How can they expect any sane man to live under these conditions? That was the only question left on his tired mind. He’d lost all hope. His world consisted of a small, windowless concrete room with a single bed and a round-edged side-table securely bolted to the floor. A small, filthy toilet and plastic hand basin occupied the corner opposite his bed. A red button on the wall was his only connection to the attendant somewhere outside, who rarely responded. After five years the world beyond those grey walls was just a memory, and well out of sight. But who in their right mind would want to see the world in such a shattered, desolate state?
It’s only a dream, he told himself with all the doubt and disbelief of a man approaching the end of his miserable life. The fact that dreams could come true, as well as nightmares, had become just as real as the cell he now called home. Some men’s dreams were just fleeting images of what would never be, while other men’s dreams, fueled by profit, had the ability to turn the entire world upside down.
One such dreamer was Mark Chimera. Many years earlier he made a healthy living sitting around at home daydreaming. Occasionally he hit the word processor and turned those daydreams into short stories. The publishers lapped them up. By the time Mark was thirty-five he lived on Easy Street. He married Amy at thirty-eight and at forty-one they had a baby boy named Will.
As is so often the case, success bred contempt. It also led to alcoholism. Three years of relentless drinking, smoking and daydreaming provided no inspiration. No new ideas came to what remained of his mind. The money started to run out. Mark’s agent began to make threats. “See a doctor and get your shit together, otherwise I’m cutting you off.”
Amy had the same thoughts running through her mind, and made Mark aware of it. He finally saw a doctor. If that doctor could have seen the future he probably would have slit Mark’s throat then and there. Instead, he told him to stop smoking, and prescribed a healthy, alcohol free diet with a few good nights sleep.
Mark quit smoking. He sat down with Amy at seven o’clock each night for a healthy dinner instead of drinking until midnight and snacking on frozen pies and chips. He washed down his meals with milk instead of booze. Mark slept like a baby. He even woke up remembering his dreams, something he hadn’t done for a long time.
Everybody dreams, but some people don’t remember them for one reason or another. Mark began remembering his dreams vividly. Inspiration rushed through his veins. He left a note pad and pen beside his bed. He even had a set in the toilet. Whenever he woke up with a dream in his head he wrote it down immediately. Most of it was incoherent rambling, although some of his ideas were quite good.
Stories began to flow like a river. Mark’s career flourished again. Most of his new stories were based on just a fragment of a dream or a small idea that arose from a dream situation, but occasionally a dream was perfect. Everything fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. Mark would wake up exploding with excitement and enthusiasm. He’d write out the story exactly as it happened in the dream. Not one detail would be changed. They were the easiest stories he ever wrote.
Mark produced eight unique stories over the following six months. He called them his dream pieces. They were the ones that followed his dreams to the letter. He felt they were somehow different from his other work, a gift from his dream writer within. Hard work led to a well publicised book of short stories with three of his special dream pieces making the cut. Money began to flow again.
Of course, success bred contempt once more. Mark took up smoking again. He drank heavily, stayed up late and spent little time with Amy and Will. Inspiration failed him again. Mark stopped remembering his dreams. He wrote no new stories worth selling. The money stopped coming. Amy finally ran out of patience. After a jagged ten year marriage, she took Will and left Mark to swim in his own misery.
It was at that point in Mark’s life that his stories began to take on a life of their own. One of the dream pieces Mark sold was a horror mystery. It involved a man waking up in the desert, lost, drugged-out and with no memory of who he was. He stumbled around for a while before finding a road. In the middle of the road, in the middle of nowhere sat a car with the door open and the engine running. Nobody was in sight. The confused man turned off the engine and waited for the owner to return. He could see for miles in all directions, but nobody was around.
Eventually, he decided the owner was not coming back. He got in, started the engine and took off down the road. In a drugged-out state he pulled into the first town he came across and crashed heavily through the front of the post office. The police arrived and identified him as a wanted murderer and drug dealer, who it seemed had been injected with LSD and left in the desert by his enemies as some kind of payback.
