The Waiting Dreamer

Blue Neustifter

At least once a week, she had the same dream. The location always changed. Sometimes she was in a featureless black void or a flat grassy field. Once, it was underwater, a world smeared in blues and greens, dappled with beams of light breaking through the surface far above. There were only two constants to the dreams: her and him.

No matter where she was, no matter how lush or barren the landscape, he was there. He never looked quite the same: some nights his hair was shaved short, others it hung to his neck; some nights his face was dusted with beard stubble, others it looked soft and freshly shaven; some nights his eyes glittered at a joke she didn’t understand, and on others his expression was heavy. Every time, he seemed imperceptibly out of focus, like someone had erased his outline, smudged his edges. But he was always there, and she always found herself drawn to him, drowned in his gaze, in eyes that felt strangely like home.

There was never much to the dream, no grand arching plot. She was there. He was there. And the ache was there, a deep and painful longing. It was so strong that it became the dream’s third character, a parasite slowly eating her from the inside out. Sometimes she felt she could hear the hunger of it, a deep bass note that thrummed so hard it sent electricity through her, made her teeth vibrate and throb. It was just her and him and the yearning. And she would slowly pull closer to him—not walking, not running, not flying, but just drifting. They were pulled together by a magnetic force, two bodies held by gravity. Collision imminent.  

Whenever she got close, he would turn to look at her, and she would be jolted by a sense of painful familiarity, that this man she didn’t quite recognize was someone she’d known all her life. He would look at her, and he would smile, and he would hold out a hand. “I’ve been waiting,” he would say. And then she would wake.

It was a mundane dream, notable only in its repetition. It had first arrived soon after her thirtieth birthday, a simple one-off that came again a month later, then again, and again, and again, with increasing frequency, her gnawing curiosity sparking more dreams which only increased her need for answers.

Her doctor listened without interest and then explained (patronizingly) that repetitive dreaming is usually related to stress. With a fatherly pat on the shoulder, he told her to take a holiday off work, and left it at that. She left his office with no answers, just a new entry on her to-do list: find a new doctor.

Her therapist suggested that the man in the dream was symbolic, a representation of some goal or need that was going unfulfilled in her life. They spent the hour discussing her career (boring but fine and secure), her social life (good friends but a lingering sense of loneliness she couldn’t define), her love life (happily single, not looking), and her finances (not great but livable). She left her therapist’s office with ideas on some life improvements to work on, but the dreams kept coming and she was no closer to their meanings.

Her best friend excitedly suggested that this was, quote, “One of those ‘We’ll find each other in every life’ soulmate things! Like, maybe you knew him in a past life! Like Sailor Moon!” She laughed and listened as her friend wistfully detailed how the dreams must be visions of him across all their different timelines, all their different romances. She drew cards for the tarot reading her friend insisted on performing to help uncover more information about this long-lost love, but in the end she left her friend’s house with no new answers, just a plate of scones and a dizzying amount of information about what the Eight of Swords reversed could mean.

In the end, she knew that the only people who could provide any answers were herself and him. Whether this was connection or symbolism or even—she begrudgingly admitted—stress hallucination, it was up to the two of them to uncover the meaning behind it. 

That evening, it came again. She stood atop a mighty stone dam that stretched into infinity across the dreamscape. On one side of the dam, an ocean’s worth of water glistened in the sunlight. The air was still, and so too the water, a flat blue-green pane of glass that stretched to the horizon.

On the other side was a desert. She could see the worn path of a river that was now barren, could trace its curves with her eyes, could see the dry ground that once teemed with life but now only held a few hearty clumps of scrub grass.

It was uncomfortably hot. She peered over the edge of the dam, at the water’s smooth, cool surface just over an arm’s length away, at the reflection of the girl staring back at her. This time, she felt the longing burst in her chest even before she saw him, the sharp ache like a runner’s stitch in her heart. And then he was there—or, at least, his reflection was, next to hers, smiling softly. She could see his lips form the same phrase as always—“I’ve been waiting”—but there was no sound. 

This time there was no magnetic pull, no force drawing them together other than the hurt of being apart. For once, it felt like she was being given a choice: she could turn away, if she wanted, leave him there, a silent image and nothing more. She could move on.

Without hesitation, she threw herself over the dam’s edge, reaching out toward his reflection. As she fell into the water, her own image overlapped his, and when she hit the water, she felt no pain, only the reverberations of a deafening crack as the dam split open. The water swept her away as it rushed to fill the empty space on the other side, but she felt calm in the midst of the chaos. Trees and grass and life sprang into being as the water filled the riverbed. As she was swept along, she saw the world burst into color and brightness, and while she couldn’t see him, couldn’t see anyone, she—for the first time in many years—did not feel alone.

When she woke, her pillowcase and cheeks were wet with tears. She felt confused, dizzy, and inexplicably ecstatic. After a moment of breathing, she stood and walked carefully to her washroom, using a towel there to wipe her face. Once her face was dry, she turned and looked in the mirror, at herself. And she felt a shock of recognition, a bolt of the same longing that haunted her dreams.

It hit all at once, why he had seemed so familiar. Why they were always drawn together, why his eyes—the same eyes staring back from the mirror—felt so much like home.

Quietly, slowly, he dropped the towel and brought his hand up to the mirror. His reflection did the same, and as their fingers touched, he saw a soft, nervous, loving smile cross his lips. 

“I’ve been waiting,” he said quietly, and his reflection mouthed the words with him. Now that he acknowledged it, it was easy to feel the shape of that longing, the patience with which it had slept inside him. All these years, he had been holding both the question and the answer inside him. As he stood there, fingertip-to-fingertip with himself, he knew he could be angry or upset at how long it had taken, how much time his heart had needed to endure. But instead, he smiled wider, glad he had found his way at all.

If there was anyone worth waiting for, he thought, it was himself.