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Dan hears the door to his building shut with a click behind him. He walks down the three steps onto the street. He’s in the back seat of a taxi, the destination a vague concept in the back of his mind. There’s a man sitting next to him. He thinks the man says something and Dan hears himself reply but he isn’t sure what the conversation is about.
The man’s face is blurry and out of focus; no distinct features, except for the dark hair and black rimmed glasses. There’s a familiarity there, like Dan should know this person.
The car is moving, or maybe just the outside is, between buildings and trees and gardens, moving faster, and faster, and faster. There’s a loud noise, everything goes black.
And then Dan wakes up.
His eyes fly open. He’s laid on his back, staring at the ceiling, chest heaving. He closes his eyes and tries to retake control of his breathing. Steady breaths, in and out. The room is still fairly dark, barely a hint of morning making it through his curtains.
It isn’t the first time, not even the first time this week. This particular Dream isn’t new either. He reaches over to check the time on his phone. Still an hour before he needs to wake up, so he settles back down, breathing slowly returning back to normal and he drifts off again.
-
Dan wakes up again but to his alarm this time. This time he didn’t have any dreams, good or bad. He’s glad.
Up until a year ago, he’d had dreams like any other normal person; a nonsensical mishmash of memories and experiences and anxieties. Sometimes they were good, occasionally bad. Mostly his dreams were a healthy amount of weird and frankly, he’s amazed at what his brain can come up with when it’s not burdened with the weight of consciousness.
But just over a year ago, he’d started to get Dreams, nearly every night for two weeks. Dreams, discerned from dreams by one common factor, a factor that has dark hair and black rimmed glasses. Dan doesn’t always remember the content of these Dreams, other times they feel so real they could almost be memories.
The Taxi Dream is a common one, and Dan’s least favourite. It always leaves him out of breath and exhausted for the rest of the day. He’d gone to the doctor about it, after the third time he’d fallen asleep at work. But he was just given sleeping tablets and told to keep a dream journal to think about what changes in his life might have triggered this, except nothing in his life had changed, not for several years in fact. He still worked the same shifts at the shop across town, he still lived alone in his flat, and he still had the same two friends he’s had the entire time he’s lived here.
After a couple more weeks, the Dreams gradually lessened to once or twice a week. But the strange thing, the thing he hasn’t told anyone, not even the doctor, is the man that appears in every single one of them. The Dreams themselves vary in type, subject, location, but somehow the same man is in all of them. Dan has come to accept this, although he found it rightfully strange at first. He’d done some research about recurring characters in dreams but didn’t find much. Mostly about people from your past but Dan didn’t recognise this man at all, mostly because he could never exactly remember his face once he’d woken up, just bits and pieces of features like the hair and the glasses.
One time, down a rabbit hole of research, he’d ended up on a website about psychic dreams. People had shared their experiences of dreaming about events that had come later true, saving their loved ones from near death experiences. One had talked about dreaming about meeting their wife the night before it had happened in real life. But Dan didn’t believe in any of that, that was all just coincidences that made the universe exciting.
The Dreams have become more frequent again, as of late.
Mid-morning sun lights up his room now, and combined with the time on his phone makes it impossible to excuse throwing the duvet back over his head and going back to sleep before his shift that starts in an hour.
The doorbell jingles to announce his entrance when he pushes open the door to the shop, just like it does for everyone who enters their cave of weird and wonderful knick-knacks, and he trudges inside 10 minutes late. There are several customers perusing the shelves so he waits until he’s behind the counter and throwing his coat into the back room before apologising to his boss, Alice, for his tardiness.
Alice just hums sceptically, used to Dan’s antics, and turns back to serve the next customer. Dan knows it would be more of an issue if she weren't just as bad as him. He collapses onto the old two-seater and closes his eyes, taking a moment to catch his breath before heading back out.
-
Dan’s pushing his trolley around the aisles of the supermarket after work. He’s got his earphones in and he’s not paying very much attention so he doesn’t notice the man who’s stopped in front of him, standing on his tiptoes to reach for something at the very back of the top shelf. Dan nearly falls over his handle as it jolts to a stop with a metallic crash, followed by a squeal and a flailing of arms.
“Oh my god, I’m so sorry!” Dan blurts out at the exact same time as the man he’d nearly just knocked over, and who is now turning around to face him, a mortified look on his face.
