My name is John. At age 14, I began having dreams of a red-headed girl my age. One night she just popped into my dreams and kept coming back every night. Sometimes we rode bicycles together, laughing. Other times we swung on swings in a playground and chased butterflies through a field with blooming blue flowers. Like rewinding films and starting them over, these dreams kept repeating themselves.
As time passed, the dreams became more real and more varied. In one dream, we went to a senior prom and danced deliciously close to popular love songs. My heart swelled with joy, and I fell so in love with her. When I walked her home to her doorstep, she turned and put her arms tenderly around me and kissed me a lingering, sweet kiss I never forgot and wished as hard as I could that she would kiss me again.
In another dream, she helped me with my homework and started doing it nearly every night. I’m serious. I’d have a math problem I couldn’t solve the day before a test, and she would show me how to figure it out in the dream. I’d have trouble remembering a history date, and she’d help me remember it. I didn’t see her help as cheating. She was like a tutor to me. I don’t know how she was so smart, but she always knew the answers to my lesson questions.
Occasionally, I wondered if she was my guardian angel. At other times, I wondered if she was a girl I would meet in the real world someday.
I never had anything to do with other girls after she began visiting me in dreams. I fell in kid love with her and never knew her name. As I grew older, two years after the dreams began, my dream girl grew older too.
One night, when I was 17, I saw her in a dream with a cheerleader outfit on, and I had my first uneasy thoughts about her and what I thought we had together. I got jealous. I began worrying football players would be coming on to her, and I would lose her to one of them. Of course, those were crazy thoughts. After all, she was just an unreal girl I’d only see in dreams. But I still felt jealous and anxious. I woke up feeling lousy that morning, still worried about losing my dream girl to some big-shot high school football star.
I laughed at myself for feeling that way about a girl who wasn’t real, a girl I’d never meet, like a drawing of a girl who never existed. I realized I’d been a little crazy wasting time loving a girl in a dream when I could have had a genuine relationship with a real girlfriend.
Then one day at a coffee shop, my jaw dropped when I saw her strolling through the front doors toward me.
“Hey!” I said, stunned and practically falling off my chair.
She walked by me as if she didn’t know me after all those years of dreams.
“We meet in dreams,” I said. “Don’t you remember all those wonderful times?”
“You’re crazy,” she said. “Leave me alone, Psycho!”
I couldn’t believe it. But I reminded myself I had only seen her in dreams and maybe I just wanted that girl to look like the girl in the dreams and made myself think she was her. Sad and embarrassed, I turned to leave. Then I saw a girl who looked just like her, her twin, entering the coffee shop wearing a cheerleader outfit.
I stood staring at her, my mouth agape. I wondered if things were going to get weirder.
“Hi John,” the twin said. “I have to get to practice now, but I’ll see you in our dreams.”
Bob Boyd