What Is Real

I was sitting there, staring at the screen in the dark. Candice had gotten tired of waiting and had simply turned off the lights and gone up to bed. I had mumbled something about being right behind her at the time, but that was hours ago. It had been some time since I'd heard the familiar creek in the floor between us that told me she was still awake and tossing in the bed.

I didn't know why, but I was drawn to this image. There, on the screen in front of me, was what seemed to be a simple picture of an office building. An ad banner running down the side of the page promising that all the top companies were reading their magazine, and if I did too, my future was secure. I'm still not even sure what drew me to this particular ad. Out of all the flashy, dancing, singing, scantily clad ads which scream at me from every page to buy or try or wear or sell their product, this one seemed to grip me.

I began to wonder where this building was. What could possibly be going on there. What were the people who worked there doing now, in the middle of the night. Did they even know they were being photographed? Did they really read Business Investors Report, or was it just some stock image placed under some bold text to get my attention and lend the ad some air of credibility? The article I'd been reading about Elizaphan Ntakirutimana no longer interested me as I sat and stared and wondered.

Then I saw something. I wasn't even sure what it was exactly. Something about the ad seemed, different. Perhaps this was why it grabbed my focus originally. I couldn't even tell you now what I saw, but there was something there. Almost as if the image skipped, just briefly. Or like two images were trying to display themselves at once like when my lousy local digital cable would act up. For just a second I thought I could understand what I saw, but just as quickly it was fading from my mind, and the more I struggled to focus on it, the more my conscious mind wandered away. Soon it seemed like another distracting banner ad, and as I glanced at the clock I realized how long I'd left Candice upstairs alone. I shut off the computer and went up to bed.

My dreams that night were visceral. I don't normally have nightmares, but more and more lately I've been waking in the night, terrified of what I'd seen in my dreams. Not just me either, my wife was experiencing the same thing. I've had violent dreams for some time. I think it's too much spicy food. But these dreams were different. The images weren't violent. They were, wrong. As though I was experiencing something that almost made sense, but in some important, unnatural way was disturbing. Like seeing that little girls head spin around. It wasn't the zombies and the monsters that were waking me in the night to huddle close to my wife. It was something else. Something that seemed like it could invade my waking world too if I let some part of me stick out too far from the covers. More and more lately.

I got up the next day feeling like shit. I knew I hadn't slept well, but I also knew I needed to exercise before work. Thirty minutes on the bike, then forty-five minutes of cardio followed by the weight routine. I used to be an athlete. Now I was fat. Not even chubby, or out of shape, or soft. I knew what needed to be done. So for a while I'd been getting up every morning and working out. But I just didn't feel right.

Those dreams. They were so vivid. The part where I ripped off my attackers face and stabbed him in the brain until I vomited. That image stayed with me. In the daylight, it was silly. I know enough about anatomy to know your brain isn't free floating beneath the skin, but still, I felt sick just thinking about it. And the way he taunted me. And being stabbed and cut over and over again.

Candice wasn't feeling well either. She also complained about bad dreams, but didn't want to talk about it. I tried turning on some tv while I worked out, but after she left, everything seemed disquieting. The house seemed too empty. The light too artificial. Even with the highlights from last nights AFC match up on the television I couldn't shake this feeling. Like the world was somehow less right today. I don't suppose football highlights on Friday from a Thursday night game helped much.

I showered, took care of the dog, and went to work. It was going to be a long day, but I hoped for a busy one. By the time I got to work the voice on the am radio had erased most of the lingering feelings from that morning, leaving only a subtle aftertaste in the back of my mind. I drove into the parking lot and parked in my usual space. As I grabbed my things and headed inside, everything seemed normal again. The smell, the muffled sunlight coming in through the tinted windows of the lobby, the sounds of people answering phones and making appointments. It seemed like another normal day.

