaching out with lithe arms.
The words, “I’m sorry,” floated hauntingly across her tempting lips.
