Chapter 1...errr...a part of it...
My novel that I'm working on. It's got a good plot that I won't tell you, and the story is good too - but how's the writing? Let me hear your reactions. I guess the tagline for it could be: "What if you lived in a world where anything was possible?" That probably sums it up best. Anywho - let me know what you think. Be honest, please. I'm a writer and I need criticism.
Reven - Prologue and Chapter 1.
Prologue
What does it mean to dream?
It can be said that any world is, inevitably, a world built upon dreams. Any development in the world is a striving toward an image of perfection that fills our mind’s eye. Indeed, the world is a mass of different images of perfection that culminates into one mass of seeming confusion. But we humans are a strange lot because while we strive to attain perfection, we consciously and purposefully strive toward what we know does not exist. Nothing is perfect, nothing can be truly perfect, and therefore it is a fallacy to call something “perfect.” So what then, if not perfection, do humans stride towards? The answer to that is the fulfillment of our innermost dreams. And when, for the lucky few to whom it happens, those dreams are fulfilled - they label it “perfect,” for a time; then the old dreams are replaced with new, seemingly impossible, dreams. That’s what we live for, to try and attain the impossible. No, everybody is not out clawing to reach their innermost desires but there is, in any individual, at least a latent hope of something great inside themselves and for themselves or those around them, or humanity, or all of the above. The cycle of dreams and fulfillment is very important to people, and it’s expressed through the things we do. We play the lottery because even though we know we have a better chance of being struck by lightning we hope that something will happen to make it shift in our favor. After all, somebody has to win. So, if dreams are so important to us - then what’s a dream?
Now, it’s important to know that what you’ve been told is not the entire truth about dreams or how the yearning for something greater connects with the images that flash through ones head during sleep; or, most importantly, how that connects to our lives and the people around us. What do you want in life? World peace? The end of poverty? Nuclear disarmament? Money? Fame? The list goes on and on. Would one be remiss in saying that these things enter our sleeping hours? We sleep and dream of riches, and we wake to pursue them. The doctor sleeps at night and dreams of discovering the cure for cancer and wakes to go to the lab. What we dream about at night is what keeps us getting up every morning or vice versa as the case may be. So our dreams contain our need for self actualization. Without dreams there cannot be hope and without hope one cannot dream. A dream is not merely the reflection of the events of the day, it is a window to everything we are - everything that makes us human. Dreaming, though, is even more important that this.
Dreaming gives us the ability to sort and ingest vast amounts of information in only a short time. A sound heard as a mere “beep,” could become clear as being a word that the hearer heard in ultrasonic the day before. And, while we downplay the importance of dreams as random synapse signals by some neuroscientists, or cloud them within the narrow and dated Jungian and Freudian interpretation - we fail to see the true importance of them, not as vignettes but as reality. Dreams and reality are inextricably linked. But, just as in life, groups and ideas are imposed upon by ridiculous stereotyping; the act of dreaming is as well.
Have you ever asked a calculus student, who wasn’t going into a math field, what they thought of it? I would wager that at least seven out of ten people would have choice words for such a dull subject. And that’s the stereotype. Dull. But calculus is, indeed, not dull at all if one takes the time to look at it a little more in depth than merely incomprehensible symbols on paper. Everyone can certainly appreciate the fact that the system was invented to solve a problem. Isaac Newton trying to solve a problem, specifically the mathematics of Johnann Kepplar’s elliptical orbits. The solution to the problem was to invent an entirely new system of mathematics back before the calculator could have been science fiction. This, alone, is enough to make this subject come to vibrant life. So, does that make any lecture one would have in a calculus class automatically interesting? No. There are boring lectures in the most interesting of subjects, occasionally. But if one keeps in the back of their mind that what they are studying is the product of dreams, mostly waking in Newton’s case, he really only slept one or two hours a night, then one sees that it’s a product of a desire to solve a problem. A desire so strong, a will so powerful that he produced that final product - Principia Mathematica. The dream that created it is what makes it interesting, not the subject itself.
