The Dream Girl: 1999 Paradox Series: Part 1

By KSZ OLIVER

'Dreams are wish Fulfillment.'
(Sigmund Freud)

Paradoxes, a complex and thought-provoking topic that has always aroused our curiosity and promises to knot our brains ...

Follow the frantic and tense trajectory of Denny and his Alter ego, a young man who works for the police in Murity, a small town in the interior of the Brazilian Northeast, and who finds himself in love and having strangers erotic dreams about a beautiful student and cellist, Emmanuelle Machado - paradoxically kidnapped and killed 20 years ago by a serial killer.

K.S.Z OLIVER

HAVE A GOOD READING!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bibliomundi
• Release date: Mar 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9781526032218

Book preview

Part 1

The Dream Girl

Dream Are Wish Fulfillment

Sigmund Freud

CHAPTER I

Part 1/I

Déjà vu

T

he fire crackled and lit up that dark cold night. He was sitting, leaning against the trunk of a tree. Before him, huge flames of what appeared to be a fire. There was a girl in a black dress with her upper body on his lap. The weather was freezing, but that warmth warmed the surround. However, she did not move or react.

He noticed a little smoke in the air. But his eyes apparently watered with the pain of loss. He was holding her small, cold body with one arm as he stared at a cell phone on the floor next door: the device had a video paused on the display. His nose itched and he felt like sneezing because of his allergic rhinitis. Nonetheless, he ignored it.

As he stroked her hair, he admired her beautiful little face. In his heart he experienced a mixture of revolt and guilt. He remembered the smile he knew and loved on that face — in the moment without life. Even knowing what should be done, he was still reluctant. Nevertheless, he concluded that he had no choice. He made a decision: in a rush, he picked up the phone and played the paused recording, also pressing and holding one of the buttons on the phone then ...

The phone vibrated intensely in his hand ...

Ugh! Denison jerked awake, releasing the device he was holding. Crap! he exclaimed, quickly grabbing her smartphone, which just didn't fell to the floor because, before falling, in reflex he had closed his legs and made it stop in his lap. Taking the phone back, he found that there was no damage to it. He observed that the device had just off, no power. Damn! ... I dozed off, was it?! he wondered a little bewildered, not sure what happened to him. Holy crap! ... What a weird dream! ...

Following being startled by the unexpected vibration, Denny perceived an intriguing detail: everything was absurdly silent there — almost like a vacuum. But it wasn't a vacuum: He breathing. Not that this state of calm was exactly new in that place. He was basement: and there it was calm by nature. But he assumed there was something more ... That seemed to be more than just silence: His workplace was 'paralyzed', as it were ... Immediately, he felt some kind of 'hollow hum' in the air. That reminded him when he put a shell to his ear, or was underwater. Denny thought it was just those situations where yawning is needed to balance the pressure in the ears.

I'm not getting a little deaf, right?! ... He wondered worriedly, scratching his ear with the little finger, but soon realizing that he heard his own voice. After being a little more relieved not to get deaf, he soon perceived it would not only be the lack of sound in the place that catch his eye...

Rising, he perceived by a few more details that impressed him: the ceiling fan and wall air circulator had suddenly jammed. And he thought the lamp lights were kind of 'dim'. "Maybe it was some kind of power outage ..." he supposed in his mind. Denny didn't know if it was just in his head, but he also felt a certain smell of smoke in the air. Because of that, he wanted to sneeze. Smelling his clothes, he didn't notice any odor. He thought it was just on his mind. Finally, he believed it was all effects of sleep and tiredness that he strangely felt he was experiencing that night.

THE BUBBLE

His eyes were a little blurry and watery. By rubbing them ... Oh, shit! he reacted when he felt one of the lenses come out of his eyes. He still was not yet fully used to their continued use. Sometimes he forgot that he wore it. As he tried to put the lens back on, he planned to climb to the ground floor for a moment to relieve that itchy nose and huge, almost compulsive urge to sneeze.

At that moment, even with one blurry eye, he seemed to be facing some kind of transparent film in front of him. Looking up, he saw that it stretched over and around him, like some kind of bluish bubble — or was it a translucent dome with him in. By putting the contact lens back on, he wanted to check if it was real. But he no longer saw it there. He noticed only a slight breeze or air movement hitting him. At that time, he also saw the clarity of the place coming to his eyes: It was as if, just as the sun's gravity holds its energy the first moment it produces it, the lamps were also holding their light around them, releasing it at that moment ... Immediately, he also noted noises of spinning propellers. It was the ceiling fan that started again. But it wasn't just that noise he heard ...

Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm...

"Oh, damn it!!! You want to kill me from the heart, do you?! ... he complained, putting his hand on his chest and holding on to one of the cabinets. There is no ghost here, right?! ... he joked with what happened to relieve the tension of fright. He had been startled when he suddenly heard from the computer on his desk the introduction of the music Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm"  by Crash Test Dummies. His heart pounding in surprise, he listened to the rest of the opening instrumental of one of his favorite songs ...

"Cause then there was this boy

Parents made him

come directly home right after school

and when they went to their church..."

Weird! ... he just said analyzing what had happened there. After turning off the music, Denny was intrigued that, hearing this melody, he had the slight impression that he had lived that before. For him, except for those strange phenomena, everything there seemed to be memories of weeks before. "So why was he there, making the same tasks that day?" he asked.