Sometime after lunch I was sitting at my desk going over some reports that Katie had emailed me. She wanted me to fact check some of the information they were basing their fourth quarter projections on so I clicked over to my web interface and started taking notes. It seemed like things were mostly in order so I didn't expect to take very long working on it. After this, the rest of the day was pretty much empty. Maybe I'd check out early and see if I could meet Candice for dinner. We needed some time out. I thought a nice meal and a movie might be just the thing to take our minds off the stress we'd been under.

That's when I saw it again. Right out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the flicker. This time it was an ad encouraging me to register to vote. With the elections coming up, both parties had their rock the vote campaigns in full swing, and this was just another mindless pop up ad promising that I could change the world with my voice. But just for a second it wasn't the senator's face on the image. It was someone else.

It was gone too quickly for me to be sure, and at first I thought I was just seeing things. It had been a hard week. The jeep had broken down and we'd had to move some money around to afford to get it fixed. Maybe it was just stress making my mind act up late at night and at the end of a busy work day. If I had anything else to do that afternoon, maybe I would've ignored the whole thing. Maybe one more deadline would have driven the idea from my mind completely, but instead I flipped over to a search engine and typed in, “banner ads images flicker.”

You can imagine the kind of worthless returns that got me. Page after page of garbage. Nothing interesting, just more offers to buy advertising space on banner ads, or list my product with linking companies. I was about to give up when I saw one foreign language result.

It was on the twelfth page of search results and I couldn't understand a word of it. I though it was in Portuguese. I clicked on the little link next to it that said, “translate into english.” What popped up was some kind of web forum.

The forum seemed to be a simple cork board with no formatting scripts at all. Even translated into english it was hard to follow because the translation was broken and inaccurate and the lack of formatting meant some posts ran way off the page while others seemed like the struts were off and the lines of text would overlap. I couldn't find any information about where it was hosted and for the most part, it seemed to be a discussion of how to make small wooden puzzle boxes. There was one post towards the bottom though which caught my attention.

What seemed to me to be a more well known poster on the site had included a link to another site in his reply. As far as I could tell, someone had asked him about buying some special tools, and he was directing that person to a site in South Korea. There were several responses after that, but towards the bottom of the page I saw this one.

“The site I saw it what ad? Flicker on did and off. Something there was not.You see of it? Anyone else, you saw what we see?”

I didn't know if any of this had to do with what I thought I'd seen, but I followed the link to the South Korean site. This time I was completely unable to comprehend what was on the site, and other than some pictures of wood cutting tools and drills, I was lost. I didn't see any ads that acted strangely though, so I closed the site and flipped over to a tech support forum I'd used recently when my computer had been acting up. I quickly fired off a simple post about what I'd seen, “Anyone notice weird banner ads? Keep seeing ghost images on my screen,” and then gave up. I figured I'd check back later tonight and see if anyone had any ideas.

In the meantime, I finished off the report for Katie and powered down my office. I decided dinner and a movie was just what the doctor ordered and dropped off the report with my notes in Katie's office on the way out.

That night, we had a lovely Italian dinner and watched a ridiculous movie about two people who meet one night in a cafe and then part ways without exchanging information, only to search for each other five years later when both their marriages fall apart. Only in Hollywood could such a story find fertile ground. In case you're curious, they find each other in the end only to realize they've been almost running into each other for years.

When we got home, we were happy and at peace. We didn't even turn on the tv or computer as we went up to bed. By the time we fell asleep, we were both too exhausted to dream at all.

The next day she had to work, so I got up, worked out, and went downstairs. I grabbed a cup of coffee and turned on the news and the computer. Corporate malfeasance, political corruption, war overseas, nothing interesting. I surfed for a while on the internet, checking sports scores and reading about Lew Rockwell. I decided to buckle down and return some emails so I pulled up my account. After deleting the junk offering me free sex videos and twenty million in foreign lottery winnings I had an email from the tech support forum. It was informing me that someone had replied to my post. I clicked on the link and read the following message.

