Chapter 13 - The Dream Collapses
Coincidence Speaks
⬅️Previous Chapter Next Chapter➡️
Happy Friday friends!
Welcome to the latest installment of Coincidence Speaks. Chapters are crafted so they can be read on a standalone basis. For the full experience head this way to start at the beginning!↩️
Chapter 13 finds Paul in way over his head…
Chapter 13
The Dream Collapses
A motionless body clustered in a curled heap, deathlike in its stillness. An older man, a man Paul had never seen before, lay collapsed on the floor in front of him. Eyes closed, face gaunt, lips drawn in a tight grimace.
As Paul knelt closer to check him, heart pounding, he suddenly imagined those eyes snapping wide open. He gasped at the thought.
The sharp intake of breath yanked Paul out of the intense dream he was having, and he woke up, shaken.
He got up and got ready for the workday with an ominous feeling lodged in his gut that he couldn’t shake. Even when he wrote his dreams down they would usually be forgotten during the morning rush—but this one was different. The image of the nameless prone man on the floor stayed crystal clear in his mind, linked to a clinging sense of dread, a nameless impending doom.
“Why won’t this sinking feeling leave me alone?”
The answer came when he opened the door of his office to start the workday.
It didn’t even make it halfway before eliciting a soft and strangely sickening thunk.
“What the…”
The door was stuck on something, something heavy.
He angled his body sideways to slip through the narrow opening into his office, and—
The exact same man from the dream was lying there on his office floor.
The door was wedged against his motionless body. He’d never seen the man before, not in his life—only in the dream from earlier that morning. Reeling, Paul knelt down to check him.
The man stirred and opened his eyes.
Paul met them, and time stopped.
The eyes blinked at him several times, snapping Paul back to his senses and into action.
“Are you OK?”
The man gave a feeble nod, pulling himself off the ground, gingerly leaning his back against the office wall.
“What happened?” Paul asked. The man cleared his throat.
“I was supposed to meet Dan in the office next door… and when I was waiting I started to get really tired… lightheaded… I got up to find a restroom and didn’t make it far. This office seemed as good as any to rest so I closed the door behind me and laid down… I must have passed out.”
He would not accept further help, adamant that he would be fine. Gathering himself, he walked out of Paul’s office under his own power, leaving him in stunned silence. Dan’s footsteps came curling towards him from down the hallway; Paul intercepted and explained what had just happened. The man was obviously still shaken but downplayed both Dan and Paul’s pleas to get checked out medically.
The rest of the work week was a complete blur. Paul couldn’t stop thinking about it, let alone focus on getting anything productive done. How could he have possibly witnessed the exact scene in his mind hours before it happened? It was getting harder and harder to tell what was truly real. It was as if the very depths of his subconscious…
…had begun to leak into the world around him.
Dan told Paul later that the man had collapsed due to simple blood sugar imbalance after a particularly intense game of racquetball earlier that morning, and was indeed just fine. Paul never saw him again, not in his office, not in his dreams.
But for the first time, Paul began to fear for his own sanity. How was he supposed to operate as a functioning family man as the boundaries of the world he knew collapsed all around him? How was he going to survive in the outcome based, risk-assessing, objective business world? Whatever the heck was going on contradicted everything he’d learned, ever been taught, ever assumed was normal.
And who was he supposed to talk to, or even relate to? Should he see a therapist? A psychiatrist? What was he supposed to say? “Uh, yeah—so I’ve been having bigtime personal problems lately, and I’m trying not to panic, because my dreams are literally coming true?”
Anyone he tried to share this stuff with would likely assume he was bat crap crazy. And how could he blame them? After his experience within the well-meaning but symptom-focused medical field, he assumed any psychiatric professional worth their salt would probably recommend some kind of medication for being delusional at best, and schizophrenic at worst.
The only one he tried to share everything with was Clara.