To Mark, fiction is the stuff of dreams, but he nearly choked on his bourbon when the exact same story hit the local news. It was just like his dream piece. Everything was the same, except Mark’s story was the result of a dream and the version on the news actually happened. Following a tip-off from a loyal reader as to the existence of Mark’s story, the police arrested and questioned him in relation to the incident. They failed to establish any connection between Mark and the event except for his story. They released him without charge.
Another of his published dream pieces was about a tragic accident involving a truck, a car and a cyclist. The driver of the truck lost control rounding a bend. In a desperate bid to avoid hitting an oncoming car, the truck flipped onto its side. The rear end of the truck collided heavily with the car. Fuel spilled onto the road and a fire ignited under the car.
A passing cyclist witnessed the accident. He leapt off his bike and raced to the car. The doors were crumpled and wouldn’t open. The woman driver frantically yelled at the cyclist to get her young son out of the back first. The cyclist smashed the rear door window with his elbow and pulled the boy out. As he placed the child safely under a tree on the pavement, the car burst into flames killing the female driver.
The truck driver was also killed and the accident was clearly his fault, but the cyclist could not forgive himself for not saving the boy’s mother. He struggled for three days trying to come to terms with the situation, but failed. He returned to the scene of the accident late at night and hanged himself from the tree were he’d placed the boy three days earlier.
That was exactly as Mark dreamt it and exactly as he wrote the story. It was not long after the desert car incident that an identical car accident occurred not far from Mark’s house. The incredibly tragic part for Mark was that the driver of the car was his wife, Amy, and the boy saved was his son, Will. The police again questioned Mark but had no way of either placing him at the scene or having any connection to the accident, besides the extraordinarily coincidental fiction story he had written. There was no way of proving he was at fault in any way, but Mark was now convinced it was entirely his fault.
Lightning struck twice. Mark again stopped drinking, this time on his own advice. He tore the situation apart, piece by piece, trying to make sense of it. He wrote eight dream pieces. So far two had come true. Those two had been sold. A third dream piece had also made his recent book. That story was a simple but gory piece about a jealous husband throwing his wife into the back of a log shredder and unsuccessfully attempting to make it look like an accident. Mark searched the internet and found an identical incident recently occurring overseas. It didn’t happen in his local area, but the story had come true. Strike three.
That left his other five dream pieces that hadn’t yet sold. If selling the story was the magic key to making it come true, then those five pieces needed to be pulled from sale and destroyed. Alex put a match to all printed copies and deleted all relevant files from his computer. He realised four of the pieces would be relatively harmless if they came true, but certainly not the fifth piece. If that piece sold and the story became a reality, it would be a catastrophe far beyond the control of Mark Chimera. He had to act fast.
“Hello, Mark,” his agent screamed down the phone line. “I was just about to call you. I sold another one of your dream pieces.”
“No,” said Mark, trembling with fear. “Hang on a minute, we need to talk.”
“Reynolds Publishing paid a small fortune for it. They lapped up that dooms day stuff like you wouldn’t believe. You know the one I’m talking about?”
Mark’s heart almost stopped beating. “No, you can’t sell that one. That’s what I was ringing about.”
“Don’t be silly. This is gold!”
“I’m serious. I want to withdraw it from the market immediately, okay?”
Mark’s agent began to get upset. “No, mate, I’m serious. I secured the deal two days ago. The money went into our account this morning, and at 11.00am I put your share into your account. The deal is done, Mark. There’s no turning back.”
The dream piece was a tragedy. Desperate and seemingly insane world leaders turn the world upside down in a destructive war sending the entire globe into poverty and desolation. The hero is a computer hacker who tries to infiltrate and alter the communications of world leaders in a cunning attempt to bring peace. He is discovered and killed. The story ends with the first nuclear strikes under way. It was published and sold well enough. Within a few months the inevitable happened. Tensions around the world grew to breaking point and global war broke out.