“How are you sleeping?” -anon.

How was I sleeping? Pretty well I thought, as I reflected on last nights activities and the restful feeling I woke to this morning. Thanks for nothing anon. Stupid anonymous posters. The internet is the greatest thing to happen to civilized and uncivilized man alike. We can create, share, and educate, and they can snipe, grief, and generally annoy from the comfort and relative anonymity of their couch. Delightful.

But hardly the response I'd hoped for. I didn't even reply. The following message asked me to run a quick HijackThis scan and install some anti-malware to remove any files which might be corrupting my video drivers. This seemed more useful, so I quickly followed the posters advice, posted my logfiles in a reply, and went back to my email.

A short time later, I received another email informing me that there were more posts on the web forum, so I clicked over again, only to read this,

“Do you have nightmares? Could you post a logfile of your dreams?” -anon.

My first reaction was to use the ignore feature on the forum to block the poster, but as I was about to click on the ignore tab, I reflected on my dreams recently.

My wife leaves me stranded in a complex twisted system of highways and overpasses to make my way home on foot alone.

At a party a man confronts me and tries to lure me away from my family who are trapped in broken vehicle.

A knife weilding attacker taunts and assaults me in a running battle through an empty city at night.

A little girl with no face comes into my home during the night and stands at the foot of the bed and watches my wife and I sleep.

My dog becomes rabid and I spend hours trapped in my room trying to barricade the door to keep her out.

The dead move among us slowly turning more and more people, and though they are clearly around all the time, no one seems to notice.

Instead of ignore, I clicked reply.

“We all have nightmares. What's your point?”

A few minutes later I reloaded the page and saw that there was already a reply to my post.

“When you see your nightmares in your waking world, will you question your sanity, or the world's?” -anon

At this point, I didn't feel like playing anymore, so I closed the site and decided to go out for lunch.

I sat there, alone, in the corner of the little Japanese restaurant listening to the harp player play. It was beautiful. Peaceful. I wrapped my hands around the small stone cup and felt the warmth from my tea. This was how I wanted to spend every moment of every day. Usually, this brought me peace I would lament until I was able to return. This time, it seemed only to distract me from what I'd read.

“When you see your nightmares in your waking world, will you question your sanity, or the world's?”

I didn't want to confront that. I returned home, without having tasted my lunch.

I walked into my home and shut the door. As I turned towards the wine cabinet to put my keys and my wallet in the drawer I saw it again, only this time it wasn't on a computer screen. Just out of the corner of my eye, I saw a flicker. Just a flicker. The kind of thing you think you see sometimes, but convince yourself isn't real. Any other day I would have ignored it. Just a reflection in the glass over the fireplace I thought. Surely just that.

Any other day I would have believed it. But that day, something else was on my mind. I wasn't ready to ignore anything strange that day. So I sat down in the living room and started looking for it.

I sat and stared around the room, waiting for anything around me to flicker, sure that something would. I sat there for an hour, staring as hard as I could at everything around me. I saw nothing. Finally, exhausted and frustrated, I leaned back into the couch.

That's when I saw it again. It was there, on the edge of my vision, like a shadow in the hall. This time I relaxed and let my eyes wander. I didn't stare at anything, I just let my eyes drift out of focus.

It was everywhere. I could see the shadows all around me. At first it was terrifying. What were these things? For a moment I panicked and tried to shrink in on myself as much as I could, afraid to let any of those shadows reach me.

But they didn't try. They just flickered there, just beyond what I could see clearly. I couldn't identify anything specific, they just seemed to be gone whenver I looked for them and there whenever I stopped. I turned on my computer and logged back on to the web forum.

My post was still there. I hit reply again.

“What can I see when I let my eyes wander? What are the shadows at the edge of my sight?”

I reloaded the page immediately but there were no additional posts. I tried waiting for a few minutes, but anxiety pushed me to post again.

“Anon, are you there?” I reloaded the page again.

