Who: Jack and Preston What: Dreaming Where: Dreamy world When: Recently--ish? Warnings/Rating: Nope none.
Well aware of how Freud viewed dreams, as any psychoanalyst was, Jack felt entirely different about them. His dreams were frequently ordered, sometimes reminiscent of something that had happened during the day and as Freud had thought, id wish fulfillment. Less often, they were jumbled images, and even less often than that, was the feeling that this was a dream and that he was distinctly aware of it such.
This dream felt distinctly that way. It was not ordered as he walked along a tree bough, many times his own size, without the slightest fear of falling. Jack knew he should fear it, but an internal check revealed no such feeling, not even a dim shred of caution as his booted feet made it across the rough surface. A glance upwards showed that the tree that he was currently walking on was huge, extending what appeared to be thousands of feet into the air. Green-hued light mixed with gold where it filtered through leaves and with no other plans, Jack kept walking.
Preston had always avoided psychology like the plague. He was a relatively intelligent man, and the idea that anyone could read his innermost thoughts by flipping through his file and asking him a couple questions about whether or not an inkblot was a butterfly or a body scared the hell out of him. Preston was also naturally private. His job didn’t lend much to keeping secrets, but Preston was the kind of person that trusted professional men in dark suits to be discreet more than he would a lover or a friend.
As a consequence, Preston never questioned the nature of his dreams, or what they did or did not mean. The majority of them were monochrome, and it came as some surprise to him when he found himself in a green forest, the air clear and the sun shining. Preston always sought out such isolated places for his vacations so he was smiling when he came upon the unlikeliest thing he could possibly have dreamed up in such a place: a man.
Preston blinked and stopped to stare. His own appearance reflected the dreams he often had, abstract dreams filled with shapes and obscure symbolism. Rather than simply being a man in a suit, Preston therefore appeared to be a shifting bundle of vaguely man-shaped structures, the figure of a person made up in polygons of shifting peach flesh and gray wool, as if he was surrounded by many mirrors and made up of many surfaces.
Nearly all of Jack's life was secrets. He had less of his own to keep, but more of other people's to guard. Even the fact that they saw him was now protected by law and something he couldn't divulge to anyone. The details of why they saw him had always been protected and what was shared during their sessions more so.
The presence of someone? Something? Else didn't disturb him, but the fact that they were so multi-faceted, a human in abstract did interest him. Most of the time when he dreamed of another human, they were as they should be. Shifting, sometimes, in that way that dreams could so, but they always looked like they should.
"Hello," he said, friendly even towards shifting man. Had he known that the man was real, he would have analyzed why he chose such a shifting view of himself. Maybe later he would consider why his subconscious chose this, but for now he walked down the giant branch, the rubber soles of his boots keeping an even grip on the bark. A glance down told him he was wearing clothes, but they were vague and indistinct, nothing of note except for the boots.
Preston felt disquiet, and therefore his figure became less solid and shifted warily as if under the influence of a strong breeze. The many shapes, all connected and yet changing in angular surfaces tinged with texture, rearranged themselves continually as he moved, putting out a vaguely leg-shaped limb and taking an experimental step forward on the sturdy branch. He didn’t really know he was not himself, and only reacted to the environment as any other man would react to a dream: as if everything was normal. “Hello,” he greeted, his voice cautious and yet not hostile. There weren’t enough syllables to make out anything but a male voice, distinct and calm.
“Why are there so many trees?” Preston asked, thinking that if there was another being here it might be useful to ask. According to Preston’s logic, everything that existed here must serve some purpose, or else it (or he, in this case) wouldn’t be there. In Preston’s life, everything had a purpose. He didn’t know that he was in someone else’s dream, and so far had no reason to suspect it. The shifting polygons moved under the surface of a long, carved face, and he looked closer, trying to find something of Jack that was familiar. He had no success.
Preston stopped, not being possessed of any particular skill that would keep him up in the trees, certainly not any Tarzan-like balance or proper boots.
Jack hadn't thought the trees were out of place. Maybe it had something to do with Aragorn, who vastly preferred trees to the bare, dry expanse of Las Vegas. These trees didn't look like ones that grew in Vegas though. They reminded him more of the redwoods that he'd seen in California, mammoth trees, but even those hadn't been quite as big as these ones.
"I don't know," Jack replied. He glanced up at them again and closed his eyes. The sunlight that filtered through the leaves and down in misshapen chunks carried no sense of warmth. Jack opened his eyes again, head tilted slightly. No shining sun heat, but it wasn't a cold day, definitely moderate as far as Vegas was concerned.
As the other man -- man used loosely here, but the voice was masculine -- stopped, so did Jack. "I like them." Had he been the type that could change his dreams, he might have done so then, made a building of glittering glass and metal, someplace that might have been at home within any of a thousand metropolitan areas, but lucid dreaming wasn't a skill that Jack had cultivated. "Do you not like trees?" He asked, a note of amusement in his voice.
The polygons’ mad movement began to slow, until the shifting angles were wider and the planes longer, fitting together closer in the complexity of a man’s long curving shapes. An expression became apparent, the clear confusion and sincerity of a Picasso. Preston was nothing if not sincere. Color leached from the polygons, and black-and-white tinged with red took over the many surfaces.
