The Dreamer.
I.
Night is falling on suburbia, and the little town and all its little houses, is bathed in darkness. In a small little room of an upstairs apartment a man sits on his own and eats his supper at a small wooden table. After he has eaten he listens to the news on the radio for a while, and then retires to bed.
He switches of the electric light, and climbs into bed between the covers. He makes his pillow a comfortable headrest, and slowly starts to fall asleep in the dark room. As he sleeps in blissful slumber all manner of dreams come to him; those strange, and those beautiful.
The dreams float through his sleeping mind light a million wonders, and a million horrors. And somewhere deep in the night he dreams a woman’s face; a woman murdered. He sees her mutilated face clearly for while, and can discern every feature. Then his dream world changes shape once more, and moves on to other fantasies, both bizarre and appealing.
When the sun cracks the next day open, he awakens. As he gets up and prepares for the days work, the only dream he can clearly remember from the night before, is the face of the murdered woman. This puzzles him for a while, but he goes down to the postal service and starts his days work of sorting out mail in the mail room, and the day starts to pass its uneventful way as it did each day.
He worked his shift and went home to his dreary evening routine as he did each day. Then he settled down to sleep once more, but had no more strange dreams that night worth mentioning. The night passed by in pleasant sleep…
II.
The next morning he watched the early morning news on the television while he had breakfast. It was an old, semi-broken black-and-white portable set, and the sound was not to good. Nonetheless he sat and watched while he ate.
The oil price was rising steadily, and there was a lot of politics on the box, as usual. Just before the end of the news, a photograph of a murder victim came on the screen. The police where looking for help in locating any possible leads or suspects in the case. He looked closely, and yes surely, it was the woman of the nightmare he had had the night before.
He pondered all these strange occurrences on his way to work. He was a lonely and inhibited man by nature, and did not confide in any person easily. Yet as he walked to work and thought through all the questions in his mind, he decided to discuss it with the only two people he was fairly close to at work. They were both subordinates, and mail sorters like himself, and they worked each day in the same large room sorting out mail.
Yes, he would tell them what happened to him and hear what they make of it, he thought to himself and walked a little faster down the pavement towards his workplace.
III.
The two men’s names were Jack Stone and Oliver Farthingham. They came in after he had started work that morning, as he was early that day. Soon however they fell to work beside him on the sorting machines, and started the days work of arranging and sorting out the mail.
As the morning progressed he fell to telling them of the dream he had had, and of the murdered woman on the television. The other two men only discussed the possibility meekly and in a uninterested way for a short while, before tactfully changing the subject.
There was no interest to be found in his tale he realized, and dropped the subject thereafter. Never again did he tell another of the dream that he had had. Work continued as ever, and that meant sorting out the mail while the machines ran endlessly.
IV.
Oscar walked down at the riverside lost deep in his own thoughts. The river ran by silent and serenely, a dark band of gently flowing water. A bird flew by swiftly in the breeze and disappeared among the trees. Yellow leaves were falling onto the ground, and into the water.
He kept on walking and thinking, and the river kept on flowing by him…
