Sleeping Outside the Box

When you sleep with a woman outside of marriage, people think you’re a bad person. When she gets pregnant without a ring on her finger, people think you’re both bad people.

Mary’s folks already didn’t like me. I wasn’t exactly wealthy and I hadn’t proposed to Mary in the four months we’d been seeing each other.

“It was an Angel!” I blurted out when her father saw her glowing, obviously pregnant with a bulge the size of Gibraltar. I looked down sheepishly. If I was going to pull this off, I had to be careful not to lay it on too thick. “An immaculate conception, while I was on a business trip to Bethlehem–I didn’t touch her, I swear. It was God!”

Her father looked at me like a jackal to a snake. I thought for a second that he might chase me around the room, jaws snapping in an effort to bite me. Instead, he looked at his wife, Mary’s mother, gullible as ever.

“Oh Mary,” she said with tears of joy and worry. “What will you name it?”

Mary’s father cared for his daughter. No matter how much he despised me, I had to give him credit for being a good guy. “Right.” He said sternly and he glared at me again, this time followed by a sigh of defeat. “You,” he pointed at me, “keep your mouth shut. I’ll tell people what happened.”

My sleep was full of fantastic CGI. Rain, water, puddles, and more all resting on a handheld device. We all had these portable devices in the shape of a perfect golden rectangle. They showed video wrapped all around the 1-inch thick screen (sides, top and bottom, front and back). It didn’t seem to have controls but nobody tried to change them. Everyone watched the same channel.

There was this young girl dancer. She suddenly became much better after disappearing for a short while. It was amazing, as if she had studied for a lifetime. Soon, she revealed that she had a way to swap her mind with that of her dying self. I eagerly prodded to find the method. It was a pen shaped chocolate with one word enscribed upon it–in gaelic it said something like “mysticism” but it also translated as “placebo”. Nevertheless, it was a necessary catalyst for the process. Somehow, I found the shop that sold these pens and soon I departed to find my dying self–because it was best to switch with a version of myself in the future, having lived a full life and now on my death bed.
I boarded a Russian boat and sailed for months. It took us through strong winds and seas filled with amazing things. Eventually, I found myself in a midieval hut where I my elderly self was dying. Now came the dissapointing part. I performed some ritual to the likes of which I cannot recall. Out from a rafter fell a copy of myself at my same age. He had the mind of my elderly self but was spry and youthful as I was. Apparently this was how it worked. I was now obsolete. There was a better me to take my place. It wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, but it was a better outcome than nothing. I was still somewhat pleased and allowed the better me to take my life while I wandered the world.

I saw an old friend on the street. He was cranked out on something vicious and didn’t seem to recognize me at first. When I stepped up to him, he produced a dull knife and hammered it into my chest. It didn’t pierce the leather jacket I was wearing so I grabbed his head and twisted him around. He still managed to prod me with the blade again and this time it cut through slightly. I let him go and started to walk away but he stabbed me in the back, just under my left arm. My jacket protected me for the most part but I could feel a little blood warming my side. He just stood there and I tried to rip the knife from his hands. The blade broke in two pieces and he started to laugh. Somehow, I was left holding the two halfs while he ran away.
It was late and dark and I was in the part of town you don’t want to be in with somebody else’s broken knife. Throwing the pieces in two seperate places, I climbed up onto a roof to hide. A patrolman was coming with a flashlight and I didn’t want to be seen. On the roof was a little shack, which I crawled into and took a nap on a makeshift bed someone had left there. I awoke to dropletts of rain, falling from the shoddy roof of the shack and to the sound of the door starting to open. I jumped up, intending to lock the door but it was too late. The kind face of a slightly elderly man poked in from the other side. He didn’t seem to hold any ill will toward my intrusion on his shack. I let him in and apologized. He sat at a desk, which I hadn’t noticed before. He began to type on an old Remington and it produced a pleasing tack and clang. The old man explained that he was a writer. He had been a writer his whole life but only recently had he truly written. This rooftop shack was now his home, his escape from his previous life, a small salvation for a dying artist.
When he realized that I was invited to a prestigious dinner party, which took place later that night, he begged me to bring him along. He desired to interview someone at the event for an environmentalist paper he was to publish. I didn’t know the person he wanted to talk to but I said he could come along anyway.
It was an extremely expensive party, with all kinds of dancing, food, deceit and decadence. I lost track of the man from the shack and soon felt it was time to go home.

Last night my dreams were in Javascript, endless for() loops, recursively scanning deeper and deeper into the dream. I woke up because of some memory error. I think I lost track and the loops crashed.