Excerpt: Dreamer Men

Jim looked around. The world had died. The sun sat in the sky, burning the earth slowly. The air seemed dull and auburn. The trees were browning and reddening, but that was normal. The rest of the world had seemed to have passed on. Jim didn’t hear a single animal producing their music. The wind was blowing slowly, and it was deafening. Jim looked down and noticed he was a few thousand feet in the air and moving rapidly. This seemed normal to him at the time.
The landscape slowly passed below him. He didn’t know where he was headed but he knew it was important. He was soon flying closer to mountains. He knew he was far away from Houston now; Texas didn’t even describe the place he was for that matter. He was also descending, fast. He passed a sign that read: Welcome to Boulder, Colorado. Population: 1.
He’d done some reading on the city of Boulder, but that seemed to have been years ago. He had planned on going to the University of Colorado in boulder to complete his aeronautical engineering degree. He’d also known that the population of Boulder was greater than one, at least it was at some point in time. The sky was still pale and burnt orange, but with the stinging tinge of the chilled mountain air. This city seemed to be deserted as well, but eventually he had seen what he had come for.
Jim hovered into a mansion, straight through the locked front doors. There was a college student sitting at the table, eating ranch style beans out of a can. He was stressed out. His eyes were hazel, and look as if they had recently seen more than his fair share of trauma. He was rather short and his clothes were ragged. He hadn’t shaved in weeks.
The stranger finished his can of beans and threw the can out the busted window beside him. He proceeded to open up a spiral notebook that was sitting next to him on the table. There were drawings. It was a visual dream journal; Jim had been hit with a brick of knowledge that told him so.
The first half of the journal seemed like rather normal dreams. There was Pictures of endless hallways, naked figures in front of a lecture hall, and interesting landscapes. The sitting college student kept flipping the pages. The pages grew bright with reds and oranges and blacks. Every page, every night, for the past few weeks had been covered in shades of those three colors. From the middle of the pages began to grow a shadowed figure. It was human, it seemed, and it looked very familiar to Jim. The student turned the page and began to draw.
Something in the house went Bzzt. The sound was just as familiar as the figure in the journal, but Jim couldn’t quite place his finger on it.

Bzzt. The world started to fade. Bzzt. Bzzt. Bzzt.
Jim jumped out of his bed, flinging comforters and bed sheets across the room.
“Bzzt. Bzzt.” Said the alarm clock.

“Shit”, Jim proclaimed, as reality, this reality, came back together piece by piece. The numbers on the buzzing machinery had quickly decided to make logical sense in his head. It was 9:45, and Jim was an hour and forty-five minutes late for pre-calculus.