Love lies in this world too. Deep down, underneath personality issues, defense mechanisms and superficiality lies the ability to love. Love is a product of dreams because it is a product of hope. Hope for true emotional satisfaction. One of the most common phrases lovers exchange is something along the lines of “I dream about you at night.” Why is that special to say? Why is it different than saying “I see you on the street occasionally and that makes me think of our time together.” Certainly, it’s endearing, but not to the extent of the dream statement. And it’s two components that make the dream statement especially endearing. Number one: Dreams are very personal. We dream about things we would never tell even those who are closest to us and we do it in a very personal time of reflection. Dreaming about a significant other gives the impression that they are special enough to you that they appear in your dreams, and that in a time when you are, in essence, freed from the normal rules of life - they still exist in your world. It’s a very powerful statement, but dreams are also uncontrollable. People describe dreams and nightmares alike as if a bus suddenly hit them as they were crossing the street. They just happen. No forewarning, no indication - it just happens. Number two: The specification “at night” is important because of the connotation of night. We associate night with romance, with intimacy. Dim lighting, candlelit dinners, these are all night activities. Not many go on dates during midday. But you don’t have to be asleep to dream.
Some of the most important dreams take place while we’re awake. Now, this doesn’t mean, necessarily what we call “day dreaming,” because you could be busy as hell and still dream, which is probably the most important point to make about dreaming itself - dreaming is constant. But that doesn’t mean we all dream the same amount or on the same level.
Who are the “best” dreamers? Well, that’s not an easy question to answer. There’s no such thing as a “good” dreamer, since dreaming is of such a personal nature. But that answer is probably frustrating to many. As humans, we have a driving need to classify, organize, box, label, and store everything. This isn’t a bad thing - it’s just something we do to stay alive. Billions of things are happening in the world everyday. There has to be some sort of concrete definition. I guess if we consider “good dreaming” purely as freedom of thought, then the best dreamers are right under our noses - quite literally. They are our children.
It is known to linguists that when a child is born, in any culture, it has the potential to make any sound that is humanly possible. For instance, in Arabic speaking countries, there are six different ways of making the guttural “H” sound, as in the German word “achtung.” Presumably the child is born with the ability to make and distinguish between all six of these variations, but if the child is born in North America that distinction seems to fall away. It can be regained - to an extent, but even then, it’s limited. So it is with dreaming and dreaming potential. All children are born with the same ability to dream and to manifest those dreams. But depending their environments; whether creativity is encouraged or stifled, whether thought is provoked or discouraged etc. defines a lot of their future ambitions. This does not mean that artists and writers are superior dreamers either. It means that they dream differently. Scientists need to dream, too. It was Michio Kaku who said: “You have to have an appreciation for beauty and form, the ability to dream, in order to be able to see just what the equations of quantum mechanics mean.”
Dreams, and dreaming as a whole, though, can be distilled into one word: “Possibility.” Dreams are about possibility. Not probability, they’re two different things. Possibility is that something could happen; probability is the odds of that event happening in a given trial under certain circumstances. But if something extraordinary happens, does that make the even less probable the next time? Probability-wise, no. Statistically, yes. If I have a coin, and I’m going to flip heads or tails my chance of one or the other is always 1:2. I could flip the coin a million times, and get heads every time - and besides carpal tunnel, I would still have a 1:2 chance of getting either heads or tails on the next flip. Statistically, though, I should not have gotten that far, because statistics uses the likely trends to say, “Well, yeah, the probability is 1:2, but flipping a million heads in a row is ridiculously unlikely.” You can’t separate them, though. That’s why the class is normally called “probability and statistics.” So what’s the probability of waking up tomorrow in another universe, where the Germans won WWII, or where Gandhi was never assassinated? In dreams, all things are possible. But if we are so set on the definition of life defined through our dreams - then that begs one question:
“What is reality?”
Chapter 1: The Old Man and the Tree
Night is a time of reflection. In French, le soir. In Spanish, la noche. In Jacob Bittner’s language: Hell. Inspiration is hard to come by in such a world as this, and when you’re a writer it seems more elusive than ever. Story ideas are easy to come by - well, the beginnings of an idea, but after that it usually gets lost in a pile of other “better” stories that don’t get developed either. As any long time sufferer of insomnia can tell you, you find cute little ways of passing the time. For Jacob, his way to “shake it,” as he said, was to walk.
Jacob was what one would consider the typical nerdy writer to look like, standing nearly six feet high with matted brown hair, small brown eyes, gold framed glasses and no muscle tone to speak of. His brown tweed jacket hung off him, as did the brown polyester pants that he always wore. The bottom of his faded gray polo hung past the bottom of the jacket - for all intents and purposes he looked slovenly and disheveled and he felt the same.
