The Dreamer's Testament - part 2

Elena doesn't sleep that night. She reads straight through until dawn, compelled by something she doesn't understand. Horror and fascination mixed together, impossible to separate.

The journals become more explicit. Daniel describes their dream encounters in extraordinary detail... positions, sensations, the precise quality of pleasure. He writes about her body with the attention of a cartographer, describing every curve and hollow, every sensitive spot.

And it's all accurate. Unbearably, impossibly accurate.

There's a place at the back of her neck. If I press my thumb there whilst I'm inside her, she comes almost immediately. It's a secret button, a key that unlocks something in her. She told me once — in the dream, she told me — that no-one else has ever found that spot. That it's ours alone.

Elena's breath is coming fast. Because yes, there is that spot. And no, she's never told anyone about it because her few lovers had never found it. She had found it by accident whilst masturbating, years ago, and it was so intense that she'd actually cried afterwards.

How does Daniel know this? How can he possibly know this?

Sometimes, after we make love, she gets very quiet. Withdrawn. And I know, even though she doesn't say it, that she's thinking about something painful. Some old hurt. In those moments, I just hold her. Don't try to fix it or ask questions. Just hold her until she comes back to herself. Until she sighs and presses closer and I know she's all right.

Elena is crying now. Because yes, she does that. Has always done that. Ever since she was assaulted at university, twenty years ago, an incident she's never reported and never properly processed, just buried deep and tried to forget. But it surfaces sometimes after sex, this inexplicable sadness, this sense of vulnerability that has nothing to do with her present partner and everything to do with that past violation.

And yes, what she needs in those moments is exactly what Daniel describes. Just to be held. No questions, no attempts to fix it. Just silent presence until the moment passes.

How does he know? How does he fucking know?

------- 

Elena is on the seventh journal when she finds it. The entry that begins to explain everything.

I've been researching. Trying to understand what's happening to me. These dreams... they're too vivid, too consistent, too detailed to be ordinary dreams. And the woman is always the same woman. Not changing, not fragmenting the way dream figures usually do. She's constant. Real.

I've found accounts of something called "dream telepathy." Studies from the 1960s and 70s, mostly discredited now, but still. The idea that some people can connect with each other in dreams. Share experiences. Access information they shouldn't be able to access.

It sounds like madness. It probably is madness. But what else explains this? I dream about a woman I've never met, and I know things about her. Intimate things. Things I couldn't possibly know unless...

Unless she's real. Unless she exists somewhere. Unless we're somehow connecting whilst we sleep.

Elena stops reading. Her hands are shaking so hard she has to put the journal down.

Dream telepathy. Shared dreams. Is that possible? Can that be real?

She wants to dismiss it as fantasy, as Daniel's attempt to rationalise his own delusions. But she can't. Because the alternative, that he stalked her, violated her privacy in some horrific way, doesn't actually explain everything. It doesn't explain how he knows about the spot at the back of her neck, about what she needs after sex, about the interior geography of her pleasure that she herself barely understands.

Unless he experienced it. Unless they shared it. Unless they made love in dreams, and both of them felt it and experienced it as real.

Elena opens her laptop. The glow of the screen floods the dark study in cold, artificial light. Her reflection shimmers faintly on the glass... pale, wide-eyed, almost unrecognisable. Her fingers hover above the keys for a moment before she starts typing. Dream telepathy. Shared dreams. Dream connection.

The search results spill out: scraps of forgotten research, yellowed scans of journals, late-night forum posts written by insomniacs and zealots. She finds the names Daniel mentioned... Montague Ullman, Stanley Krippner, the Maimonides Dream Laboratory in Brooklyn, 1960s. Men with earnest faces and cigarettes in their hands, believing the unconscious could bridge miles of distance. Patients sleeping under electrodes while others, in separate rooms, stared at projected images... a horse, a knife, a burning house. And sometimes, impossibly, the dreamers saw them.

Mainstream science laughed. Funding stopped. The files were boxed, shelved, forgotten.

But there were cases. Real ones. People describing the same colours, the same rooms, the same taste of metal in their mouths. People who’d never met.

Elena scrolls, breath held. It’s absurd. It has to be absurd. And yet her heart won’t slow down. The rational part of her mind, the part that edits reports, is fraying at the edges. Because if even one of these accounts is true, then what Daniel wrote wasn’t delusion.

It was… testimony.

She stares at the glow of the laptop, at the cursor blinking like a pulse.

If she and Daniel somehow found each other in dreams, if they touched, kissed, fucked, if they knew each other there, then where does that connection live now? Does it still exist, somewhere, humming in the dark between waking and sleep?

A soft sound cuts through the stillness. The faintest of creaks from the hallway. She freezes, listening. The house is holding its breath with her. Nothing. Just the old boards settling, maybe. But the feeling stays... that charged, invisible presence just beyond the corner of her vision.

She pulls the journal back towards her. Her hands are trembling again. She has to keep reading now. There’s no turning away. Not anymore.

And if it's true, if she and Daniel somehow connected in dreams, made love in dreams, knew each other in dreams... then what does that mean? What is she supposed to do with that knowledge?

She keeps reading. She has to finish this now. Has to know the whole truth.

------- 

The eighth journal is where Daniel addresses her directly.

If you're reading this, and I think you are, I think somehow I've arranged for these journals to reach you, then you know now. You recognise yourself in these pages. You understand what we've been doing, you and I, whilst we sleep.

Elena... I know your name now. It came to me last night when you needed me from behind. And I was fucking you and things got so wild. I pressed your head down into the pillow, my thumb steady on your love spot. I kept ramming into your rectum. You had never done this before. And it was so divine. 

Elena... the name tore from your throat while I pressed into the furnace of your arse. You came so hard you milked me dry, spasming around my cock, and your scream soaked into the cotton whilst I flooded your darkest place in thick, hot pulses.  

