The Dreaming Highway

The dream is always the same.

Haley Algood is just the way Seth Reynolds remembers her ten years ago. Her hair is almost shiny in the evening light. The glow from the moon and from the light pole no more than fifteen feet away makes her facial features light up the interior of the car. As she kisses Seth softly on the lips, it is warm, sensuous, and sweet. His hand gently plays with her hair. He returns each kiss with one of his own. The moment, as he remembers it, isn’t as much a sexual experience as it is a sweet one.

The fact that Seth is dreaming this every night is no longer news to him, he’s had this dream quite a few times as of now. He knows when she will bend down to kiss him. He knows the exact moment he will see the sparkle come out in her eyes, the sound her voice will make when she coughs. It’s the same every night.

The parking lot they sit making out in is always Greenway Park, which sits on the beautiful Lake Greenway (which sparkles in the winter). If there are two things Tallahassee, Florida is known for, they are the intense greenery that almost fills the city - not counting the downtown roads near the state capital - and the nearly hundred or so parks that decorate the town. In December of 1998, however, Seth and Haley have forgotten all about the green park and the sparkling lake, and are focused in on the world inside the maroon Thunderbird.

Why can’t I stop thinking about you, Haley Algood? Seth asks, and each night, he knows the answer to expect.

Haley lifts her head and says, Come with me.

Seth does. He opens the door for her and the two climb outside into the chilly December wind. They walk toward the concrete path in front of the parking lot. After a little while, the path winds and carries them to a stony cliff overlooking Lake Greenway, the Park Heights High School (which sits directly behind), and the city of Tallahassee itself. Haley sits on one of the stones with her legs hanging down just above the water.

Look at the stars, Seth. Just take a moment and look at them, she says.

And Seth realizes he is having a hard time looking at the stars. All he can think of is the beautiful young woman sitting next to him on the stony cliff of Lake Greenway. They are 18 and they are in love. Seth is certain of it. From time to time he feels like Haley is, too.

God, you’re beautiful, he says.

Stop thinking so much, she says, and she’s right. He has been thinking too much. And not for bad reason, either. He knows, for instance, that the following morning, Haley will be on the first flight to Chicago and out of his life, no longer a student at Florida State and within a dormitory's reach. Her parents had finally convinced her that she was too far from home, that she should be back in Chicago where she belongs, that she needs to put all her focus on her studies. This, of course, means that she should be putting minimal-to-no focus on dreamers like Seth Reynolds. Maybe she could even get her soccer scholarship back - the one that she had dropped due to Seth’s incessant whining that she was gone too much.

Seth, Haley says in the dream, and he soon realizes that it was only said in the dream (not in the actual memory - dreams are funny that way). She says, You do realize that I am just a figment of your imagination.

Seth nods but never takes his gaze off her.

In a few moments, you will wake up and I will be gone. But, this moment is real, Seth. It’s as real as the air you’re breathing. Can you remember that?

Seth isn’t sure what she means by this, but he nods just the same. And in the background he can hear something else as well.

A low rumbling sound is in the background of the windy night. At first it sounds like the wind, but after a night or two of dreaming this, Seth is certain that it’s not. For a few moments now, it has been growing slowly and steadily, but not enough for him to lose his focus on Haley. Not completely.

But then the rumbling sound begins to grow and before he realizes how dark the scenery around him is getting, the humming sound becomes so loud it is almost deafening. Seth winces in pain as he throws his hands to his ears. This doesn’t drown out the sound, it only muffles it.

Seth? Haley calls out, but the humming sound is so intense that it drowns everything out. Seth? What’s wrong? Why are you covering your ears? What’s happening?

Can she not hear it? he thinks, and decides almost immediately that she can’t. And Seth knows something else: this hum was simply not here in 1998, not in the actual memory. It is something else that has been reserved for this dream, but by God, it feels real.

