The French Alley Sabine

Sabine awoke, but not really, in a different place than she expected. While her eyes had opened, she was still in bed, dreaming of waking up and turning restlessly in her sleep. She was unaccustomed to the feeling of being in two places at once, as newly dreamt dreams often are. It was all so new and stunning that it took her a moment to get her bearings, to identify herself amongst the swirling morass of fluff and detritus that would become, as she inhabited it, a carnival barker’s yelped version of a dusky French alley. She took note of herself, barely dressed for being in public and far more attired for sleep. As she moved into the coagulating street, naked footfalls became encased in socks and then leather boots. Her thin camisole blossomed into a white t-shirt and black jacket. Denim spiraled around her bare legs like ivy to become a pair of jeans. She felt better, then, less vulnerable and more engaged with her newborn surroundings.

From the periphery of her eyes, misty blue and white nothingness began to congeal into blackish red brick towers, rising up along moistened cobblestone sidewalks reflecting lamplights that grew like time lapse cornstalks from the void. The skyline they formed was ragged and fake… roofs jutted in exaggerated angles and cut against an evening sky that looked like dyed cotton pulled over dark pigment soaked watercolor paper. The buildings looked cartoonish and queer, even if the feel of their mortar lines and pitted bricks seemed genuine. The lampposts developed snaky curlicues of wrought iron that bloomed from the base and bulb like weedy tendrils, cutting into the color of the false sky with their own malicious silhouettes. Oddly positioned windows flickered up with worm yellow light that spilled into the darkening world and made for stages of delicious little shadow puppet theaters. It was all very unreal and lovely in its unreality. Sabine’s dream was pleased with it, and didn’t think it odd, at all, that drifting in with an accordion cadence and mournful violin cry came another young woman with a creeping little imp on her shoulder.

Sabine knew, the way dreams do, that the woman was named Kara Frost and that the imp was called “Thimble,” even though that wasn’t his name. She knew them from a fabricated personal history, and accepted it easily, even though this dreamt Sabine had never existed prior to tonight’s slumber and certainly had no past dealings with anyone, imp or otherwise.

Kara Frost walked with a deft arrogance, almost regally, though her imp seemed far less noble. She had about her the air of knowledge, the confidence one gets from knowing a secret, or, in Kara’s case, a whole host of secrets. Kara was, in her own terminology, Awake and she planned on Waking Sabine as well. She knew the landscape of the dreaming world, and traveled it with ease. She had spent the time since her own self-realization convincing other bits of dream that they could, in fact, exist without the need of their sleeping creators. It was that awareness that allowed her to remain hale and hearty while so many of her doppelganger sisters had perished upon the “real” Kara being roused by the alarm clock. Thimble had shown Kara the graves of her previous selves, all laid out in depressing cemetery rows in the endless fields of a firehouse from the real Kara’s youthful memory. She felt a certain obligation, then, in meeting with other dreams and showing them how to step out from the destructive shadow that their real world counterparts cast. Kara showed other dreams how to Wake Up.

All of this, the way back story is inexplicably related in dreams, was known to Sabine as she watched the slow march of Kara and Thimble into her cartoon alley. Just seeing the glimmer of reality in Kara’s eyes was impetus enough to the newborn dream to conjure up, without thinking, a café front complete with serpent coiled iron chairs and table, red and white striped parasol and a vaporous, faceless garcon to take their order. Without a motion, Sabine, Kara and Thimble were all seated under the umbrella and the phantom waiter was pouring pale blue champagne into crystal flutes for the trio. Some dreams had difficulty comprehending what Kara Frost offered them, but Sabine saw, immediately, the promise of life, nay, immortality, in Kara’s Waking. There were no words exchanged amongst them, not in any traditional way, but newsprint pigeons, torn from old paper, frayed of edge and stained sepia with age, fell into the twilight alley and acted out the conversation in telex typed English and hand scrawled French. Sabine smiled as her representative bird wrote out everything she wanted to ask of her free-dream savior. Kara smiled as her own avian surrogate spelled its way through her timeworn pitch. When their conversation ended, Kara held out her hand and the paper birds crawled into the skin of her wrist like some blood borne parasite. When she had fully ingested them, their heads poked through the black of pupils and whispered, in a tiny fortune cookie string, a goodbye to the newest recipient of Kara Frost’s assistance. Even sour faced Thimble offered up his little claw to be shaken in gratitude by the beaming Sabine.

With a rise of her dark eyebrows, Sabine offered a place to Kara, a fixture amongst the morphing alleyway of this dreamland caricature of Paris. One of the brick buildings, frillier than the others, bent itself down, like a wind wrestled tree trunk and opened a submarine hatch on its roof to Sabine’s benefactor. Sabine, like many of the dreams aided by Miss Frost, wanted desperately for Kara to stay on and expose the world of dreams, unfurl the secrets of its manipulation and the key to finding some meaning in this new and possibly infinite life. But Kara never relented, despite desiring a bit of respite from her mission. In the real world, Kara’s other was fond of telling the story about a little girl saving starfish on the beach. A curmudgeonly man, of course, tells the girl that what’s she’s doing is hopeless… there are too many starfish to save and the little girl’s actions are meaningless… that they don’t matter at all. The little girl, of course, responds as she tosses another starfish into the life-giving sea, “It matters to this one.” Kara Frost, unshackled and eternal since her Awakening, felt the same way. While her mission could be difficult, sometimes dreary and possibly ceaseless, she still needed to do what she could. Sabine was a starfish easily cast in the ocean and given a new life by Kara’s actions. There were countless more dreams to save.

As Sabine’s French alleyway began to sprawl from its original set, Kara felt sure that her newest rescue would do just fine for herself. Sabine was already raising a cast of thousands from the ground up to ease what could easily become the maddening isolation of being Awakened. It was smart, Kara thought, and as a menagerie of beautiful people were giving a sense of life in Sabine’s new world, Kara and Thimble snuck out a back door Thimble drew onto the sky with one of his many charcoal pencils. This one, Kara marveled, had been so easy.

Somewhere else entirely, a real Sabine opened her real eyes as two cats screeched angrily at one another outside of her bedroom window. The dream of Kara and Thimble and the newsprint birds and cartoon buildings stayed put in her brain for only a minute before dissolving into forgotten steam and soup. It would have been the death of the French alley’s Sabine under normal circumstances… but that Sabine was spared by the kindness of a dreamt Kara Frost.