Looking at the calendar, he saw that he was marking July 13, 2019. ’July 13’?!! No! ... Is it?! ... he wondered, somewhat bewildered, still trying to situate himself, as if awakened in confusion. In view of that uncertainty about the exact notion of time, he told himself:

"You know this is ridiculous, right? Doubting the very reality you are seeing? ... If you have not realized, you was almost asleep standing in that place, so tired!...his Alter ego reminded him.

You right! ... he said, agreeing with himself, recognizing his physical condition at that time. It's all just sleep effects. he thought. How long did I really napped, huh?! ... Denny wondered, once again feeling as if there was a kind of time lapse in his memory. It seemed like for weeks! he thought. Afterward acknowledging that, strangely, his physical condition was not the best, he was going to wrap up his overtime that weekend.

Although he was very intrigued by all these events, as he could not explain them, he ‘let it go'. "He was just tired of working all the afternoon and night," he concluded about everything he thought he saw in that place. "After all, he was drowsy with sleep and tiredness," he justified those strange things he through.

DENNY

Denison Assumption, or Denny, as they called him, was 29 years old and worked at the Reconcavo Police Department, based in Murity, a coastal town in state of Bahia, in the northeast of Brazil. With over 40,000 inhabitants, it was 100 km from the capital, Salvador. At half a kilometer above sea level, Murity was quite cold in winter.

The city was named from indigenous people who initially inhabited that micro region. It had something to do with a huge, almost homonymous palm tree called by the natives Bority. Also very present in the flora of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, the tree was abundant in that area, when the city was just a small village, almost 100 years ago.

He was a boy of medium height, normal physiognomy, and brown. He had dark, narrow eyes and dark brown hair — traits that had earned him the nickname Chinese in high school. But that characteristic was more related to myopia and due to lightly indigenous traits, inherited from his mother.

He worked in the administrative part of the municipal police station, a building that functioned in a kind of public services complex in the center of the city. The site was a set of buildings built around the old police station, where had gathered the main public services, such as the Forum, and the public services of the city — besides the PD office itself.

Still in the PD...

UNDER PRESSURE

Looking at the PC clock, Denison saw that it was past 9:20 pm. The normal shift of his work had already ended since 5:00 pm. However, he has extended his activities into the night.

Denison digitized old county documents and files as part of a national program to create a central digital database. As the project was late on schedule, the Federal Government paid additional to those who produced more. Because of that, he decided that he would work overtime to increase his monthly income — besides accelerating the volume of service. But sometimes he got overworked.

Almost 9:30 pm

He had determined to work until 22:00. Nevertheless, after that episode involving the fright with the device vibrating in his hands, the things he had the impression of having seen in that room and, mainly, due to tiredness, he decided to anticipate his departure.

This was all been a clear sign of the his state of physical and mental wear, he suspected. As he headed for the vehicle in the PD yard, Denison noticed that he was more than simply physically and mentally exhausted. "He didn't know where he had spent so much energy that day. He seemed to have come from a war — or to have been beaten! ..." he thought, massaging his aching shoulder muscles.

His arms hurt too, and his rhinitis had been triggered in a way that was only common only in the presence of smoke, making his nose itch and drain. Only there was no smoke in the place. Or maybe, who knows, he was just with low immunity? ... he thought, already thinking about buying vitamin supplements and self-medicating, as he always did.

He realized that the state of his body's muscles reminiscent when he performing some kind of heavy and prolonged work. "If he were to make a diagnosis of the clinical condition itself, he would say that was under great psychological pressure and physical effort all that day. Which is strange, because it only started work from noon that Saturday..." he remembered.

9:37 pm

PROBABILITIES

Denison was on his way home. Suddenly, changing the subject in his mind, he remembered what he supposedly dreamed during the nap in the PD — and the strange episode with the unexpected vibration of the cell phone. What a weird dream! ... he admitted, remembering whose face was the girl on his lap. "He should probably be looking too hard at her pictures in those files! ..." he acknowledged as he kept his tired eyes on the track.

As he drove, he recalled when the device vibrated in his hand without his having pressed a button — or received a call. Denny even thought he was taking a shock at the time. "But he didn't remember having slept with the device in his hands ..." thought. Besides, the smartphone wasn't in the socket: so it couldn't have been an 'electric shock' either ... he reconsidered. All he remembered, before he supposedly dozed off in his chair, was that he picked up his phone and made a video of himself when he turned the front camera on by mistake.

Interesting! ... he just said, after remembering the episode of the video recorded unintentionally. But that didn't seem like such a recent memory ... It was as if he had been living for weeks — not that night! ... he had that particular impression. Denison thought this was what they called ‘Déjà vu'. Nonetheless he would see that this one, Déjà vu, was not restricted to just the events in the basement of that police station...

Around 9:40 ...

While driving back home, he began to experience the faint feeling of having been to these places before. Not just passing through those places before: "But having already experienced and even thought about the fact that thought he had lived all that before," he noted strangely. What is it? ... Some kind of ‘Déjà vu de Déjà vu'? ... he asked jokingly, however, a little impressed. He also remembered that in the basement of the Department, the sensation he had upon awakening was that he was somewhere, seconds before waking up there.

But aside from thinking that these episodes were repeating with him, Denny would realize that these strange perceptions of double events would not be the last — or the only one.

As he stopped the vehicle at a traffic light in front of a Baptist school, he watched people neatly pass the crosswalk. Suddenly, as if knowing what would happen next, he predicted — or remembered that: "One woman would stumble