“Sorry, are you okay?” Dan asks, sheepishly. He squeezes his hands around the handle of his trolley, palms clamming up against the plastic, itching to get away. His face heating up, as it always does when he embarrasses himself in front of other people, particularly people with as gorgeous blue eyes as this person.
The man smiles and gives an awkward, nervous laugh. “Of course, I’m always tripping over things.”
Dan laughs in reply, failing to mention that he hadn’t actually tripped. He apologises again and pushes his trolley around him, exiting the situation as quickly as possible to save himself from any further awkwardness. He lets out the breath he’d been holding once he’s made it to the next aisle and finishes up his shopping in record time lest he run into the man again.
Dan’s still thinking about the encounter later that day, as he often is after he makes a fool of himself in public. Particularly, he’s thinking about the gorgeous blue eyes and how it may not be the worst thing in the world if they ever met again.
*
This one always starts in a car, or more precisely a taxi. A man Phil doesn’t know will get in and sit in the back seat beside him. It’s always the same man, at least it’s always a man with the same brown curls and the same soft face but the rest of his features are out of focus and kind of blurry, the way people always are in dreams. But Phil knows it is always the same person. He will say something and Phil will reply, though he isn’t sure what the conversation is about. Then there’s a loud noise and everything goes black. And Phil wakes up.
His eyes fly open then immediately squeeze shut against the bright light of the still rising sun streaming in through his windows. Phil lives near the top of his building and likes to watch the sun set over the buildings and the twinkling lights of the city skyline as he lays in bed, so his curtains are almost never closed. This routine is to the detriment of morning Phil however, who presses the heels of his hands into his aching eyes then sits up and reaches for his glasses.
Not all of Phil’s Dreams are this dramatic, mostly they are set in his childhood home which he’d recently had to say goodbye to permanently when his parents moved. Sometimes they’re set at work or in the city or a mixture of all of these things. But all of them have the same thing in common.
He ponders this, not for the first time, as slightly too hot water hits his back and pours down his body. It started about a year ago, when he’d first moved to London for work. He can’t really say any more precisely than that because at first he hadn’t even noticed there was anything to notice. What with the stress of the move and having practically no furniture and only just enough money to make rent, he’d just put it down to some kind of weird manifestation of the anxiety and stress of that time. Looking back now, he probably should have been more freaked out that there was a person Phil had never met appearing in every one of his Dreams. Maybe he’d taken it as a kind of comfort; a constant in the midst of so much change. He’d been sad the first time he had a normal dream again.
*
Phil’s had a long day at work and the thing he most wants to do is get back home, put on some pjs and have a nap, that is until an idea pops into his head and an invisible force all but drags him into the store.
He’s reaching up to grab something from the top shelf when he feels something bump into the trolley he was using to balance himself. He hears a shriek leave his mouth as he waves his arms about to keep from toppling. He turns around to apologise at the same time as the person who’d bumped into him. The words catch in his throat and he feels the tips of his ears go red and hopes the stranger doesn’t notice.
It’s probably a good thing the man scurries away as quickly as he does; Phil has a habit of embarrassing himself in front of other people, especially people as gorgeous as this man had been. Phil takes a moment to compose himself, as well as waiting for the man to get ahead enough that they won’t bump into each other again (no matter how literally) and almost forgets what he wanted in the first place before moving on again.
Phil’s replaying the interaction still later when he’s finally sat in his pjs, watching a movie, surrounded by the snacks he’d picked up at the store. He can still see the image of the man, rosy patch on his jaw, wide startled eyes and thinks maybe it wouldn’t be such a terrible thing if they did happen to meet again one day.
-
Dan almost calls in sick when he wakes up the next day. He’s never had a Dream so intense. He pulls the duvet fully over his head and lets the warmth that cocoons him settle his mind, lets the remnants of the dream wash over and through him, taking deep breaths as he does.
This was a new Dream.
He’s in a public space; there’s people all around him. They seem to glide through the air as one giant mass rather than walk but they never touch him. Dan is moving through them, slowly but in one direction, with purpose. The air is thick with noise, the ambient chatter of a large crowd but also a deeper noise. A familiar rumbling. All of it together is almost too much to bare and he just wants to clamp his hands over his ears to make it stop but he doesn’t, he just keeps moving like he couldn’t stop if he tried. The crowds seem to part like the parting of the sea and Dan stops.