I don't know where you live, though I've dreamt  your flat so many times I could navigate it blind. I don't know what you do, who you love, what your waking life looks like. I only know you in dreams. I only know you in that space where our unconscious minds meet and merge.

And I love you. Is that insane? To love someone you've only met in dreams? Perhaps. But the love is real. What we share is real. I know your body better than I know my own. I know your fears, your pleasures, your secret self that you show to no-one in waking life. How can that not be love?

Elena can barely see through her tears. Because she's starting to remember. 

There have been dreams. The ones that evaporate the moment you open your eyes. They're like thin veils of smoke that vanish before you can reach them. But as she's reading Daniel’s words, fragments begin to reassemble in her mind. A phrase. A sound. A smell. It's so uncanny how the memory of smells tends to outlast everything else. The shape of a shadow leaning over her.

She shouldn’t remember these things.

And yet she does.

They come creeping back, piece by piece, as if his writing is calling something forth that was buried too deep, or never hers to begin with.

It’s not just memory. It feels… inhabited. The air changes every time she turns a page. Sometimes she catches her own reflection in the dark window beside her and it’s like someone else is standing there, watching her and  remembering for them.

Not clearly, not distinctly. But there's something there, at the edges of her memory. Those dreams she's had, recurring dreams, of a man she couldn't quite see. Of making love to someone she knew intimately but couldn't name. Of feeling connected to someone in a way she'd never felt connected when awake.

She'd dismissed them at the time as stress dreams, as her subconscious processing loneliness and desire and immediately forgotten the moment she got up, fallen into the bottomless well of her subconscious. But what if they weren't? What if she was there too, on the other side of Daniel's experience, experiencing the same connection from her own perspective?

I'm dying. The doctors have told me. My heart is failing, has been failing for years apparently. I have months, maybe. And I'm terrified that when I die, I'll lose you. That whatever allows us to connect in dreams will break, and you'll slip away from me forever.

So I've made arrangements. These journals will be translated after I'm gone. They'll reach you somehow. I don't know how exactly, not yet, but I have faith that they will. And you'll read them. And you'll understand. And you'll know that somewhere, someone loved you completely. Knew you completely. Even if you never knew him in waking life.

I hope that matters. I hope it's not just a burden. I hope it's a gift.

Elena is sobbing now, great wrenching sobs that shake her entire body. Because she does remember. Now that she's looking for the memories, they're there. Hazy, dreamlike, but there. Nights when she woke feeling sated and connected, the wet sheets between her legs,  mornings when she felt the ghost of someone's touch on her most intimate skin, moments when she caught herself missing someone she couldn't name.

It was Daniel. All along, it was Daniel.

And she never knew. Never understood what was happening. Never recognised that the dreams were real, that the connection was real, that someone out there was experiencing the same thing she was.

And now he's dead. And she's reading about their love affair, because that's what it was, wasn't it? A love affair conducted entirely in sleep... from the other side of death, understanding it only after it's already over.

------- 

Elena's reading through her tears. The final journals chronicle Daniel's decline. His weakening heart, his growing desperation to leave some record of their connection, his fear that death will separate them completely.

Last night we made love and I knew it might be the last time. My body is  abandoning me. Even in dreams, I can feel it. The exhaustion, the weakness. I'm not sure how much longer I can maintain the connection.

She held me afterwards... in the dream, she held me. And she was crying. As though she knew too. As though some part of her understood that we were saying farewell.

I told her I loved her. I've told her a thousand times, but I said it again. And she said it back. She said it back, and I felt such overwhelming peace. Because whatever happens now, we had that. We had love, even if it was only in dreams. Even if no-one else would believe it. We had it.

Elena remembers that dream now. Remembers crying, though she didn't know why. Remembers saying "I love you" to a man she couldn't see, and meaning it completely. Remembers waking with tears on her face and a sense of profound loss.

That was the night Daniel died. She's certain of it suddenly. The timing matches. That was their goodbye.

The final entry is brief.

Tomorrow I go into hospital. I won't be coming back. I can feel it, in the way my body is shutting down, system by system, surrendering to the inevitable.

Thank you. For existing. For meeting me in dreams. For loving me, even if you didn't know you were doing it. For being real.

I hope we meet again. In whatever comes after this, if anything comes after this. I hope we recognise each other. I hope we finally speak in waking life.

Until then... goodbye, my love. My impossible, unknowable love.

Thank you for everything.

Elena closes the journal. She sits in the silence of her flat, surrounded by Daniel's words in two languages, and she understands now what she's been asked to do.

She's been asked to remember. To recognise. To understand that she was loved, completely and impossibly, by someone who knew her in ways that shouldn't be possible.

And she's been asked to witness. To carry this story. To be the only person in the waking world who knows what she and Daniel shared whilst they slept.

It's not a burden, she realises. It's a gift. Daniel was right about that. It's an extraordinary, impossible gift.

------- 

Elena finishes the translation. All twelve journals, translated carefully from Italian into English, Daniel's voice preserved as fully as she can preserve it.

She should destroy them now. That was the agreement. But she can't. Not yet. Maybe someday she'll destroy them. Maybe someday she'll be ready to let this go. But not yet.

For now, she needs to know they exist. That there's a record, somewhere, of this impossible love. She carefully locks the drawer and slips the key into her breast pocket.

Elena's dreams change after she finishes reading. Daniel isn't there anymore. She can feel his absence, a space where he used to be. But the dreams are different now. Clearer. More intentional. As though whatever door opened between her unconscious and Daniel's has stayed open, even though he's gone.

And she's learning to honour both... the waking and the dreaming. The spoken and the felt. The impossible and the undeniable.

It's enough. It's more than enough.

It's everything.