The Afterlife series Box Set (Books 1-3) (48 page)

“But can you make other stuff than food?”

“Nope. It is only food for me. But that is good enough.”

“It is a great gift. I love your talent. I wish I knew how I’m supposed to use mine.”

“You will figure it out.”

I was quiet for a long while. Mick stared at me. Then he moved some hair from my face and lifted my face with his finger under my chin. “You seem troubled?”

“Well, I am just wondering. Today in class I seemed so strong. Stronger than ever. I did a magic trick, I flew faster than any of the others, without even trying very hard, and I was on fire. But the other day I couldn’t even climb a rainbow even though everyone else did it with ease.”

Mick smiled and put a hand on my chest. “How is your heart?”

“What do you mean?”

“How did you feel this morning compared to that day with the rainbow?”

“I was happy this morning. I have been happy for several days now actually. Happier than I have been in a long time.”

“How did you feel the day with the rainbow?”

I went back in my thoughts and realized that he was right. I was miserable that day. “Frustrated. I remember being confused and a little mad at you for smothering me.”

“So there you have it. It is all in here,” he said and pointed at my heart.

I smiled. Maybe I could learn to control all of this somehow. With a little training I could learn to make the right things appear when I wanted, and with confidence and a joyful strong heart I could fly fast and balance on rainbows.

“How do you feel right now?” Asked Mick.

“Now?”

“Yes, right now. At this moment.”

“Happy. Peaceful. Relaxed.”

Mick grabbed my arm and started pulling. “Come on.”

Together we soared into the air. “Where are we going?” I asked.

“To climb a rainbow!”

The rainbow he had in mind was even higher and seemed narrower than the one we had tried to balance on in class a couple of weeks ago. Remembering what happened last time I tried, I quickly lost my confidence.

“I don’t think I …”

Mick stopped me. “I don’t want to hear that. Of course you can. Remember what you did earlier today. You can do anything. I have a feeling you are even stronger than I am.”

“How do you figure that?”

“I could never fly fast. And the first time I made something appear with my hands it was a rotten blueberry, not a living creature that could sing and fly. And I was so exhausted afterwards that I had to spend a night being treated in the hospital tower. I couldn’t fly for a week after it.”

Mick leaped onto the rainbow and stood for a second while finding his balance. When his body was steady he reached his hand down to me. I hesitated. “Come on!” he said with a grin. “I won’t let you fall.”

A glacial breeze hit my face as I took his hand and let him pull me onto the rainbow. At first my foot slipped a few times, but with Mick’s help I soon found my balance. Like a tightrope walker, I stretched out my arms and started putting one foot in front of another.

Mick smiled while I carefully took the first couple of steps toward the top. The surface of the rainbow beneath me was slippery and it was hard to keep my feet steady. At one point I looked up and felt discouraged when I realized how far I still was from the top. At that moment I lost my balance and almost fell off.

“Don’t do that,” said Mick. “Don’t look at the top. Focus on only one step at a time. Concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other.”

I regained my balance and took in a deep breath. I looked down. The bright colors almost blinded me. It was beautiful. Through the rainbow I could see the castle far beneath us. I took another deep breath and put my right foot out. When it was steady I put out the left. And so I continued for a long time. The rainbow felt insecure and wobbly underneath me, but I kept walking, focusing only on the next step. Finally I felt myself nearing the top. The climb became steeper and harder until I finally reached the top. Carefully I turned and waved at Mick who was far below me now. Then I took in a breath of the fresh air and enjoyed the amazing view of the area surrounding the school. I had never been up this high before. I was a long way above the clouds. I could see forests stretching as far as the eye could reach. I saw the wide ocean that just seemed endless. It was magnificent.

Cautiously I sat down on the rainbow and took one more look before I pushed myself down. It was like a giant slide that just kept going. It gave me butterflies in my stomach and caused me to laugh out loud. I felt like a four year old again. Nothing troubling me except how to get to the bottom. I was absolutely free, unthinking and utterly irresponsible. It was the most liberating feeling in the world. And it wouldn’t stop. The rainbow felt endless. I laughed and laughed and put my hands up in the air. At some point I wondered what would happen if I just kept going and never got off. My teacher had told me that no one knew where rainbows ended. Did that mean that I would just keep going forever and ever? That sounded so weird.