Stories went crashing through his head pulling other stories with them, just snippets, though - never something complete and interesting he could develop into something useful, though, just interesting snippets. Like seeing only the fight scenes in a good action movie. He had a headache that seemed to crack his skull in two whenever this happened, and he had already swallowed most of a bottle of acetaminophen, the remnants of which rattled in the bottle bulging from the pocket of his jacket. “Cold night,” he thought. “Nearly July and it feels like February.” His feet plodded slowly along the sidewalk as his mind attempted to follow his legs. He felt like his mind had fogged up. He walked into the entrance of a park. Tower Grove Park. Neatly laid out, not the safest place in the world, but people would assume he was just a homeless drunk anyways just to look at him. Breathe misting on the cold air, he walked onto the arrow-straight path through the park, hands jammed into his pockets and chin pressed to his chest. “Once around, and then I’ll feel better. Jesus Christ, this hurts.” The pain began to dull in his head as he made his way around the perimeter path, fading to the usual dull thump in the very back of his head underneath the bald spot. The trees were lit by the old-fashioned street lamps that lined the center lane of park making light level okay but not overly bright so as to aggravate his headache again. A light breeze rustled the leaves on the oaks that stood all around him - mighty pillars that represented a different time. A long sigh escaped him as he walked back to where he had entered the park, and he turned around to start back.
He walked back along the path toward his apartment just on the edge of it and followed the gentle curve of the path back towards the entrance to the park. He continued to walk for about thirty seconds before he froze in his tracks. He blinked and shook his head. “There was no curve in that path, I’m losing it, I’m sure I’m just tired.” It became obvious something was not right as he looked forward but couldn’t see the entrance gate where he had come in, and the path still curved gently through the treed walk and he began to jog. The path still curved and the stone changed a little - it became a little rougher. Still no gate - he broke into a run, and then a sprint. The paved path became raw concrete became flagstone became gravel became a rutted path in the dirt. “Holy shit.” He thought to himself, “It’s the fuckin’ twilight zone.” The trees closed in menacingly - oaken pillars became oaken prison window bars, holding him in, forcing him to follow the path which had become nothing more than a rabbit trail at this point. He slowed to a walk. It felt like his chest had just been stabbed, like it normally feels when one runs that is out of shape. He put his hand on a tree to steady himself and emptied his stomach onto the path, expecting to see blood or some sort of alien in his vomit but there was none. “Yet,” he quipped in his mind.
“Now isn’t that just the bloody epitome of revolting. Not only does he vomit but then examines it afterwards. I’m glad I only saw you vomit. Jacob narrowed his eyes as he turned with his hand still on the tree to look at his insulter. It was an old man, who looked to be in his nineties with a long gray beard and a white robe, carrying a wooden staff. More so than his wizardly look, though, was his absolutely malevolent stare. Almost like he was dissecting Jacob where he stood. “And who the fuck are you?” He asked, trying to match the stare, and realizing that he might soon lose his life - the old man looked dangerous and he didn’t know why.
“Better question, who the fuck are you. You’ve been here for 10 minutes, I’m sure you’ve gotten that it’s not home at this point.” Said the old man, giving him a brick-splitting glare.
“Why did you bring me here?” Asked Jacob
“I didn’t bring you anywhere, you brought yourself here. I don’t know how you did, but it’s important you go now.” Said the old man, condescendingly.
“Well, how do I get out of here - where is here?” Spitted Jacob, sarcastically gesturing all around him.
The old man’s eyes narrowed. “I’m not in the mood for these games. I’ve got things I need to tend to rather than you betas deciding to cavort here.”
“What the hell is a beta? Where the fuck am I.” Screamed Jacob. The old man snapped his head around, his face taking on a startled look.
“Where did you get here from?” Asked the old man.
“St. Louis, Missouri, USA, Planet Earth, Milky Way Galaxy.” Jacob almost whined. “Now where is this place?” He asked.
“You’re a primary!” Said the old man. “How did you get here?”
“Well I - ” Everything went black, like he had turned off a movie that was playing.
He opened his eyes slowly to a pounding headache. A groan was about all he could manage to let escape his lips as he surveyed his surroundings. It was a waiting room of a hospital. He opened his eyes a bit more and the fluorescent light hit him hard causing him to want to throw up with the pain but he held it in. The plaque on the desk said “Barnes Jewish Hospital, St. Louis.” He pushed himself off the chair and staggered to the desk where a nurse informed him he had an attack. Narcolepsy is a weird disease, and Jacob has been a sufferer for years. Strange things happen in narcoleptic episodes, and he knew he wouldn’t need drugs when he found out he had this. He had medication - but he couldn’t remember to take pills. He tried. The headache was not the kind of headache he had in the park - this was a caffeine withdrawal headache. [cont]
Reven - Prologue and Chapter 1.
