Dream Journal Ultimate
Date: 11/24/2025
By amandalyle
I’m sitting in a circle of empty chairs, the kind that look like they could squeal if you confess anything too heavy. The whole room has AA energy, minus the alcoholics, plus a vague cosmic joke at my expense. I don’t know why I’m here. Maybe the universe stuck a cosmic post-it note on my forehead: Deliver me here. Then Kylie sits down beside me. Well. Brilliant. My stomach executes a full gymnastic routine. Three silent years, and suddenly the girl who once carved a Kylie-shaped crater into my life is right here. She looks the same, only… crushed. She’s hunched, like she’s smuggling her whole collapsing world in the straps of her backpack. She’s shredding a tissue into snowflakes. I know that habit. It’s practically genetic between us. Then the sobbing starts — loud, rattling, like someone wringing out her soul. I can’t watch. My arms act before my brain does; I pull her in. She lets me. No fight, no hesitation — just this heavy, hurting person melting into me like she remembers exactly how we used to fit. “Everything’s gone to shit,” she chokes. “He left me.” His name curdles somewhere between thought and tongue. I don’t speak it. When the crying slows to occasional tremors, I offer her the most glamorous proposal I can muster: “Wanna go on an adventure?” By which I mean: come deliver parcels with me. Romantic, I know. Off we go — two ghosts doing gig-work. Teamwork. Dream work. Hardly-paid work. Our first stop: a house pulsing with party bass strong enough to dislodge dental fillings. I glance at the parcel. Toni. Oh fantastic. I’ve been dreading this reunion since the dawn of my employment. “Here goes,” I whisper. Kylie nods — both moral support and emotional crash mat. We enter chaos. A full circle of drunk, smoky bodies, clinking glasses like they’re trying to summon a demon. Toni catches my eye, then promptly evaporates. Classic. Zara’s mum stumbles forwards, plastered and proud. “Let ’ave it then,” she demands. I hand over the parcel. She immediately berates me for dirtying her “Gucci” trackies. Sure. If Gucci ever releases a line called ‘Gutter Slop Beige,’ maybe. She’s really just performing wealth-theatre for the wrong audience. I couldn’t care less if she draped herself in a diamond-encrusted binliner. Kylie, meanwhile, is cackling like this is peak comedy. “Welcome to my world,” I sigh into the void. We continue — lost, circling estates like two pigeons with faulty internal GPS. Eventually, we surrender to the gravitational pull of lunch. Kylie is always thinking about lunch. Even apocalypse-level emotion can’t stop her inner hobbit. We settle on a rickety bench. Then —because the universe enjoys seasoning my life with madness — a man emerges from the trees. “There’s a magic portal machine in that bush,” he whispers in a thick Somerset drawl. “Spits out artefacts from yesteryear.” Naturally, we follow him. Because why not? Trauma bonding leads to strange hobbies. The machine looks like an 80s toaster mated with a fax machine. I press a button; it groans awake. I select a number. Nothing. “Nah, higher number than that,” the man advises. “It only spits one item per timeframe.” Right. Of course. We try again. The machine coughs out a box of washing powder from the 1980s. Kylie snatches it like it’s liquid gold. Soon we’ve amassed a heap of expired junk, each relic more useless than the last. The whimsy wears off when your bounty could poison you. But Kylie’s delighted, and — God help me — her delight still means something. We leave the bush-dwelling oracle behind and drive until we somehow — not realistically, not geographically, just dream-logically — reach Disneyland. “Shall we?” she grins, vibrating with pure childlike mania. Disneyland is my personal version of purgatory — loud, sticky, joy-scented torture. But I shrug. “If it makes you happy. As we walk the gaudy strip, I spot Mum struggling with bags so heavy they look like they contain the remains of entire civilizations. “Want me to take those?” “No, it’s alright.” And when Mum says she’s got this, she’s got this — even if she’s about to rupture a disc. She waddles off towards a bus stop, determined as ever. We continue. Kylie suddenly freezes, eyes blazing. “Lorde,” she breathes. For a moment I imagine an actual medieval lord galloping towards the exit — cape flourishing, escaping the hellscape. Lucky bastard. But no. Lorde the singer. And here she comes: legs so long she looks deep-faked by an algorithm with a fetish for stilts. “LORDE!” Kylie screams. “Bitch, please,” Lorde mutters, strutting past like we’re dust mites she might inhale if she breathes wrong. Kylie deflates like a sad party balloon. “It’s okay,” I tell her. “She’s always been a knob.” Kylie snorts. We laugh about the legs — those towering eldritch contraptions. We’re still laughing when we reach a round, spinning photo spot — a perfect bright circle painted on the ground, where families line up to take pictures. It’s ridiculous. It’s tacky. And it hits me like divine slapstick. A circle. The same shape as the chairs. The same shape we’ve been walking in all day. The same pattern our friendship has followed — gaps, returns, absences looping back into presence. Kylie steps into the circle without noticing, turning towards me with a smile that feels borrowed from a different timeline — the one before everything went wrong. And something clicks. Not a loud, cinematic click. A quiet one. Like the universe whispering: Some things aren’t meant to end, only to return differently. I step into the circle too. Just for a moment. Just long enough to wonder whether this time, maybe — just maybe — we’ll stay in the same loop long enough to find each other again.