Dreams Really Do Come True by iwiwt

The clock on the wall ticked too slowly. I was sure that it wound backwards each time I blinked, but my eyes went dry whenever I tried to catch it doing so. An odd thing to keep in a waiting room.

It *was* a waiting room, I’m sure of it. I think it was, anyway. There were chairs arranged around the perimeter, and a toneless beige paint on the wall, which qualified it well enough in my books. If only I could recall what I was waiting for.

“Mr. Murphy,” he said, coming around the corner, “if you’re ready.”

I supposed I was ready enough, given how long I’d waited. How long had I waited? I wouldn’t let on that I was thoroughly befuddled, not to this newcomer anyway. He stood there in the doorway, looking at me expectantly. Badly balding, dark rimmed glasses, short, and holding a clipboard, he couldn’t have looked more like the most generic office functionary if he’d tried. I nodded and stood, and the slight man bade me follow him into the hall beyond.

Stepping into the corridor outside the waiting room, I looked about, determined to locate myself in some place familiar. Doors dotted the length of the hall, with other concourses branching off at random. The lights flickered and hummed annoyingly. Of course they did.

“Well, go on then” the little man instructed, gesturing vaguely around with his clipboard. I was clearly meant to lead him on from here. I couldn’t let on that I didn’t know where to go, so I picked a door nearby at random and made for it.

“Sure,” he said sarcastically, “why not that one.”

“Look man,” I began, ready to tell him off.

“No, no, that’s fine. It makes very little difference in the end.” He pulled a pencil out of his shirt pocket and erased something on the clipboard as we came before doorway.

“Number fourteen” I read aloud, finding a brass tag affixed to the front of the door.

“Well, fourteen” he corrected.

“What?”

“It’s just fourteen, not number fourteen” he said with a wave of his pencil, as though explaining to a toddler that the sky was blue.

“Does it matter?” I asked, thoroughly tired of the man’s pedantic airs.

“I suppose that’s up to you in the end” he retorted with a wry chuckle.

I grew tired of trying to puzzle out what he meant, and opened the door wide.

A living room, modestly furnished, lay beyond. It was unremarkable, and no more familiar to me than the rest of my surroundings, but for the woman on the couch; my 10th grade girlfriend.

“Jenny Browning?” I exclaimed. She sat there, idly flipping through the channels on her TV, seemingly oblivious to my presence at her door. I looked to my companion, who was busy stifling a yawn.

“Mmm? Oh, sorry,” he mumbled, “yes fourteen for Ms. Browning.” Another mark on the clipboard.

“Can she see us?” I asked.

“What do you think?” he replied, reaching past me to pull the door shut. I opened my mouth to protest.

“We don’t have all day,” he insisted, cutting me off, “we’ve many more to get through.”

The next door, bearing the number two, opened into the back of a rattling mail truck as it drove down the road. The old redhead who did the parcel deliveries in my building wrangled with the wandering wheel before her as she bumped along. Again, the little man pulled the door shut after only moments.

The next door, fifty four. A small storage closet where a woman all too familiar to me rummaged among some boxes, wearing the green apron synonymous with a popular coffee chain.

“Becky,” I said in shock as she pushed boxes aside in search of something, “we dated for like a year.”

“Fascinating” the man said sarcastically, cataloguing whatever it was he needed to.

“Hey now hang on,” I insisted as he pulled this door closed too, “what’s the big idea here, huh? What’s going on? I don’t know where the hell I am, who you are, what these people have to do with any of…”

“Look,” he stopped me cold with an upraised hand, “I just have to make sure you get through these, okay? Open the door, take a look, move on. I don’t make the rules, alright?”

“This is a dream” I said, not seriously. It was never a dream.

“This is *obviously* a dream” he replied, pushing another door open. Nineteen. My mom’s friend Tara sat in the waiting room of a car dealership, flipping through a magazine and kicking her flip flop back and fourth.

We carried on. Five, the front desk girl at work. Seven, a woman I’d done a group project with in college. One, a lady who’d dropped off my Door Dash order two weeks ago. Forty seven, my college roommate Kevin, typing away at a laptop in a home office. One hundred and ten, my cousin Jeremy’s girlfriend scrolled through Instagram in a cafeteria. It went on like this for a while, mostly women, a few men, all seemingly unaware as I peered in on them at work or in their homes. I knew or recognized them all, if somewhat vaguely in some cases.

“How many are there?” I asked after maybe two dozen doors. The little man checked his clipboard.