Prologue
What does it mean to dream?
It can be said that any world is, inevitably, a world built upon dreams. Any development in the world is a striving toward an image of perfection that fills our mind’s eye. Indeed, the world is a mass of different images of perfection that culminates into one mass of seeming confusion. But we humans are a strange lot because while we strive to attain perfection, we consciously and purposefully strive toward what we know does not exist. Nothing is perfect, nothing can be truly perfect, and therefore it is a fallacy to call something “perfect.” So what then, if not perfection, do humans stride towards? The answer to that is the fulfillment of our innermost dreams. And when, for the lucky few to whom it happens, those dreams are fulfilled - they label it “perfect,” for a time; then the old dreams are replaced with new, seemingly impossible, dreams. That’s what we live for, to try and attain the impossible. No, everybody is not out clawing to reach their innermost desires but there is, in any individual, at least a latent hope of something great inside themselves and for themselves or those around them, or humanity, or all of the above. The cycle of dreams and fulfillment is very important to people, and it’s expressed through the things we do. We play the lottery because even though we know we have a better chance of being struck by lightning we hope that something will happen to make it shift in our favor. After all, somebody has to win. So, if dreams are so important to us - then what’s a dream?
Now, it’s important to know that what you’ve been told is not the entire truth about dreams or how the yearning for something greater connects with the images that flash through ones head during sleep; or, most importantly, how that connects to our lives and the people around us. What do you want in life? World peace? The end of poverty? Nuclear disarmament? Money? Fame? The list goes on and on. Would one be remiss in saying that these things enter our sleeping hours? We sleep and dream of riches, and we wake to pursue them. The doctor sleeps at night and dreams of discovering the cure for cancer and wakes to go to the lab. What we dream about at night is what keeps us getting up every morning or vice versa as the case may be. So our dreams contain our need for self actualization. Without dreams there cannot be hope and without hope one cannot dream. A dream is not merely the reflection of the events of the day, it is a window to everything we are - everything that makes us human. Dreaming, though, is even more important that this.
Dreaming gives us the ability to sort and ingest vast amounts of information in only a short time. A sound heard as a mere “beep,” could become clear as being a word that the hearer heard in ultrasonic the day before. And, while we downplay the importance of dreams as random synapse signals by some neuroscientists, or cloud them within the narrow and dated Jungian and Freudian interpretation - we fail to see the true importance of them, not as vignettes but as reality. Dreams and reality are inextricably linked. But, just as in life, groups and ideas are imposed upon by ridiculous stereotyping; the act of dreaming is as well.
Have you ever asked a calculus student, who wasn’t going into a math field, what they thought of it? I would wager that at least seven out of ten people would have choice words for such a dull subject. And that’s the stereotype. Dull. But calculus is, indeed, not dull at all if one takes the time to look at it a little more in depth than merely incomprehensible symbols on paper. Everyone can certainly appreciate the fact that the system was invented to solve a problem. Isaac Newton trying to solve a problem, specifically the mathematics of Johnann Kepplar’s elliptical orbits. The solution to the problem was to invent an entirely new system of mathematics back before the calculator could have been science fiction. This, alone, is enough to make this subject come to vibrant life. So, does that make any lecture one would have in a calculus class automatically interesting? No. There are boring lectures in the most interesting of subjects, occasionally. But if one keeps in the back of their mind that what they are studying is the product of dreams, mostly waking in Newton’s case, he really only slept one or two hours a night, then one sees that it’s a product of a desire to solve a problem. A desire so strong, a will so powerful that he produced that final product - Principia Mathematica. The dream that created it is what makes it interesting, not the subject itself.
Love lies in this world too. Deep down, underneath personality issues, defense mechanisms and superficiality lies the ability to love. Love is a product of dreams because it is a product of hope. Hope for true emotional satisfaction. One of the most common phrases lovers exchange is something along the lines of “I dream about you at night.” Why is that special to say? Why is it different than saying “I see you on the street occasionally and that makes me think of our time together.” Certainly, it’s endearing, but not to the extent of the dream statement. And it’s two components that make the dream statement especially endearing. Number one: Dreams are very personal. We dream about things we would never tell even those who are closest to us and we do it in a very personal time of reflection. Dreaming about a significant other gives the impression that they are special enough to you that they appear in your dreams, and that in a time when you are, in essence, freed from the normal rules of life - they still exist in your world. It’s a very powerful statement, but dreams are also uncontrollable. People describe dreams and nightmares alike as if a bus suddenly hit them as they were crossing the street. They just happen. No forewarning, no indication - it just happens. Number two: The specification “at night” is important because of the connotation of night. We associate night with romance, with intimacy. Dim lighting, candlelit dinners, these are all night activities. Not many go on dates during midday. But you don’t have to be asleep to dream.