When I finally had enough I decided to get off. I didn’t care much for how it looked, since I was all alone, so I just curled into a ball and sort of rolled off. I landed on a cloud beneath me and couldn’t stop laughing. A few seconds later Mick joined me. He laughed like a child too.

“What an awesome ride!” I yelled.

“I know! I love doing this.”

We stayed on the cloud while our laughing turned to giggling and eventually wore off. Tears of joy and laughter ran down our cheeks.

“Thanks,” I said when we both became quiet.

“You are very welcome,” Mick answered. He was still smiling widely.

Sometimes we complicate things unnecessarily,
I thought to myself, remembering my conversation with Rahmiel the other day. Maybe all I needed was to uncomplicate it a little.

“A penny for your thoughts,” said Mick.

I shook my head. “I was only thinking how I was sure I could beat you back to the castle.” I got up and leaped into the air.

“Never!” said Mick and leaped after me.

Abhik sat next to me at dinner. I was starving and kept shoveling food into my mouth. Abhik looked at me with a grin.

“Sometimes you are a little weird, do you know that?” he asked.

“I know,” I said while grinning back.

At the same time Mick came out from the kitchen as he always did when dinner was served and everybody had started eating. He walked around among the tables and talked to people, asking them if they enjoyed the food. They would always applaud him. It was his little ritual, and I knew he loved it. When he passed our table our eyes met and we both smiled secretly. Abhik saw it immediately.

“What is going on with you two?” Abhik asked later when we were alone in the common room where we studied for the next day’s dream-catching class. I froze in the middle of a sentence in my book,
All Men Are Dreamers: Seven Ways to Catch a Human Dream.
I stared at Abhik. He had his nose in another of our textbooks called
You May Say I'm a Dreamer, But I'm Not the Only One.

“What? What do you mean?” I asked and pretended that I didn’t know.

“You and Mick. I saw you two earlier today. He helped you get onto the big rainbow over the ocean. The hardest one that no one in our class has yet climbed. And at dinner you exchanged looks that I don’t know what they mean.”

I couldn’t help smiling. I felt like a silly schoolgirl. “What looks?”

“You did that thing with your eyes that you sometimes do.” Abhik tried to imitate me, but with no luck.

“What are you talking about?” I said and threw a pillow at him.

Abhik just let it go through his body with a plunging sound. “Aw, that hurt,” he said and bent forward trying to catch his breath.

“Why didn’t you move?” I asked as Abhik laughed and threw a pillow at me. I ducked in the last second and it hit a vase in the corner that fell to the ground and broke.

“Oops,” I said. Then we laughed.

“There is definitely something going on between you and Mick again,” Abhik said. “It is nice to see you happy again.”

I shrugged. “Well don’t get too attached to it. I don’t know how long it will last.”

“So are you together again?”

I shook my head and tried to sound convincing. “No. We are just friends.”

Abhik laughed. “Yeah right.”

“No, seriously. We have promised each other to put everything on hold until Jason arrives. Then we will see what happens. Mick has told me he will wait for me.”

Abhik became serious. “He said that?”

I nodded. “Yes. He wants me to have closure.”

“Wow. That is really big of him. I don’t think that I could do that.”

“Well he’s a great guy.” I paused and thought about what I had just said. He really was. I was beginning to think that there was something really wrong with me for not marrying him. Now that I didn’t have him here with me all the time, I really wanted him more than ever. I didn’t understand myself at all. I didn’t want to be like that. I didn’t want to be someone who always wanted what she couldn’t have. I didn’t want to risk losing everything on account of some feeling or some silly dream.

Abhik sighed. “I really hope that you will not hurt him again.”

I stared into the fireplace that always burned. It made a crackling sound. I liked having it here; it gave the room a great ambiance.

“Me too,” I said.

C
HAPTER 15

 “
I
F YOU WANT TO
catch a dream, it is important to first of all find your own inner peace.”