He’s stood a few feet away from Dan, eyes down at his phone and when he looks up it’s like Dan has been punched in the gut and that’s when he woke up.
Dan’s taken himself to the shower. He’s massaging the remaining shampoo into his scalp with his fingertips, like he has been for the last five minutes, replaying this new dream over and over in his mind. His eyes are closed and his head is tipped back as the water pours over him and down his face. Dan is positive it’s the same man that has been living in his dreams for the last year. In all this time he has looked the exact same, the features Dan can make out anyway. Except this time. This time, he looked younger, and the dark hair hung down in front of his face, not unlike the hair style Dan had as a teen. And his eyes…
Dan nearly chokes on the water when he blurts out “Blue!” into the steamed up, empty bathroom. He splutters and turns off the water, shampoo long since rinsed out, and grabs his towel from the radiator. He buries his face in the warm fluffiness of it and grins. He’s completely naked and his hair is dripping water all across the carpet but he races into his bedroom and grabs the dream journal, opens the next new page and writes in big letters: BLUE EYES!!!
*
Phil tells his family a lot but he’s never told them about this. He wouldn’t know how to do it anyway, “Hey, have you ever had a recurring dream person? No not a recurring dream, a recurring dream person .”
He wishes he had told them now, because he has nobody to share this new revelation with. He hadn’t been able to move, looking down at a phone he hasn’t even owned in nearly ten years, and when he’d looked up he’d come face to face with the man, or maybe boy was a more fitting description this time. He felt a rush of emotion and then he’d woken up.
Now, Phil’s getting ready for work but there’s two words going around and around in his brain: Brown eyes. This man has brown eyes. How had he never noticed that before? Long brown, pin straight hair in a style Phil had had himself in his younger years, had been covering one of the them, but it still felt like such an obvious feature he’d missed until now.
-
So, now there’s a face. An actual real face, with actual face features and not just the general concept of a face. It’s a face that Dan can now picture every little inch of, right down to the freckles on his nose. There’s the face Dan’s has become used to, as well as the young, floppy-haired face that Dan has only met once more since that first time in what Dan can now say was a train station. There have been in between faces as well, faces with shorter but still floppy hair, faces more mature with only a hint of that softness of youth. Dan has memorised them all. The journal beside his bed has little sketches he’s made of each of them. He would never claim to be an artist but for his eyes only it serves a way to remember the beauty of them all individually.
Dan has taken up an aversion to taxis since the Taxi Dream started. Which is unfortunate, because he is also lazy by nature and would take one everywhere he went, before at least. Now, Dan uses his legs and walks most places that he can, and tubes to the rest. It has done wonders for his health but today Winter is hitting hard. He’d woken to the sound of rain on his windows, hammering on all sides like the weather was telling him he should just take the day off work, stay inside, where it’s warm and safe and dry. Unfortunately, the weather doesn’t have London bills to pay so he orders a taxi.
It’s just his luck that the rain stops as soon as his phone buzzes that his taxi has arrived. He zips up his coat to his chin and shoves his feet in his shoes. The taxi is waiting right in front of the apartment building. The door closes with a click behind him and he hops down the three steps onto the street. He’s suddenly hit with a weird sense of deja vu as he opens the taxi door and climbs into the back seat. Somehow, Dan knows there’s going to be someone already sat there a second before he even sees them. He groans silently to himself, his hope to avoid people for as long as he can before he has to put on his customer service mask is dashed.
The car moves off as soon as he’s pulled the door closed. He fastens his belt then steals a glance at the man next to him. He’s looking away, out the window, thankfully, so Dan takes a second to take him in, at which point Dan gasps. He’s wearing a thick black winter coat, it matches his dark hair and black rimmed glasses, and even backlit against the London scene Dan can see that it suits the man’s pale complexion well. Dan appreciates a good styling theme. He has one leg crossed over the other, his hanging foot pressed lightly against the car door to keep it steady and his hands are fiddling with themselves on his knee. His jeans and shoes are also both black.
Dan realises he’s been caught staring a second too late. He looks up and a pair of blue eyes are smiling back at his behind their glasses. Dan tries to look away but… he can’t. He’s frozen in place, his eyes just a touch too wide to be normal, his jaw slack. An expression of something Dan can’t read passes across the man’s own face before it’s replaced by a neutral, friendly smile.
“Good morning.” The man says.
