What Sophie Sought
an excerpt

I didn`t dare open my eyes. The glare of the sun burning under my eyelids felt more real than ever before. The insole of my trainers heated up almost instantly, and I very quickly started to feel horribly damp under my clothes. I knew from the feel of them that these weren`t the clothes I had been wearing in the kitchen. They were made of linen. Incidentally, I have managed to go through most of my life since this event without wearing linen again. I hate the stuff. I don`t understand why anyone would voluntarily make themselves look like some sort of messianic figure, which is what linen does to people.
I tried to sink to the ground in horror and despair, but the sand was too hot to sit on, so I had to put my head in my hands while resting on my haunches. Looking back, I guess it was kind of ridiculous to go to all that effort of maintaining a balancing act for the sake of indulging in my own depression, when I could have just given up on feeling sorry for myself and got on with the inevitable mountain-climbing. But if I am kind and fair to myself, I can admit that it`s important to let yourself feel afraid or upset sometimes. After all, if it was someone else who was curled up crying, I`d treat them with kindness. Why not be kind to myself about this?
Even given that I was indulging my sense of pain, I wasn`t being particularly kind to myself at that time. I felt inadequate to deal with this. I kept hoping that I would start to feel Sophie`s hand on my cheek, but it never happened. All I felt on my cheek was the burning sun. I willed myself to wake up. Wake up. Now. Find the kitchen floor below you, open your eyes to the oil-stained ceiling, feel the pain in your bum from impacting against the lino, come back to reality. Soon. Now. Wake up.
It didn`t work. I was here for the long haul, it seemed. I wondered what would come next - a bombing, a sandstorm, an athsma attack, or maybe something completely different?
I decided tentatively to open my eyes. I could see a lot of sand; more sand that I had been able to see in the previous two dreams. I could see as far as the horizon this time. I couldn`t see any unexploded bombs, and the mountains were a distant shape on the horizon. I could also see an enormous, blue sky above me. Even when I had been on holiday to hotter countries that England, I had never seen a sky as sublime as this one. It was a bright blue that seemed to hold incredible depth beyond it. Not one cloud could be seen, no were there any jetplane trackmarks. Just endless, passionate blue.
For all the time I would spend in the desert and on the mountain, this sky would alternate between offering me hope and taunting me. In the former case I saw it as kind of perfect beauty that seemed to exist beyond my moment-to-moment existence, that watched over me and protected me. The the latter case it still seemed to be watching over me, still seemed as eternal and beautiful as ever, but I felt that by extension it must be the cause of all my torment. Each time I asked the question, ‘Why?’ I directed it above, to that horrid beast that was hanging over us.
I stood up, and immediately felt that someone was behind me. When I turned around I found that Sophie and David were there. They had probably been there all along, ever since I first found myself in this desert. Wasn`t that what Sophie told me? That we were all in it together, and I was just unaware of the fact?
“The mountain,”Sophie said, pointing at the dark bluish shapes on the horizon. “We have to be on our way. There`s no time to lose.”
“What`s this all about?”asked David, clearly feeling irritated by the heat. “How do we get out of here?”
“I don`t know the answer to either of those questions,” said Sophie, who was already striding ahead. She didn`t need to strain her voice because there was no sound here other than our footsteps and our words. “I know that all of this is important somehow. I don`t think we can get out of here, and I don`t think we should.”
“Important how?”one of us asked. She said that it was difficult for her to explain, and that she just knew the way things were in this place and that she wanted us to trust her. So we kept on walking towards the mountains.
Hours upon hours went by. I didn`t believe that the first hour had really passed - I thought it must just be a trick of my imagination and that mere minutes had passed. This was a dream, after all. Still, the fourth and fifth hours were much harder to cast doubt upon. Huge amounts of time really were passing by. The mood swings I experienced at this time were very similar. At first I didn`t believe I was really having mood swings - I thought I was going through the motions of some linear set of feelings that would keep on producing new experiences until eventually I was happy. I started off frightened, then curious, then irritable, then numb, and I figured there was more to come. However, by the time we decided to camp down for the night I had already cycled through these feelings five times over. There seemed to be no escape.
The decision to settle ourselves down to sleep was a strange one. As far as David and I were concerned, we were already asleep, and should have woken up long ago. Sophie rather sensibly insisted that if we hadn`t woken up yet then we weren`t likely to for a long while, and we might as well get some sleep in this reality so that we keep our bodies in good shape. What she said sounded pragmatic and sensible, and I of course agreed to it because I was exhausted.
Yet as I fell asleep I couldn`t help but wonder what all this meant. What did she mean by a long while? What would it be like to go to sleep within a dream? On top of this, what did it mean to keep our bodies in good shape? Was this the same body as the one that lay unconscious in the kitchen? Was I inhabiting a different body now, one that exists only as a product of my mind? Wasn`t all this happening in Sophie`s mind? After all, she knew far more about this world that we did, and she was the one with the snakes. Was I a figment of Sophie`s imagination?
It occurred to me that what Sophie had just told us boiled down to this: the bodies we inhabited in her imagination were subject to the same rules as our bodies in real life. We had to sleep to have enough energy to go on into the next day. I had started feeling hungry about two hours ago. If you cut us, will we not bleed?