And in a split second, Seth feels the ground shaking and moving out from under him, like the hand-eye-coordination tricks that magicians are always performing (the hand, ladies and gentlemen, is quicker than the eye. Observe...the plates and glasses as they remain on the table.). Only Seth isn’t on a table here. He is drifting - sliding - and in what takes less than five seconds, Haley is gone into the abyss of the Tally night as Seth finds himself thrown back into the front seat of his Thunderbird. He tries to scream but nothing comes out. He is still covering his ears to drown out the hum, that hum from hell.

In one dramatic grimace of his face, Seth shuts his eyes, tightening the muscles around his eyes so hard he can feel his retinas burning.

And then, as if from nowhere, the humming stops. For a split second, Seth wonders if he has gone completely deaf. And when he opens his eyes, he is momentarily speechless each time.

* * *

Seth opens his eyes expecting to see the edge of a well-lit parking lot at Greenway Park in the middle of December, the wind coming through the trees. Perhaps the sparkling lake.

What he sees before him, however, is something else entirely. Instead of a concrete path lit up by a light post in the dark Tallahassee night, Seth sees an empty open road. And in broad daylight.

He’s still looking through the windshield of a car - no, not a car, but a vehicle of some sort. This is much higher, though, this much he knows for sure. The deafening hum is gone, thank God for small favors, but everything is different. Really different.

A Volkswagen Rabbit passes him on the open winding road. The vehicle he’s sitting in isn’t moving, he quickly surmises. One look at the road beside him and he knows he must be parked on the shoulder. He looks to his left and sees that the ground is rocky and brown, almost mountainous. To his right is an upward slope of rocky ground where the slope is nearly ten feet higher.

I’m not in Tally anymore, he thinks.

He swears he hears voices, yet the interior of the vehicle is empty except for himself.

He thinks, Somehow, in about five seconds, I have gone from a park in Tally to this. How?

Of course, he knows he’s dealing with a dream here. Think a stupid question...

The voices he hears are muffled at best. He can’t make out a word, only tones - three tones from the sound of it, and yet the vehicle is empty. The road itself is empty.

Seth opens the driver’s side door and steps out onto the open paved road. The sun is bright and the air feels crisp. Not the chill of the December wind he had felt only moments ago, but not hot either. It is nice. Perhaps spring weather.

And it’s daylight, he thinks again.

The road is wide and seems to wind on in an endless stretch. Paved and clear, it appears to be an Interstate road of some kind.

Not in Florida, though, he thinks, noting the brown rocky ground around him. He looks at the body of the vehicle he’s just exited. Sure enough, it is a van, the large fifteen-passenger kind. The kind he remembers riding to church camp in as a kid, the kind of van he and Tony Macoli had mooned the right lane of traffic in on their ’93 camp adventure (That’ll be two hours of van washing duty, gentlemen.).

He glances at the name printed on both sides of the van.
MOUNT OF OLIVES CATHOLIC CHURCH

Seth can remember attending only one Catholic mass in his entire life. He had stayed over with Chris Hugh in the sixth grade, and when he had only slightly dozed off during Father Morgan’s dry sermon on the three blah-blah-blah talents, Chris’s mom had slapped him on the back of the head so hard he thought his eyes would pop out.

He glances at the van again. No city name listed below the name of the church. The van is completely white with the exception of the black typeface forming the parish’s name.

He walks around to the back of the van and glances at the license plate. There is no number, only the word MISSOURI written across the top. Seth had been through Missouri a couple times in his life and he didn’t remember the landscape looking this dark and rugged. Well, maybe the Ozarks, he thinks.

Again, he hears something. The sound did not start, it was just there, and it only takes him a moment to realize what it is. It’s the sound of the hum again, though not nearly so loud, not yet, anyway.

He discovers a set of steps climbing the up-hill slope. As the hum gets louder, he climbs the steps. As he reaches the top, he can see a wooden shack in the distance. It looks like a log cabin, that of the Abraham Lincoln quality.

There’s something else, too, he sees. Or someone. As he focuses in, he discovers a woman standing several yards in front of the cabin.

