In the dream she was a child again, dressed in pajamas. Under her left arm was Arthur her teddy bear, looking brave as always with his orange fur and green shirt. Beside her on her left side was her bike, shiny and orange, banana seat waiting for her to get on and ride. But she knew she wouldn’t be riding the bike. She, Arthur and the bike would be taking a ride.

She stood in front of an old house, which stood just off a dirt road. She knew the house was her home, though she could never recall having lived there.

“Here he comes.” Arthur said, though his mouth did not move, and she didn’t really hear him speak.

Turning to her left, she saw an old pickup truck wind silently along the road in her direction. Must be a new engine for it to be so quiet, she thought to herself.

“It’s not a real truck.” Arthur told her.

The pickup stopped in front of her and the man inside gestured for her to get in the back, then got out of the truck and placed her bike in the box. She climbed inside and sat down, at once realizing she never saw the man’s face, save as a silhouette.

“He’s not a real man.” Arthur told her.

The truck started off, and suddenly they were driving down the main street of Maple Creek. I grew up here. She could see faces she knew, and others she didn’t, and none of them paid any attention to her or the truck. So silent.

The truck came to a halt and the dream shifted and she was standing in an empty lot. On her right was the city hall and on her left, the bank. That’s not right. There’s no lot here.

“It’s not a real town.” Arthur told her from the ground beside her. She looked down and cried out in shock.

The plush bear lay some two feet from the edge of a dugout filled with a dark sticky liquid which looked like blood. It completely surrounded her.

“Better get to work,” came a man’s voice, dry and raspy.

She looked up. Across the street from the lot sat the man, his face still wreathed in shadows. He was seated on a bench in front of the barber shop, smoking a cigarette. He gestured to a spot behind her.

Turning, she cried out again. Behind her, a pile of dead bodies had suddenly appeared. A feeling of guilt and remorse filled her, and she felt compelled to hide the bodies quickly. Grabbing a shovel which had also just appeared, she began pushing the bodies off the pile, across the ground, and into the dugout. She kept trying to keep them down under the dark liquid, but they wouldn’t stay down. When she tested the dugout for depth, she nearly lost the shovel, the liquid flowing at an accelerated pace.

It can’t do that. There’s no source for it to flow like that.

“It’s not a real river.” Arthur told her.

“It’s not a river at all.” she replied.

The dream shifted and all that remained was the liquid, which was now indeed a river. The torrential flow swept the bodies away, along with the shovel. On either side of her, a cemetery stretched off into infinity. Arthur sat upon one of the tombstones, so she went to retrieve him. She noted as she picked the bear up that she was her proper age, a young woman in her early twenties. Looking behind her, she saw that the town and man were gone. Ahead of her was a great rocky crag, shrouded in darkness and cloud.

Yet even in the presence of that foreboding sight, she felt an amazing peace, as though she were back at summer camp where. . .

Now what was it that happened there? she wondered to herself. It felt as though something was missing, amid the calm and the peace. What was it?

She looked around; hoping to find some clue, but nothing had come to her except the continual calm. The crag remained obscured in cloud.

Too real, this dream is too real.

Up until now, the dream had been erratic and arbitrary, racing from one vision to the next with no sense of clarity.

Then the sound of a gunshot echoed through her mind and she wheeled about to look in the direction the sound had originated from.

Running on the pathway towards her were two small children, one a young girl with blonde hair tied into pig-tails and the other a young boy with big brown eyes and dark hair, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt. Neither of them appeared to be older than seven.

A distant splashing sound diverted her attention momentarily as the children ran past. She turned her head away for put a moment to see where the sound originated from, and when she looked back, the children were gone. In their place was stillness, and beneath that the sound of many children's voices blending into the rhythm and hum of some great machine.

Wake up oh sleeper, rise from the dead, and the Light will shine upon you. . .

The chant continued to rise in volume, and added to it came a new voice.

Wake up oh sleeper. . .

Ariana.

“Arthur?”

“(I’m not even a real bear.)”

