Work Text:
These days, her will doesn't feel very strong.
It's difficult to explain.
However many times she considers it, there's still very little she could say about it, but it goes like this:
Sarah can't dream. At least not how she used to Before. Not for a while.
Shouldn't have made a difference, yet somehow it does.
Before, she couldn't occasionally remember her dreams, but at least she knew she had them, hidden away somewhere in her waking mind, bubbling just beneath the surface in between plays and playtime and screaming matches with her stepmother, while now there was... nothing. Not for lack of trying. Being unable to dream starts weighing on a person. It's fine, at first, until it's not, but life must go on, and it does, as life is wont to do, dreamless and vague around the edges, shapes moving right at the edges of vision.
She's starting to wonder whether she's ever been able to at all, or if she only thought she did. No former dreams come to mind when she sits down and really tries to remember. She had dreams as in goals and ambitions, but no real stories her mind used to concoct. Maybe she's losing her memories as well—she's not sure which would be worse, because at least dreams are more or less fantasy while her memories... that's more or less who she is. Right?
Dreams are wishes. Memories are wishes fulfilled.
*
After she goes off to have a life of her own, she doesn't want to go back home for many reasons, none of which have to do with closure and all of which have to do with personal safety and being an adult now.
As time passes she believes she must become a little older, somehow, logically, though that's debatable as well, because when she looks in the mirror she finds that time has passed her oddly, kind of like when a car curves around you in the middle of the road at the last minute, giving you a good scare with little actual damage done.
*
Although everyone's dreams are unique to some degree, the main ideas behind most dreams come from similar places.
Sarah's always thought in terms of themes.
As she sees it, these often include fear of some sort or another, worry about the people around you in the real world, or just plain old self-centredness—anxiety over making significant choices, as if any given decision could potentially change everything, or even the feeling of being trapped in a life that you're not meant to have. No real solutions are on offer on how to get out of those jams, but dreams don't tend to come with a receipt and a money-back guarantee.
The most that's on offer is a way to process life, experiences and emotions, the stuff that can't be easily expressed otherwise.
Ultimately, it's about valuable personal insight, she guesses, some clarity, specks of proverbial light that can help guide you towards something, though not much in terms of practical use. Mostly it's about processing stuff.
Dreams are a way to explore inner creativity or get inspired. They can be subconscious projections of fears, hopes, wishes, all of the emotional undercurrents which are hard to see otherwise. They're a gateway into whatever lurks in the mind, an outlet for expressing what can't be expressed. There's the chance of insight and advice, if you're lucky, or red flags finally flapping if you're not. Dreams can be symbolic and meaningful.
Sarah isn't getting any of that, and it's not for a lack of trying.
She doesn't know why she cares so much and can't just let it go. She's let go of everything else, but this one has become a sticking point for reasons she can't quite fathom.
*
A good old-fashioned nightmare is what she needs, to remind her dreams aren't always all they're cracked up to be.
Obviously that doesn't happen just because she wills it—few things do these days. Besides, the timing would be too neat, too much like magic.
And, after all, it's kind of an impossibility given how she can't really dream at all, to have a nightmare out of the blue.
But the appeal of having everything tied up with a bow is still there. She almost wishes for it.
She doesn't speak much to Toby, hasn't for years now.
He's still in school and she doesn't go home much, therefore there isn't any real way they could be in the same room together unless they actually made the effort. (She's going to ignore how he's sixteen and probably can't go off on his own several states over in order to see her.)
But even if they did see each other, the insight that could be gathered here seems like very much not worth the time or effort. Touching base feels unlikely—explaining her symptom to a teenager feels inadvisable—and ultimately the risks of bringing this up all over again seem like too much of a price to pay.
What if Toby tells her it never really happened to him? Or, worse, if he does know and he came through it all completely unscathed, then she hasn't got a chance in Hell. Not that this would mean anything if he did confirm he's going through the same, but Sarah could at least breathe a little better then.
For the purposes of their continued dysfunctional sibling relationship, she's ignoring the existence of phones as well. Besides, this isn't the sort of conversation she wants to have at a distance.
*
There must have been others who ran through the Labyrinth and made it out, on quests and missions maybe not unlike her own, and then, after, went on to life in the real world again as a consequence—or a reward—and can dream again.
There are surely others, she isn't special, yet it feels like she's gone through the maze in her own mind so many times that she's the only one who's ever been through it at all.
*
Toby calls on a Friday, after school lets out but before Sarah can clock out. He leaves a message on her answering machine. It shouldn't surprise her that he didn't have her mobile phone number handy, but she's somehow shocked anyway, shocked at the sudden wealth of information he doesn't know about her, or it could just be the shock of getting a message at all, whatever form it takes.
She listens to it late on Friday—back in her apartment after three glasses of wine with the rowdier bunch in her department and stale bar food, the message echoing off the empty, hollow walls.
It doesn't say anything except for how he's going to be in the city for a field trip and wanting to meet up, which she guesses is more than enough, but it feels like a throwaway idea that has little to do with her.
The world has changed a lot since Sarah used to be sixteen years old—he can break off from his school group and spend an afternoon, unattended, in the city with her—or maybe it hasn't. She rarely came home before supper at sixteen.
He leaves his number in the message, and the impulse to dial him in that very moment is so strong it scares her. But what would be the point? It's him, clearly, so she lets it be and pencils in the day in her calendar instead.
*
That night, she sleeps deeply and dreams. And come morning she can't remember what those dreams were, but she knows she has them for the first time in a decade and a half.