In The Waking World
1187 Words
I stopped trusting my sense of reality the day I heard someone call my name in an empty room.
It was a Wednesday. I was in the records office, second floor of the university library, finishing up data entry for one of the research assistants. The floor was almost always quiet—rows of locked cabinets, aging monitors, and the smell of old paper that had soaked into the carpet.
I was alone. I hadn’t seen anyone else since I arrived.
Then I heard it.
Clear as day. A voice. A man’s voice.
“Lena.”
I froze. Turned around.
Nothing.
The hallway outside was still, the kind of still that settles just before a storm. I stood for a long moment, waiting for footsteps or laughter or something—some sign that I wasn’t imagining it.
But the silence held.
I packed my things early and left.
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That night, I didn’t dream.
Or maybe I did and just didn’t remember. Either way, I woke up with that emptiness again—like something had been taken and I hadn’t realized it was mine until it was gone.
I sat on the edge of my bed, eyes fixed on the wall, trying to will his face back into focus. I wanted to see him again. I didn’t care if it was just a dream. Seeing him, even in that world, made waking up feel like less of a letdown.
I’d stopped trying to explain it to myself. There was no framework that made sense. All I knew was that he existed—somewhere. Somehow.
And I missed him.
Which was insane. How do you miss someone you’ve never met?
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Later that afternoon, I wandered into the city center. I told myself it was just for fresh air, but the truth was more complicated.
I was chasing something. I didn’t know what. A sign, maybe. A glitch. A name on a wall. A song in a shop. Anything that would say: You’re not imagining this. He’s real.
It was quiet for a Saturday. The streets were half-full. I walked past shopfronts I’d seen a hundred times before but never really looked at. My feet felt heavy. My thoughts even heavier.
I turned onto a side street, a narrow one lined with secondhand stores and dusty window displays. Something about it felt familiar. I’d never walked this way, at least not consciously. But as I passed the third shop on the left, I stopped.
It was a bookstore.
Old, almost forgotten, tucked between a record shop and a dry cleaner. Its windows were filled with mismatched stacks of novels and hand-written signs. One of them read, Open when it matters.
I stared at the sign for a long time.
Then I stepped inside.
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The air was warm and still. A bell jingled softly overhead as the door closed behind me.
It smelled like my childhood—paper and ink, aged wood, and something faintly sweet, like vanilla.
No one stood at the front desk.
The shelves were tall and full, the lighting soft and dim. I wandered in slowly, letting my fingers brush the spines as I passed. It was quiet, the kind of quiet that makes you want to whisper.
And then I saw it.
The corner of a black notebook, sticking out from a shelf marked “Miscellaneous.”
I pulled it out.
Same size. Same texture. My heart started racing.
I opened to the first page.
My name. Lena Adewale. Written in neat, slanted handwriting. The same kind as in the other notebook I found two weeks ago.
Below it, a sentence:
“The mirror between dreams and waking is thinning.”
I flipped through the pages. Nothing else. Just that one line. But it was enough.
I clutched the notebook to my chest and stood still for a long time, trying to slow my breathing.
When I finally moved back toward the front, a woman was waiting at the counter. Elderly, quiet, her hands folded in front of her.
She smiled gently.
“You’ve been looking,” she said.
My throat was dry. “What is this place?”
“A resting point,” she replied. “For people between answers.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that.
She nodded toward the notebook. “You’re not the only one. He’s looking, too.”
The words hit me like a drop of cold water. “Who?”
She just smiled again. “You’ll know when it matters.”
I stood there, holding the notebook like it was the only thing keeping me tethered. “What happens if I find him?”
Her eyes softened. “That depends on whether you remember why you were separated in the first place.”
I wanted to ask more, but she turned away and disappeared into the back room.
I left without paying. She hadn’t asked.
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That night, I sat on my bed with the notebook in my lap and my phone beside me. I opened a new note and typed in the sentence: The mirror between dreams and waking is thinning.
It sounded like something from a fantasy novel. But it also felt… right.
Like an explanation I didn’t understand yet.
I didn’t sleep well. Dreams flickered in and out. Fragments. A hand reaching for mine in the dark. The sound of footsteps behind me in a hallway. A voice whispering my name—this time from inside the dream.
When I woke up, my heart was pounding.
And I remembered something new.
His name.
Miles.
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The next day, I searched him.
Miles. It was all I had. But paired with my dream journal, I knew a little more. He was Nigerian. He had a soft, steady voice. He lived in a city that had trains—lots of them. I had seen him holding a transit card in one of the dreams.
It wasn’t much.
But it was more than nothing.
I typed “Miles Nigeria” into every search engine. Of course, a thousand names came up. I added “engineer” because I remembered him talking about fixing systems in one dream.
More pages. More profiles.
Most were wrong. Older men. High school students. Musicians.
But on the third page of one search, I saw a small profile image. It was blurry—taken from a distance—but I stopped breathing.
It was him.
I clicked the link.
Miles Obiora. Systems engineer. Lives in Lagos. University of Ibadan graduate.
And then I saw something that stopped me cold.
A comment he’d posted on a forum thread about dreams—buried among technical questions. The thread was called “Recurring Dreams of Unknown People”.
He had written: “I’ve been dreaming of the same woman for three months. I know her name is Lena. I don’t know how I know that.”
The post was two days old.
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I stared at the screen for what felt like an hour.
He was real.
He had been dreaming of me, too.
We weren’t imagining it.
We were remembering.
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- Writer