Some of the most important dreams take place while we’re awake. Now, this doesn’t mean, necessarily what we call “day dreaming,” because you could be busy as hell and still dream, which is probably the most important point to make about dreaming itself - dreaming is constant. But that doesn’t mean we all dream the same amount or on the same level.
Who are the “best” dreamers? Well, that’s not an easy question to answer. There’s no such thing as a “good” dreamer, since dreaming is of such a personal nature. But that answer is probably frustrating to many. As humans, we have a driving need to classify, organize, box, label, and store everything. This isn’t a bad thing - it’s just something we do to stay alive. Billions of things are happening in the world everyday. There has to be some sort of concrete definition. I guess if we consider “good dreaming” purely as freedom of thought, then the best dreamers are right under our noses - quite literally. They are our children.
It is known to linguists that when a child is born, in any culture, it has the potential to make any sound that is humanly possible. For instance, in Arabic speaking countries, there are six different ways of making the guttural “H” sound, as in the German word “achtung.” Presumably the child is born with the ability to make and distinguish between all six of these variations, but if the child is born in North America that distinction seems to fall away. It can be regained - to an extent, but even then, it’s limited. So it is with dreaming and dreaming potential. All children are born with the same ability to dream and to manifest those dreams. But depending their environments; whether creativity is encouraged or stifled, whether thought is provoked or discouraged etc. defines a lot of their future ambitions. This does not mean that artists and writers are superior dreamers either. It means that they dream differently. Scientists need to dream, too. It was Michio Kaku who said: “You have to have an appreciation for beauty and form, the ability to dream, in order to be able to see just what the equations of quantum mechanics mean.”
Dreams, and dreaming as a whole, though, can be distilled into one word: “Possibility.” Dreams are about possibility. Not probability, they’re two different things. Possibility is that something could happen; probability is the odds of that event happening in a given trial under certain circumstances. But if something extraordinary happens, does that make the even less probable the next time? Probability-wise, no. Statistically, yes. If I have a coin, and I’m going to flip heads or tails my chance of one or the other is always 1:2. I could flip the coin a million times, and get heads every time - and besides carpal tunnel, I would still have a 1:2 chance of getting either heads or tails on the next flip. Statistically, though, I should not have gotten that far, because statistics uses the likely trends to say, “Well, yeah, the probability is 1:2, but flipping a million heads in a row is ridiculously unlikely.” You can’t separate them, though. That’s why the class is normally called “probability and statistics.” So what’s the probability of waking up tomorrow in another universe, where the Germans won WWII, or where Gandhi was never assassinated? In dreams, all things are possible. But if we are so set on the definition of life defined through our dreams - then that begs one question:
“What is reality?”
Chapter 1: The Old Man and the Tree
Night is a time of reflection. In French, le soir. In Spanish, la noche. In Jacob Bittner’s language: Hell. Inspiration is hard to come by in such a world as this, and when you’re a writer it seems more elusive than ever. Story ideas are easy to come by - well, the beginnings of an idea, but after that it usually gets lost in a pile of other “better” stories that don’t get developed either. As any long time sufferer of insomnia can tell you, you find cute little ways of passing the time. For Jacob, his way to “shake it,” as he said, was to walk.
Jacob was what one would consider the typical nerdy writer to look like, standing nearly six feet high with matted brown hair, small brown eyes, gold framed glasses and no muscle tone to speak of. His brown tweed jacket hung off him, as did the brown polyester pants that he always wore. The bottom of his faded gray polo hung past the bottom of the jacket - for all intents and purposes he looked slovenly and disheveled and he felt the same.