He walks a little closer. She’s still a good hundred yards away from him, but he can see something else. In front of the woman is something made out of stones. He wonders for a moment if the woman is Haley, but soon decides that she isn’t. As he draws closer, he sees that the object in front of her is a giant Star of David.

The humming is getting louder by the second. It is almost to the point of pain again and Seth throws his hands against his ears. He tightens his eyes almost shut as if it will help and then digs his fingers into his ears even further, but it does only a little good. The sound is horrendous. Like a beep test of the Emergency Broadcasting System, only this is no test. Seth can feel his eardrums - can literally feel his eardrums - and wonders if his ears are bleeding. He removes his hand, but only for a second. There is no blood, he discovers, and instantly returns his finger to his ear.

The woman a hundred yards away has no hands against her ears. She isn’t squinting. She’s looking straight ahead, showing no sign of pain or discomfort.

Can she even hear this? he thinks. She can’t, he decides.

Seth begins to feel the earth around him shaking and moving again, but the woman ahead of him stands still.

Who is she?

He can feel the sensation of the magician pulling the tablecloth out from under the plates and glasses again. He can feel his feet losing traction, and yet the woman ahead of him does not move. She is still and...

No, she’s not still, not entirely.

Her eyes have moved. Her head is in the same position, but her eyes have moved to...

Me? he wonders. It suddenly appears to be so.

Any moment now, this earthquake - No, it’s not an earthquake, more of an earth wind - will no doubt carry him away and back inside the cab of the Catholic church van that had somehow brought him here. And that would be perfectly fine with him if it takes the ability to hear away from him. The sound is beyond inhumane at this point.

The woman is now looking at him, her head now turned in his direction. And he sees that the look on her face isn’t surprise by any means either. It’s expectancy.

He begins to register this as the suctioning power of the earth wind begins to pull him back inside the van. A moment later, he is sucked inside the interior of the vehicle. And if his dream calculations are correct - and after this long, they almost always are - then this part of the dream will commence in five seconds.

Five...

The woman...

Four...

was expecting...

Three...

me all...

Two...

along...

One...

* * *

And then the woman is gone. The Star of David that had been in front of her is gone. The brown stone and dark grass is gone. The daylight is gone. The hills and mountainous land is gone. The log cabin, gone.

There is only darkness for several seconds. Just when Seth begins to think he’s lost both sight and sound, the darkness fades to a white. It is perhaps the purest white he has ever seen.

Heaven, maybe? He wonders.

No, it isn’t heaven, but it is...something. He glances around and sees a window to his right. And out the window is...

Yes, there are other colors outside the window. Seth can see the red brick of a building. There are people walking around outside: shoppers, business people. And it’s raining out there, raining hard. There are vehicles driving left and right, some parked. Inside this place, however, there is only white, the white of a bleached egg.

He discovers that he is sitting behind a big white table. On the other side of this table is a booth seat - a white booth seat, of course. Seth glances behind him and notices that he is also sitting on a white seat. This wouldn’t be so strange if it weren’t for the fact that even the wood and metal that would typically make up table legs and counter-sides was a pure white color as well.

He looks to his left and is not at all surprised to see a giant dry erase board (white) with only one thing written in black ink:

AND MAKE SURE AND TRY THE COFFEE!

THE COFFEE’S THE BEST IN TOWN!
ONLY $0.98.

He also soon discovers that the sound of the hum is not present in this place. This would be enough to convince him that it is heaven, in fact. But, just when he begins to think this, the room begins to fade back to the darkness. Seth tries to adjust his eyes but the room is growing darker by the second.

Hey! he yells to no one. What is going on? The lights!

And in three seconds, the room, the window, the dry-erase board, all fade to black.

I’m waking up, he thinks.

Seth opens his eyes. He’s sitting in a cold sweat on his bed in his Tulsa, Oklahoma apartment. He glances at the clock on the night stand beside him. The time, as always, is 4:59 A.M.