He knew the almost impossible task ahead of him. If his dream piece was indeed responsible for all the current devastation around the world, then surely it was believable that another dream piece could potentially resolve the situation. If he dreamed of world peace, wrote the story exactly as the dream happened, and then sold the story, peace would break out and the world would return to normal again.
That was his daydream but it needed to become a real dream. Mark spent his nights sober and well fed. He slept like a baby. He had no problem remembering his dreams, but none of those dreams were capable of changing the course of history. The world deteriorated around him.
It took Mark almost three years to dream the dream he had to dream, but it finally happened. He woke up and wrote the dream down in detail immediately. He typed it up on an old typewriter as printer cartridges were by that stage hard to come by. Even clean paper was hard to find. The internet and phone lines were limited to those considered valuable to the cause.
Mark walked the thirteen kilometres into town to deliver his new dream piece to his agent in the hope that someone, somehow would be interested in buying it. His agent’s building was a wreck. Nobody occupied it. Mark wandered the city for three days, sleeping wherever he found shelter, until he located what seemed to be the only publisher in town. He barged his way into the building insisting on presenting his piece to the boss, but the answer was obvious.
“Don’t be ridiculous. We’re not buying fiction you idiot, just news, and we’re only paying for world changing stuff.”
It was strangely ironic. It was pointless telling the publisher his story would indeed change the world. He’d be thrown out like a lunatic. Chances were, if anyone really knew what Mark was responsible for, they would either lock him up or shoot him on the spot.
Mark roamed the streets looking for a sale that was never going to happen. He offered it to passersby for ten cents hoping someone would feel sorry for him enough to buy it. One day Mark became a little too pushy in a large crowd and the security forces arrested him.
His last hope was to explain everything to the police commander. Mark told his entire story, in detail, leaving nothing out. After a short time three burly men in uniforms arrived and took Mark away. He was condemned without trial to a hospital for the insane.
The next five years passed with Mark locked away from a world that continued to deteriorate. His world consisted of a small, windowless concrete room with a single bed and a round-edged side-table securely bolted to the floor. A small, filthy toilet and plastic hand basin occupied the corner opposite his bed. A red button on the wall was his only connection to the attendant somewhere outside. She rarely responded, but after five years had become quite close to Mark, knowing him better than any other patient.
In fact, she was well aware of Mark’s only goal in life. She also knew he was suffering. His liver was failing and the cancer from smoking so much had spread throughout his tired body. He had degenerated into a state of barely living, and death was knocking on his door. She decided to do the most humane and compassionate thing she could.
She knew Mark’s only desire in life was to sell what he called his dream piece. As a final gesture, although convinced he was utterly insane, she offered to buy Mark’s story. Through the food opening in his door she gave him three old documents that were blank on one side and a small pencil.
“Write down the basic idea of your story and I’ll give you a dollar for it.”
With just a small fragment of strength left in his shattered body, Mark wrote out the entire story, exactly as he remembered his dream from all those years ago. He stayed up all night to get it right. In the morning he eagerly awaited his attendant’s arrival. This time she unlocked the door and entered.
“Have you finished your story, Mark?”
Mark smiled, shaking badly. He handed the story to her. She took the crumpled pieces of paper and gave him an old and dirty one dollar coin. Mark put the coin in his pocket and smiled once more. He closed his eyes. He died.
His final dream piece came true. Within a month peace broke out and the world began its journey down the long road to recovery. The only remains of Mark Chimera’s life was his son, Will. Amy’s sister, Jess, raised him after the accident that killed her. He went on to marry, have a son and lead a relatively normal life.
On the tenth anniversary of Mark’s death, Will sat with his wife for a quiet lunch and a glass of bourbon to commemorate the memory of his father. Nobody usually talked about Mark. It was kind of a family rule, but today was different.
“Do you know much about your father from before, well, you know?”
“He was a writer just like me according to Auntie Jess,” said Will. “The crazy thing is, I had a strange dream involving my father last night. It’s given me a great idea. I think I can write a story from it exactly as it happened in my dream.”