“I like trees. I don’t climb them that often. I like to keep my feet on the ground.” Though the polygons weren’t small or kind enough to reveal the faintly rueful smile, it was there in his voice. “You know the type?” Preston liked to be very grounded. He went backwards, and accumulated every symptom of normality and sanity physically possible in the hope that it would produce the results he wanted. He was marginally successful.
“I don’t think we’ve met before. This...” Misty white clouds speckled the surface of the man’s figure. “This isn’t normal for me. It’s beautiful, though.” He added the last quickly, worried he would offend.
The change in colors had Jack tilting his head, his natural curiosity not banked in this dream state. It took him a few seconds to realize that he was no longer standing, but sitting on the wide branch, with no clear recollection of moving, only that in one second he was upright and the next, he wasn't.
"I know the type," Jack said, wryly smiling. "I like to keep my feet on the ground as well." The ground was stability, a known factor, and by no means was Jack a dreamer, except that lately he'd been moving further and further away from what was known and expected. Perhaps it had begun when he refused to wear the white coat that everyone associated with doctors (a coat he wasn't wearing now, either) and the office that looked less like a doctor's office and more like a spa.
His entire life was built around comfort, a sort of passive hedonism. Jack didn't regret it. "It's becoming my new normal," he said quietly. Meeting though. Meeting assumed that the other man was real, that they could have met somewhere. With that came the awareness that this was a dream. "You're not a part of my subconscious?"
Preston was far less stable. Though at times his strange appearance became so refined as to closely resemble human, there was nothing like breathing flesh there to be recognized, and if it was a conscious thing to conceal his appearance, he wasn’t aware enough to notice. To him, though the trees were beautiful, they were not reassuring nor familiar. He felt he could lose his balance and fall down into eternity, a common ending to many of his dreams, even the ones haunted by forms and papers. He didn’t feel secure enough to sit, and so he stood, shifting and flexing in a dizzying array of peculiarity without color.
“You don’t look like the type,” Preston disagreed, his tone not confrontational but conversational. “You look like you could go anywhere you want.” He even had the shoes for it, which Preston observed without moving or mentioning it. Feathered edges of paper moved over the surface of the many polygons at chest level, bland taupe carpeting undulating over the surface lower down.
Preston didn’t notice what was or wasn’t a dream. He was simply where he was, which was probably fortunate. He kept looking down at the long drop. “I don’t know that I’d be a great subconscious, but I suppose it’s possible. Do you have someone like me subconsciously?”
Papers, like the many forms he had to fill out, like the papers on which he wrote his notes after a session, like the construction paper he never got to use as a child. "No," Jack replied with a curious tilt to his head. "People in my dreams usually look as they are. You're more surreal," he said conversationally. It wasn't an insult, not even a thinly veiled one.
"But I do not know what you are like yet." Leaning back, he braced his weight on his palms behind him and stretched out his legs. "I don't know that I could go anywhere. I moved recently though, to somewhere unexpected." Jack didn't always do what was unexpected, but moved back and forth between the world of a doctor, where things were definitely expected of him and the world outside being a doctor, where he sometimes felt like an outsider.
"Your shifting face and colors suggests that you either have something to hide or that you don't know who you are. Or that who you are changes frequently." He paused, head still cocked as he regarded the vaguely humanoid figure. "If you are part of my subconscious, I think it would be more of the later rather than the former, unless my subconscious is trying to hide something from me."
The conversation was becoming even more complex and Preston’s sleeping mind gained depth to meet it, but as a result he had more difficulty maintaining his calm. The strange assembly of form and shapes became more agitated, shifting and moving amongst themselves, colliding in confusion, unmistakable even without clear form. The thrum of paper being shuffled together like a deck of cards grew loud and bizarre in the otherwise quiet forest space. “I’m sorry.” He seemed to think that being surreal, that being without normality, was something to apologize for. “I look the way I am.” He didn’t know for sure what exactly what that was; it worried him, and he backed away a little on the strange high branch.
“Maybe you’re part of my subconscious.” He wasn’t sure of that, didn’t like that option. Preston’s subconscious had always stayed where it belonged, and it had absolutely no business rising to the surface. Take aside the fact that he would probably lose his job, he thought that if his subconscious ended up in conscious he’d come right the hell apart, and he’d skip all the warning signs like... like weird dreams.
He took another backward step. His footing slipped. The many shapes came apart.
"You don't need to apologize," Jack started to say, but then the shape was stumbling backwards, falling, snapping apart. Any other denials or apologies that he would have made were lost as he went after the shifting, falling shape.
And as always, it was the sensation of falling that woke him up, leaving him gasping as he sat straight up in bed with a grumble from Spot. Both hands scrubbed at his face while a cold, wet nose nudged at his thigh, as if asking what was up. "It's okay, boy," Jack said quietly as he pushed the covers back and pulled his legs out.
Was it a reflection of his subconscious? His unconscious mind? Wouldn't he have realized that Jack was real? He was still considering it when he got out of his bed and went to get something to drink. An answer was not immediately forthcoming, not while he was walking to his kitchen, not while he was drinking his water, and not when he finally got back into bed, Spot resettling his furry head in Jack's elbow. "Shit," he said quietly to his dog, opposite hand coming up to pet his head, long slow strokes until he drifted off again.