The Station, Part 27 cont.

I think it’s the dreams. I have been trying to push away the images and the feelings I remember having. It’s all still there. So vivid. More so than any dream, even the last one. It’s more akin to a recent and profound memory than a dream really. I didn’t want to talk about it before. It just seemed silly at the time. Did I talk in my sleep by any chance? The comm has been open non-stop so if some of my recent transmissions have a wholly nonsensical, I must apologize. Guess it would be amusing on your end. Go ahead. Laugh. I can take it. I’m a big boy. But if you did hear incoherent babbling, it certainly wasn’t so in my dream. To say the least, it was wonderful. It’s like I know what is to be this winged being that flew among the many others of his kind. We ate fruit that tasted better than anything I’ve ever known. I still know that taste even now. How can that be? It was all a product of my imagination of course. Had to be.

There’s maybe two days left of air in the suit. And I must tell you, I could rip off the fucking thing here and now. Seeing my two guides in their comfortable nakedness just makes that feeling stronger. I could just take it off and wander with them and be all the happier for it. Just what am I worried about anyway? Viral or bacterial contamination. Come on, even if that were true, that’s not an automatic death sentence it? Even if I did come down with something, by the time I find Frontier, I could give myself a powerful general antibiotic that’ll kill just about every microorganism in my body. It’ll make shit like there’s no tomorrow, but I’ll at least be alive to tell about it. Yeah, but who am I telling? I don’t even know if you’re there still, or ever were. Enough of this line of thinking huh? I can’t explain my sudden downturn in mood. Yes I can. I’ve only been skirting around the issue because I don’t want to face it. Then let’s get real. I’m probably not going to find the station in time. I’m going to be forced to remove the suit or suffocate. I’ll be in true contact with this place for the first time. I’ll feel the temperature and humidity with my own skin. I’ll smell the air with my own nose and hear the calls of unknown things without the filtered reality of my suit’s speakers. I’m terrified of that. I really am. Even through the visor, I see a less than real view of the world around me. Everything I have experienced is checked the artificiality. Oddly enough, the most real thing I have captured has been what’s restricted to subconscious. Yes, the dreams.

I’ve never, ever, experienced such richness in detail during sleep. Sure I’ve had my share of nightmares, even a few that had me waking up in that well-known cold sweat. But even those horrible images, even when they were new, would have paled in comparison to my recent dreams. Even hours later, I still recall the feeling of wind under wings that were never mine. The joy of reunion with strange beings I have never known. The taste of fruits that I have never known to exist. But it just hit me. I have known this dream, in way. Days before, and you would know this as well, I came across this place. The first tunnel. The end of the first tunnel led to a place with a valley. That valley was covered in what I could only describe then as glowing mushrooms. But there was something else there too. At the time I was too bewildered to do much else other than turn back. Above it all was a mist enshrouded sky. That’s what it appeared to be. Yes, now I remember more. Sounds came from those mists, maybe above them. I had no interest in discovering what the origins of those sounds were. I think I may know now. But that defies logic. I can’t just know things like that. More likely it’s my mind trying to work out this already impossible situation. Put things into an order. Who am I kidding? There is much more at work here than mere dreams.