This time there was a reply.

“Have you begun to question yet?” anon had posted again.

“What's happening? Who are you?”

“Do you want to know what you're seeing.”

Now that was a question. I did. I thought I did. Then again, what I'd experienced so far was terrifying. What more could I learn. How much more terrifying could it become?

“What am I seeing?” I needed to know.

“Imagine a thousand points of light. A million. More than you could ever count. Imagine that those points of light make up every image you see. Imagine if someone else could manipulate those points of light, to manipulate what you see. Or what you think you see.”

“Do you mean I'm seeing some kind of illusion? Some kind of hologram?” It wasn't making any sense.

“No. What you see is real. If what you see changes, what is real changes.”

“Then what are the shadows? What is the flicker I keep seeing? What are the nightmares?”

“The shadows are the rough edges of the image they've put in front of your eyes. The flicker is your mind refusing to believe a lie. The nightmares are real.” And with that I felt something...pull.

The room seemed to twist around me, and suddenly I was somewhere else. I was strapped into a chair, with a wall of televisions directly in front of me. My eyes were watering and I tried to blink them, but something was holding them open. I tried to reach up to feel them, but my arms were strapped to the chair. I tried to scream, but my mouth was gagged. On the televisions in front of me I saw my days playing out.

On one I was eating at a chinese restaurant.

On another I was reading a book before bed.

On another I was working on the reports Katie had emailed to my office.

Day after day was played before me on the screen. On screen after screen.

“So you've awakened. We wondered how long it would take this time. The program seems to have lasted a little longer. What was it this time? The flickering?” Two men had entered the room from behind me, they began to undo my restraints while one of them questioned me about the experience.

I began to remember.

“Yes, it was the flickering again.” I had volunteered for this. “But that just got me curious. It was the nightmares that fed my fear. I would have overlooked the flickering and the shadows except for the nightmares.” To save my family.

“Yes, well, there isn't much we can do about that yet. We've tried filling your days with pleasant images to soften the nightmares, but they seem to break through over time.”

“There was someone in there, someone who made me remember. Who pulled me out of the program. Who was it?” My family had been attacked, it was all coming back now.

“It was you again. Every time you start to realize the program is there, you search for an answer. Once it was a priest. Another time it was a radio talk show host. This time a computer user. Each time they explain the program to you and you wake up. Are you ready to try again?”

I thought about my family.

Our world was not a safe place. I knew where I was now. Inside a hardened facility, safe from the things we'd created outside. We hadn't meant to, but somewhere along the way we'd gotten greedy, and now our whole world was paying a price.

It had begun as an attempt to make dreams come true, literally. We had developed a program which could project your dreams onto a monitor. It was used for therapy at first. As holographic technology advanced, we developed a way to interact with your dreams. A kind of lucid dreaming you could live in. It was supposed to be a new horizon.

But all dreams aren't pleasant ones. By the time we realized what we'd done, there were nightmares among us. It wasn't as easy as just turning off the machines. The program was supposed to be self sustaining. It was supposed to live on. And so it did.

They were out there. The girl with no face. The family trapped inside the abandoned car. The knife wielding attacker. And worse. Things no one should dream. We'd learned the hard way to dream about happy things, but no one could stop the nightmares outside, so we came up with a new plan.

We'd brought our dreams into our world, what if we could go live in their's? What if we could escape this place where we weren't safe anymore, and go to one where we were? The program was supposed to work, but somehow, our brains kept refusing it. So I volunteered. For my family's sake. They weren't safe here. So time and time again, they sent me into that place. Where I had a wife and a dog, and I tried to make the program work. It should work.

But each time I had learned the truth.

“What you see is real.”

It should work.

“The shadows are the rough edges of the image they've put in front of your eyes.”

“Yes, I'm ready. Send me back.”

“The flicker is your mind refusing to believe a lie.”

It should work.

“The nightmares are real.”

But it doesn't.