Dan opens his mouth to reply, but no words come out. He clears his throat. “‘Morning.” He manages with a smile and nod.
“Awful weather.”
Dan nods again. “Yeah. Terrible.” He can hear his flat tone. Can feel himself still staring.
Conversation fades and the man faces forward again. Dan manages to pull his eyes away too.
The driver will have the addresses of both of their destinations, and presumably his is somewhere not too far from Dan’s seeing as how Dan was picked up along the way. So it’s odd, not least because the rain had just started back up again, when the man suddenly leans forward and asks the driver to drop him off just ahead, just before a set of green traffic lights. The driver obliges and the man thanks him, before turning around to give Dan a curt nod as he gets out.
Dan watches as the man stands on the edge of the curb as they drive away and up to the lights that are now red. Dan watches him watch the car, which is why Dan misses the screech of tyres of the skidding van as it pulls out too fast from the junction across from them, right into the space they would have been had they been even 2 seconds sooner. Dan lets go of the breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding, the driver curses loudly, about bad London drivers and how ‘e almost ‘it us!!
Behind them, the man pulls up his hood, buries his hands in his pockets and carries on his way to work.
*
Phil isn’t sure why he’d done that, but he’d never been more thankful that he did. The moment was like deja vu. And those eyes, the curls, the soft face. He could have just said it then, but then the man would have probably just looked at him even more strangely. You’re the man from my dreams. It sounds like some sort of line.
-
The moment it finally clicks for Dan is like having ice cold water thrown in his face. It’s actually more like a blast of hot air from the AC when he opens the door to the shop. They’d decided to turn it on as soon as the weather took a turn. The doorbell rings like a light bulb in cartoons that flash above the character’s head when they get an idea.
“You’re letting all the warm out, Dan.” Alice calls across the shop floor. There’s no customers inside at the moment, must be a slow day (though every day seems to be a slow day, Dan really isn’t sure how the even survive being in the centre of London with the business they get but Dan isn’t going to argue if it means he has a job).
He’s still stood in the doorway, holding the door open, hot air blowing down the back of his neck. Alice raises an eyebrow at him as she rearranges the front desk. Dan shakes his head, “Right, right, sorry.”
“You ok, honey? Look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”
-
The third time Dan meets the man from his dreams in real life, (the supermarket, the taxi; it took his entire shift to remember that first one), is in the cinema. He’s going to see the new IT movie, alone. Which, frankly, is a recipe for a weeks worth of nightmares and a skyrocketing electricity bill, but he’s nothing if not a self-proclaimed masochist.
He buys himself a large bucket of popcorn and finds his seat at the back of the theatre, right in the centre, eye level with the screen so he doesn’t get a crick in his neck. He’s twenty minutes early to the screening (miracle number one), but only because he’d misread the timings. There are already a handful of people in the screen when he walks in however, but only one on his row.
Dan takes his seat and begins to get comfortable. He puts his drink and popcorn in the holders provided in the arm rests, then takes off his coat and lays it across his lap as a blanket. He’d worn a thick jumper because he knows this screen is always a touch too cold. It’s a black fluffy jumper with a double-sided sequin skull on it. He picks his popcorn back up, takes a handful and shovels it into his mouth. He chews and keeps his eyes on the still blank screen, hand absent-mindedly stroking the sequins up and down.
The lights are halfway dim and he’s aware he’s being watched. He takes another handful of popcorn and glances at the man about five seats to his left out of the corner of his eye. He repeats the action once more, this time fully turning his head to look.
Dark hair, black rimmed glasses, blue eyes. Full bottom lip. And all of it is being directed straight at Dan (miracle number two). Dan tips his head back on his seat and smiles up at the ceiling. A cheeky, knowing smile, like he’s just got a joke the universe has been playing on him.
There’s movement next to him. Dan lifts his head back up and watches as the man gets up and sits back down next to Dan, this time leaving only one seat between them. He’s turned in his chair towards Dan, both elbows on the same arm rest, studying Dan’s face. In another situation, Dan would say it’s creepy.
Dan knows what the question is going to be before he even says it.
*
Phil can’t help it. He can’t let this go a third time. If he doesn’t do anything he’s going to spend the next 2 hours and 50 minutes with his mind focused on the man five seats over from him, and then the rest of his life wondering.
He gets up and moves closer, opens his mouth to ask…
“Yes.”