Sally's dream | Teen Ink

Sally's dream

December 23, 2016
By BetsyJ GOLD, Vellore, Other
BetsyJ GOLD, Vellore, Other
17 articles 9 photos 14 comments

Favorite Quote:
Apt words have power to suage the tumours of a troubled mind.



















- Milton.


When Sally dreamt, her dreams usually involved phantasmagorias. You know, those dreams with unusual situations that keep changing very strangely.

The best and worst part of it was that when she woke up, she remembered them. She remembered them for days , and sometimes she never forgot them at all. Once, she had dreamed that she had been sprinting away from a priest who turned out to be the Devil, then soon she had inexplicably wound up inside a hospital, bedraggled and with a wailing baby in her arms.
Another time, an Ostrich had made a giant nest atop the parallel cable wires that ran from pole to pole in front of her home. The next day it had abandoned the nest containing four large violet-speckled gray eggs at her doorstep. When Sally had touched the eggs, they had been hot. She had hatched one of them to find steaming hot black coffee spilling out. She had taken a tentative sip only to next find herself stuck inside an empty movie theatre that was being flooded by waves of roiling waters. Her tongue had still burned from sipping that hot coffee.
Her dreams always took her to the most fantastic and grotesque of places. Her deranged fantasies came true there and her most peculiar obsessions took real form. In her dreams, she could meet people she could never imagine to meet in real life and she could hurt whoever she wanted there too. Anything was possible. And nothing was impossible. These two statements were actually true in her dreamland because no matter how much people say it real life, they're not really true in this world. Not for dreamers like Sally. No one can make a vast ocean of hot-pink soap water and swim in it endlessly without getting wrinkly palms. No one can scoop a galaxy of comets like water and taste it. No one can pick the ring off of Saturn, sprinkle some stars over it and wear it around their head like a tiara. No, not in this world. But in Sally's dreams, she could do all those things. She really could.

That morning, Sally woke up to the sound of her parents arguing. Trying to fizzle out the now familiar noise of argument, she tried remembering what she had dreamt about the night before. After a quick scan, her brain flashed a montage of images across her mind's eye like lightning. At first, they went as quickly as they came. But soon they slowed down.
Of all the images that flew by like butterflies across her mind, Sally caught one. It was the image of an cherubim sculpted out of marble. And then another image swam by but before she could it make it out, reality interfered.
"SALLY!" yelled a voice from beyond her bedroom door "Get up, time for school!"
Sally exhaled in aggravation. There went the rest of the dream she was trying to recall.
                                                                                                                                *
The alarm bell hollered marking the end of that school day. Jostling and wending her way uncomfortably through the rising sea of sweaty students in the student hallway, Sally finally got out the main door and felt the late afternoon sun blanketing her tired skin. A dull roar of small talk and gossip surrounded her as she climbed down a flight of stone stairs and reached the broken sidewalk redolent of exhaust fumes.
It had been a long day at school. Brent, a popular bully from the 8th grade, had picked on her yet again for being short. Sally wasn't really that short, everyone else was just a bit taller than her. Besides, five foot one wasn't all that short for a seventh grader, in her defense. Her usual companion, Bessie, hadn't come to school so she'd had no one to tell her half-recollected dream to that whole day. 


Sally crossed the road and ambled casually back home, wishing she didn't have to go back to her whining family so soon but not wanting to go anywhere else either. She passed the usual shops and diners and that old cracked fountain with the Cupid statue mounted over it by the public park like she did almost every other day. It had never occurred to her to pay attention to that old statue before. It was so old and invisible amidst the modernity of everything else of the city that Sally never would've noticed it if it wasn't for her dream. There had been an angel in her dream; an angel, although not Cupid, but a cherubim sculpted out of marble just like this one.
As she took a closer gander at the dismembered statue, she noticed that someone had left a quaint blue rubber bracelet looped around one of  its broken arms. Sally removed it gently to read the inscribed words of silver on the bracelet. She felt her heart go aflutter as she read : You dreamt about me.
 



Similar Articles

JOIN THE DISCUSSION

This article has 0 comments.