James Locker: Detectives in A Trap

Chapter 5 James Has a Twisted Dream.

James Locker woke up in the middle of the night. The nightstand clock showed 3.00 am. How long had he been asleep? From what he remembered he came home around 6 pm and crashed instantaneously. It felt like he had been asleep for an eternity and that the sleep had been deep and dreamless until the last five minutes before he woke up. He had dreamt about her for the first time in over a month. Emily Luong had looked so different in this dream compared to his previous. In those old dreams, she always looked beautiful like a paradise long gone, in this dream; however, the essential features were the same, but the magic was gone, and the loving smile had twisted into an empty shell. Was that fear he had seen in her blank gaze or was it something else, was it the gaze of a person that was dead inside or even physically dead? He had to get the picture out of his head somehow.

James sat up on the bed. Even though it was an August night, and his room was cold he was sweating enormously. His hands were shaking roughly, and his vision was blurred. He had seen these symptoms in a lot of people the symptoms of alcohol withdrawal. "Well I guess that's what a month of heavy drinking does to you," he thought. As James did not intend to end up as an alcoholic, so he would just have to live with the physical symptoms until they disappeared.

He thought about what his friends had said about getting rid of the memory of a loved one by hooking up with random women. In his case, it seemed this process had not removed the memory but rather twisted it to a worse one. He considered the option of what was the worst:

· Have a very positive memory that nothing in your everyday life can compare with so your daily life becomes dull and pointless

· Have a very negative memory that comes back and haunts you in your nightmares.

“Oh well they are both curses” James concluded. Now all he needed was to stabilise his emotional life and get rid of his anxiety. He took one of the antidepressants for the first time in six weeks, and he soon fell asleep to a dreamless unemotional sleep.