Rise

Ariana, wake up.

“Of course not, you’re. . .”

Wake up oh sleeper

“Ariana, wake up or you’ll be late for work!”

Ariana Desirae came awake to the sound of her roommate, Jennifer Ward’s voice.

“I’m awake.” she called. She waited a few moments for rising, stopping to ponder the dream. Jennifer had told her that if you meditated on your dream for a while after you woke up you had a better chance of remembering it than if you just woke up and began doing something else.

“Jennifer, I'm working late tonight, so don't make me any supper.” she said, sitting on the edge of her bed and rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

Jennifer, a red head, came and stood in the doorway to her room and posed, dressed for work.

“How do I look?” she asked.

Ariana made a sweep of her hands over the night shirt she was still wearing. “Better than me.” she replied.

“Oh thanks,” Jennifer laughed in mock gratitude. “As for supper, I'm working late too . . . with Cory.” Jennifer giggled as she slipped her shoes on and headed for the door of their duplex. “Don't wait up!”

“I won't.” Ariana replied.

“And don’t fall back to sleep! You don’t want to be late for work again!”

‘Work’ for Ariana was at a street mission called The Open Door in downtown Edmonton where she helped out with feeding the drop ins they had and handling the receiving of items for sale in the thrift shop.

She plopped back down on the bed, leaning over to retrieve a black and red hard cover book from underneath. Grabbing a pen from her night stand, she flipped the book open to a page already half filled with spidery handwriting, and began to write.

“This morning I dreamt of the graveyard again, only this time I wasn't alone. There were two children with me -- a little blonde girl, who I think is me as a child, and a dark haired boy who is familiar, though I can't recall where I would know him from.”

After finishing the entry in her diary, she stood and went down the hall and into the washroom. She stripped off her nightshirt and looked at herself in the mirror. At five foot three inches and just over one hundred pounds, she presented a petite yet shapely figure, topped off by a long, straight mane of golden hair which framed an almond shaped face. Her eyes were a deep blue, and her younger brother Derek had often referred to her as Aryan rather than Ariana, saying she would have been a great poster child for White supremacists.

She turned on the water in the shower and stepped in front of the mirror for one last look, pulling in her tummy and reminding herself to start doing sit-ups again. Not that she was fat, but she had always been proud of a hard stomach; she wasn’t long legged and her bust was a bit too big, but she had always felt that you either worked with what you had or you didn’t work at all.

It'll be nice to have the house to myself tonight, she thought as she stepped into the shower, not that it makes any difference. Ariana, despite all her beauty and charm, was still very single. In fact, it had been almost two years since she had dated anyone. Her mother was constantly bothering her to get married, but Ariana maintained she was waiting for the “right one.” Her mother scolded her for being picky, but Ariana was adamant.

It wasn't even that the guys she had dated were jerks or “losers” as her younger sister Claire always called them. It was just that it was so difficult to find someone who could reconcile the simple lifestyle she led. Many of her relationships had ended with the guys telling her she should become a nun and do foreign missions so that guys like them wouldn’t meet her. Even the church offered only young pace setters, bent on changing the world with their pocket books and designer clothes. And anyway, she had hoped to find her real mother prior to engaging in any serious relationship.

She had been adopted by the Desirae family when she was five, shortly after being abandoned and sent to a group home in Calgary. She could recall the hell of living there, but for some unknown reason, she could remember very little about her natural mother and absolutely nothing about her father.

During her years with the Desiraes she wondered who her natural parents were, and why they had abandoned her. It wasn't that the Desirae family was unkind; in fact she often considered how fortunate she had been to be a part of their family. They were Christian folks, Baptist by denomination, family oriented, always having devotion times around the supper table and attending Sunday school and church regularly.

She finished her shower and toweled off. She wiped the steam from the mirror and gazed at her reflection. The thought of being alone in the house tonight, and wondered if her standards for this “right man” were just perfectionism like her mother had said.

Where are you? she wondered, Who are you. . .and where are you now?