Dream Journal Ultimate
Date: 10/12/2025
By amandalyle
It was pouring down rain. Absolutely pelting it down. The sort of tropical downpour that makes the sky seem to fall apart. Alex and I ran for shelter and stumbled into a block of gleaming apartments — glass from floor to ceiling, modern and smug about it. The lobby was underwhelming. Clinical white walls, minimalist art, and the faint smell of expensive air freshener. We stood there shivering, dripping puddles onto the marble floor. Alex shivered beside me and asked for a hug, his voice small. My heart beamed. He was thirteen now, long past the age for cuddles. Too cool for affection. But here he was, leaning into me again. A rare, endangered moment. I was grateful for the warmth - until he pulled back, face clouded. “Yeah… you forgot the deadline for my Venice trip.” And just like that, my “Parent of the Year” badge slid off my chest and landed sorrowfully in the puddle at our feet. I wandered towards one of the apartments, curiosity tugging me forwards. The front door was glass — practically an invitation. Through it, I saw her. Kylie. A ghost from three years past. She was with her, of course — Amy — my long-time nemesis, flaunting her mermaid-red, Ariel hair, and wearing some Lycra contraption that looked spray-painted on. The sight of them together twisted something sharp in me. Jealousy? Regret? Hard to say. They left through the back terrace. I let out a breath. “They won’t see me now,” I thought, and took it as my cue to sneak in. The place was pure Kylie — cluttered, cosy, creative chaos. Trinkets, journals,crystals, things with meaning only she could explain. I wandered through the wreckage of her personality until my eyes caught a painting on the table: an oil rendering of a ship tossed in a storm. The sea was wild, blue bleeding into blue, beautiful and fierce. I don’t know why I did it. My wet hand reached out, brushed the surface — and smeared it. The sea collapsed under my touch, the ship lost to fog. I gasped, tried to fix it with a crumpled tissue, but this only made things worse. So I covered the ruin with a stack of board games and tiptoed out like a ninja with dainty toes. The scene folded in on itself, dissolving like a sandcastle beneath a tide. Now I was standing outside another building. I knew I was supposed to be there. A meeting, maybe? I slipped inside, cautious, like a dog meeting strangers. Chairs arranged in a circle. Familiar faces — mothers from Alex’s primary school days. Polite, pleasant, and utterly peripheral to my life. I took the loneliest chair, the one slightly out of the circle, and waited. The woman leading the group wheeled in an enormous, boxy TV — VHS player and all. The sight tugged me back to my school days. “Wonder what we’re watching?” I whispered to the person beside me. “Trisha Goddard, maybe?” I joked — then froze. The woman next to me was Kylie. Of course. She had a knack for waltzing into every dream scene uninvited. She looked exhausted. Hollowed-eyed. Without a word, she rested her head on my lap. I hesitated, then brushed a strand of hair from her face. I wanted to say sorry — for the painting, for the silence, for whatever went unsaid in real life. But the TV flickered on before I could speak, and the dream flicked over to the next channel. Now I was in an old-fashioned department store with Mum. The kind that smells faintly of perfume samples and nostalgia. She stopped at a stall selling handwoven slippers, each pair more hideous than the last. “I’ll take these,” she said brightly. The stallholder — a sour-puss of a woman with a permanent scowl — snapped, “You can, but you’ll have to buy the treads to stitch them together with.” “Oh,” Mum said, thrown off balance. “I won’t bother then.” Mums comment didn’t quite land, setting the woman off on a mad rage. “Don’t start giving me that!” she shouted, face reddening. Mum dropped the slippers like they were on fire, and we walked away, the woman’s anger echoing behind us. Near the exit, a small wicker basket caught my eye — filled with tiny, colourful dildos. Of all things. I was turning one over in my hand, marvelling at the absurdity, when a voice behind me made me jump out of my skin. “I see you didn’t respond to the invite on WhatsApp,” said Liz, hands on hips, her little army of twenty-somethings behind her. I froze. No excuses came. “I’ll take that as a no, then,” she huffed, flouncing away with her baby lambs in toe. I shrugged and went back to rummaging through the basket. Another flick of the reel. I was walking through a sunlit park with my husband, Mat. The air was crisp, the ground carpeted in autumnal leaves. Everything felt peaceful — until it wasn’t. Up ahead, chaos — a fire engine tipped on its side, wheels spinning idly. Firemen sprawled across the path, holding hands, murmuring prayers. “What in Bob’s uncle—?” Mat whispered. Then a roar. A bang. Flames erupted, devouring the fire engine. People screamed for the firemen to move, but they didn’t. They stayed hand in hand, still murmuring, as the inferno swallowed them whole. The sight burned itself into my mind, horrifying and yet somewhat ironic. The scene dispersed along with the smoke and I was now sitting with my daughter, photo albums scattered across the coffee table. Each picture shimmered with motion, like tiny movie clips. We watched our past play itself back — birthdays, beaches, smiles caught mid-laugh. “Do you remember watching Robbie Williams in concert?” I asked. She nodded, eyes bright. “Yeah. I met him backstage. He spoke to me.” And suddenly, we were there — backstage, waiting for Robbie himself. The anticipation hummed like static. The curtain of reality peeled back — and in rolled Badger from Breaking Bad in a wheelchair. “I’m Robbie,” he said with a grin. No effort to disguise himself. No attempt to be the pop star. Just Badger, utterly unbothered. My heart sank. Phoebe’s going to be devastated, I thought. Instead, she shrieked and launched herself into his arms. Badger winked at me. And somehow, I laughed. Because maybe it didn’t matter who was behind the face. Maybe it never did. The dream began to dim, fading around the edges. The rain was back, hammering on glass. Alex’s hug. Kylie’s tired head on my lap. Mum’s confusion at the slipper stall. The firemen holding hands in the flames. All of it threaded together — tiny moments of failure and forgiveness. Things broken, smudged, left too late — yet somehow still held with love. Maybe dreams were just the mind’s way of trying to fix what we ruined. To repaint the canvas. To hold the hands of the people we lost in the fire. And then the static swallowed everything.