“Two more” he replied dryly. We turned a corner.

“Hang on there’s three doors here” I said. The little man shrugged.

“That second one is new, by the looks of it.”

“What do you mean, ‘new’? I just asked you like two seconds ago!”

He smiled, quite pleased with himself.

“We’re very quick, you know. We don’t miss much.”

Disregarding him, I opened the closest one, electing to leave the ‘new’ one another minute. Fourteen, again. My American Lit professor from college hunched over a stack of papers, red pen scanning one before her. For a woman twice my age, or more, there was something unbelievably alluring about her. I’d had the biggest crush on her.

“Dr. White” I mused to myself as we moved on. I had so far resisted the urge to work out what the numbers meant, or who the people had been in relation to them. This was, by my partner’s admission, a dream; there was no use arguing with the unknowable logic of fancy. We approached the ‘new’ door. The brass tag read “1”, lacking the aged patina of some of the others.

A slight woman, about my age, lay in repose on her bed, cotton underwear around her ankles, shirt still on, with an industrial looking wand pressed into her unkempt bush. Her brow was furrowed furiously, eyes screwed shut in concentration. Curiously, the little man didn’t close the door immediately. Feeling guilty at looking in on this most private of moments, I peered around the room at anything other than the woman on the bed. I’d seen enough to recognize her as the girl who’d just moved in across the hall.

“This feels a little personal man, I don’t think we need to hang around,” I said to her ceiling as she began to emit stifled whimpers.

“Well we might as well wait a second. Save us a trip back, you know?” Surely he knew that I did not.

She pressed the wand hard into herself with both hands, seemingly pleading with herself to cross the finish line with what remained of the breath she held fast to.

“ComeOnComeOnComeOnPleasePleasePlease,” she muttered with trailing desperation, “JustOneMorePlease.” Her perseverance paid off, and she began to shudder happily in her success. The man stared at the door expectantly, pencil hovering above his record.

“Aaaaand…” he droned, faking some anticipation, “two. There we go.” He punctuated some measure on his sheet. The girl on the bed flipped her toy off and let her arm fall to the bed next to her, exhaling contentedly.

“Wait just a fucking minute!” I yelled as he pulled the door shut on her room, “Is that what this is? Is that what the numbers are?”

“It’s looking an awful lot like it is, isn’t it?” he explained in his dry, bored tone. God, I hated him.

I stomped past him, staring daggers at, and through, his beady little eyes. Looking forward to ending his sick little game, I prepared to open door the last of these cursed doors, number…

One thousand three hundred and sixty seven.

No matter how hard I blinked, squinted, and focused on it, the number refused to be believed. My diminutive little guide caught up to me and chuckled, whistling softly at the digits on the door.

“Now that’s gotta be some kind of record. I haven’t seen something like this all week. You gotta watch those ones when you wake up; they can be trouble”.

“I don’t even think I want to know at this point,” I said, near whispering in my disbelief, thinking back to the number on my old roommates door. We’d shared a shower. He used my towels.

“Well,” he said, almost sympathetically, “you know just as well as I do that this doesn’t quite work like that.” He leaned over and pushed the door open for me this time.

“What the hell…”

I’d never seen her in my life.

___

I awoke, as you might expect, with a shuddering, gasping start.

7:29am, as far as my alarm clock was concerned. Saturday morning.

Somehow expecting my room to look or feel differently, I was awash with relief to realize that I was awake, truly. None of the sluggish unreality that often outed your dreams as falsehood were present. The angles of the room all made enough sense to assure me that I had, blessedly, awoken to the realest of worlds.

Accepting that the combination of YouTube rabbit holes, late night munchies, and flagrant self abuse that had become habitual before bed again might have all combined to manifest the debauched little accountant and his backrooms of perversity, I did my level best to get on with my morning and forget the entire ordeal.

In direct defiance of the usual laws of such things, I realized halfway through scrubbing down in the shower that the images refused to fade from my mind. I never remembered dreams at all really, and yet I could still picture every detail of the rooms I’d looked in on, and the stale carpet smell of the halls, and the wet sniffling of the little clerical creep who’d accompanied me.

Brushing my teeth, I resolved to remember who all I had seen in those rooms. There were some obvious standouts; I was confident that all the women I’d ever dated for more than a few weeks were in there. Obviously, there was the matter of Kevin. I admired my half-heartedly maintained physique with pride as I recalled Professor White and the fourteen compliments she’d apparently paid me in her private time.