Mr. Ngodup Dhamdul was, as always, floating in the air in the lotus position with his eyes closed. Now he opened them slowly and stared at us with his narrow brown eyes with that big smile he constantly wore on his face. I always felt good in his classes. He made us all feel good.

“And how do I do that?” he continued. “How do I find my way to that center of my inner self where there is completely peace and I am in total balance, you might ask.”

Some of the students nodded. Mr. Dhamdul’s smile grew wider even though I would have thought it wasn’t possible. “First of all, you have to make sure that nothing is troubling you. You need to cast your care, as we say. To be a great dream catcher you must never have strife in your life. You mustn’t hold on to the past or have any unforgiveness in your heart. Bad feelings will cause you to fail at this as well. You have to clean your heart of worry and anxiety. All these things are like poison for you.”

That was a lot, I thought.

“So what do you think? It sounds impossible, right?” he continued.

A couple of my classmates agreed with him. Mr. Dhamdul shook his head heavily. “Nothing is impossible in this world you belong to now. Reaching inner peace isn’t either. You can do it, if you make a decision today that you want to.”

Nigel raised his hand. “But how do we actually physically catch these dreams? How do we hold on to them and what do we do with them?”

“Aha, the practicalities. You want to know the technique?” said Mr. Dhamdul

“Yes,” Nigel said.

“We are getting to that. Don’t be in such a rush. Being in a hurry will get you nowhere when it comes to dream catching.”

“Because it will disturb our inner peace and cause us to lose our balance?” said Frederic Cornwell with a mischievous grin imitating the teacher’s mystical calm voice. His sister sniggered loudly next to him, but Mr. Dhamdul didn’t take any notice of them.

After half an hour of boring theory lessons each of us received a net. Mr. Dhamdul asked Nigel to lie down and fall asleep on a mattress on the floor. Ten minutes later he was snoring and caused giggling among most of the students. He even drooled on the pillow.

“Come closer and look at his eye movements,” Mr. Dhamdul whispered. “The Rapid Eye Movement has already begun. That is when Nigel is dreaming. Now if you focus on the top of his head, you will begin to see something that humans are not capable of seeing. It might take a while for you to learn how to see it, but you will eventually.”

We all stared intensely at Nigel. A rainbow of different colors suddenly seemed to appear. “Is it like colors?” I asked.

“Yes! Yes!” Mr. Dhamdul said with great excitement that caused Nigel to snort and turn in his heavy sleep. “Keep looking and tell me what you see,” Mr. Dhamdul whispered.

I looked at my classmates and realized they were all staring at me. Apparently they hadn’t been able to see anything yet, so they were somehow expecting me to tell them what they were supposed to see. I turned to look at Nigel again and now the colors seemed to be moving around and then it all turned into what looked like a bubble. Shapes appeared in it. It looked like people. Soon they had bodies and faces and they were walking, running, and doing stuff, like a small movie or a play taking place on top of Nigel’s head. It seemed so surreal. The people seemed to be talking now, but I couldn’t hear them, so I went closer. Everybody stared at me like I was watching something they couldn’t see.

“It looks like a bubble. It has people in it,” I said.

“That is it! That is the dream. It is inside that bubble. Very good, Meghan. I am impressed that you can see it so early in your training. Now pick up your net and try to catch it, but be very careful not to scare it off,” Mr. Dhamdul said.

I lifted the net and went closer. I stretched my arm out and moved the net close to the bubble with the dream, but the bubble moved, so my net came back empty. I tried again but the same thing happened. Nigel started moving in his sleep. He began tossing and turning. The bubble seemed to become flaming red. I turned to Mr. Dhamdul for help. He looked pensive for a few seconds.

“When you miss, it might cause the dream to go bad. So now he has a nightmare. Look at his tormented face while he is dreaming. We have to be very careful when we try to catch the dream. You don’t want to catch it when it is a bad one. Those are impossible to change. We have to wait to see if it calms down a little,” he whispered.

We stared at the dream for a few minutes and eventually its colors changed again. Blue and yellow colors were mixed into the red and Nigel’s face seemed calmer.