Stories went crashing through his head pulling other stories with them, just snippets, though - never something complete and interesting he could develop into something useful, though, just interesting snippets. Like seeing only the fight scenes in a good action movie. He had a headache that seemed to crack his skull in two whenever this happened, and he had already swallowed most of a bottle of acetaminophen, the remnants of which rattled in the bottle bulging from the pocket of his jacket. “Cold night,” he thought. “Nearly July and it feels like February.” His feet plodded slowly along the sidewalk as his mind attempted to follow his legs. He felt like his mind had fogged up. He walked into the entrance of a park. Tower Grove Park. Neatly laid out, not the safest place in the world, but people would assume he was just a homeless drunk anyways just to look at him. Breathe misting on the cold air, he walked onto the arrow-straight path through the park, hands jammed into his pockets and chin pressed to his chest. “Once around, and then I’ll feel better. Jesus Christ, this hurts.” The pain began to dull in his head as he made his way around the perimeter path, fading to the usual dull thump in the very back of his head underneath the bald spot. The trees were lit by the old-fashioned street lamps that lined the center lane of park making light level okay but not overly bright so as to aggravate his headache again. A light breeze rustled the leaves on the oaks that stood all around him - mighty pillars that represented a different time. A long sigh escaped him as he walked back to where he had entered the park, and he turned around to start back.
He walked back along the path toward his apartment just on the edge of it and followed the gentle curve of the path back towards the entrance to the park. He continued to walk for about thirty seconds before he froze in his tracks. He blinked and shook his head. “There was no curve in that path, I’m losing it, I’m sure I’m just tired.” It became obvious something was not right as he looked forward but couldn’t see the entrance gate where he had come in, and the path still curved gently through the treed walk and he began to jog. The path still curved and the stone changed a little - it became a little rougher. Still no gate - he broke into a run, and then a sprint. The paved path became raw concrete became flagstone became gravel became a rutted path in the dirt. “Holy shit.” He thought to himself, “It’s the fuckin’ twilight zone.” The trees closed in menacingly - oaken pillars became oaken prison window bars, holding him in, forcing him to follow the path which had become nothing more than a rabbit trail at this point. He slowed to a walk. It felt like his chest had just been stabbed, like it normally feels when one runs that is out of shape. He put his hand on a tree to steady himself and emptied his stomach onto the path, expecting to see blood or some sort of alien in his vomit but there was none. “Yet,” he quipped in his mind.
“Now isn’t that just the bloody epitome of revolting. Not only does he vomit but then examines it afterwards. I’m glad I only saw you vomit. Jacob narrowed his eyes as he turned with his hand still on the tree to look at his insulter. It was an old man, who looked to be in his nineties with a long gray beard and a white robe, carrying a wooden staff. More so than his wizardly look, though, was his absolutely malevolent stare. Almost like he was dissecting Jacob where he stood. “And who the fuck are you?” He asked, trying to match the stare, and realizing that he might soon lose his life - the old man looked dangerous and he didn’t know why.
“Better question, who the fuck are you. You’ve been here for 10 minutes, I’m sure you’ve gotten that it’s not home at this point.” Said the old man, giving him a brick-splitting glare.
“Why did you bring me here?” Asked Jacob
“I didn’t bring you anywhere, you brought yourself here. I don’t know how you did, but it’s important you go now.” Said the old man, condescendingly.
“Well, how do I get out of here - where is here?” Spitted Jacob, sarcastically gesturing all around him.
The old man’s eyes narrowed. “I’m not in the mood for these games. I’ve got things I need to tend to rather than you betas deciding to cavort here.”
“What the hell is a beta? Where the fuck am I.” Screamed Jacob. The old man snapped his head around, his face taking on a startled look.
“Where did you get here from?” Asked the old man.
“St. Louis, Missouri, USA, Planet Earth, Milky Way Galaxy.” Jacob almost whined. “Now where is this place?” He asked.
“You’re a primary!” Said the old man. “How did you get here?”
“Well I - ” Everything went black, like he had turned off a movie that was playing.
He opened his eyes slowly to a pounding headache. A groan was about all he could manage to let escape his lips as he surveyed his surroundings. It was a waiting room of a hospital. He opened his eyes a bit more and the fluorescent light hit him hard causing him to want to throw up with the pain but he held it in. The plaque on the desk said “Barnes Jewish Hospital, St. Louis.” He pushed himself off the chair and staggered to the desk where a nurse informed him he had an attack. Narcolepsy is a weird disease, and Jacob has been a sufferer for years. Strange things happen in narcoleptic episodes, and he knew he wouldn’t need drugs when he found out he had this. He had medication - but he couldn’t remember to take pills. He tried. The headache was not the kind of headache he had in the park - this was a caffeine withdrawal headache. [cont]