Clara, who had taken on an incredible burden in giving Paul the time and space for his unorthodox recovery from Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy. Clara, who knew the medical field didn’t have the answers he needed, and gave him full rein to get as internally focused on healing as he’d needed to be. Clara, who was over the moon happy to have finally gotten her husband back.
But now, Clara became more and more alarmed as the man she had married transformed rapidly before her eyes.
From the moment he’d tapped her on the shoulder the day after Christmas, she’d borne the full brunt of Paul’s rising enthusiasm about all things metaphysical. It seemed like all he’d wanted to talk about since then was this universal “interconnection” between all things, and the remarkable phenomena going on in every moment that he’d never noticed before.
Paul was no longer living up to the image of the well-rounded, “standard edition American dude” she’d first met—the practical, social and career-oriented man who liked happy hours and sports. Now he was walking around in the clouds, lost within the subjective machinations of his own inner world, jabbering on to her about all manner of crazy and intense things that made little pragmatic sense in the actual real world.
One change Clara could get behind though was when Paul abruptly lost his taste for meat, especially as an animal lover herself. This was quite the new development relative to Paul’s previous penchant for grilling out on their patio deck five nights a week. And it wasn’t a sudden recognition of animal cruelty, nor a personal crusade for vegetarianism—he’d simply… lost the taste for it.
Clara’s younger sister in particular couldn’t believe the day when he casually mentioned he didn’t really like meat all that much anymore, and was considering stopping altogether.
“Paul, the day you are a vegetarian is the day I wake up with my head sewn to the living room carpet.”
Paul laughed, impressed with her off the cuff movie reference to National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. Plus it was exactly the nudge he needed to make it official. “Fine—consider it done then,” he replied. “I’ll go vegetarian from here out!”
At the very least, it would be interesting to see his sister in law’s head as a fixture in their living room.
Paul kept doing the best he could, trying to share his perplexing experiences with Clara. The recurring number patterns, the vivid dreams coming true, the strange coalescing shapes and colors intermittently popping up around objects, the spontaneous heightened synchronization between his subjective thoughts and the objective world. He wanted to share everything with her. Except for the fact that he’d been doing awareness expansion practices several times a day, and the strange new phenomena appeared to be linked in some way.
But it was a lot. And it was exhausting.
To Clara, all of these rapid-fire changes were finally adding up to full out system overload. First Paul’s ankle collapse and constant sallow brooding, then not being able to help around the household, then being unable to walk at all, then unable to work, then dealing with an incurable mystery pain syndrome, and now this… whatever the heck this was—when and where would this drama ever end?
Clara had had enough.
One eye-wateringly sunlit afternoon they sat together on their freshly stamped concrete patio overlooking a classic fenced-in suburban lawn, perfect in its neon green lushness. Clara looked him straight in the eyes—a sudden soul-piercing gaze of striking vulnerability.
“I don’t know who you are anymore. And I’m not sure if I can go where you’re going.”
Paul swallowed and nodded.
He felt her fear and her courage in saying it. With her truth shared with such profound honesty, his own choice point came into clear view, and there wasn’t anything else to say.
The absolute last thing Paul wanted was to hurt the woman he loved any more than he already had.
So from that moment on he decided to shut it down. Stopped sitting in stillness, stopped awareness expansion practices, and pulled his attention away from inner world exploration to focus completely on the practical world around him, like everyone else was doing a much better job of.
End Chapter 13
Chapter 14 - Heart Math will post Friday, May 17th. Thanks for being here in interactive real time! Comments and feedback always welcome.
In gratitude,
E.T. Allen
ET, something about this sentence really spoke to me: "“I don’t know who you are anymore. And I’m not sure if I can go where you’re going.” Anyone who have been in a relationship knows what this means. If they haven't experienced it, then at the very least, it is something they'd fear. Great observation.
Interesting to hear how this is now impacting his relationship… and his decision to turn down the lights. Hmmm, I do wonder how this is going to work for him, if it’s possible to put a dimmer switch on an 8000 watt bulb!