4CHANC0K3 could not take his eyes off of the screen for the last 78 hours straight.

FACT: Abraham Lincoln had dreamt his death. He woke up in his dream to cries in the parlour. Walking downstairs, he found women dressed in mourning clothes moaning at a casket. He asked them who had died. They whimpered that the President had passed.

In the dawn of embalmment during the Civil War, Lincoln became the first President to parade around the country for the purpose of mass mourning. His death became a national reality. He was assassinated only a few days after his initial dream.

4CHANC0K3: have u eva dreamt u were someone else?

DR3@DFU1WAKE: once

4CHANC0K3: who’d u dream u were?

DR3@DFU1WAKE: i dreamt i was sunny bono. only i was teh futuristic version of him in robot form created to appease teh foreign masses of a fancy hotel bar. i think it was in japan… like japan in 2080. it was fuckin cray cray. cher was there 2. but she was just in teh form of a brain in a jar with a long black wig sittin on top of a piano. so fckd up right?

4CHANC0K3: did u sing in ur dream?

DR3@DFU1WAKE: yea but i was tone deaf. cept that everyone else in teh dream didnt seem to notice. i remember thinkin to myself, wow wtf… i sound like shit. why teh hell do these fuckrs keep clapping?

4CHANC0K3: weird

DR3@DFU1WAKE: yea teh next thing i knew i was swimmin in a pool of gold liquid with cher’s brain bobbin nearby and i wasnt a robot nemore. i was just bono as is

4CHANC0K3: wtf

DR3@DFU1WAKE: yea, right? at this point in teh dream i began singin again too but this time to myself and it was teh most epic ballad u could imagine. i remember tellin myself to remember the lyrics when i woke up

4CHANC0K3: did u?

DR3@DFU1WAKE: nah. i just remembered the song i sang tone deaf at the bar

4CHANC0K3: wut was it?

DR3@DFU1WAKE: at last

4CHANC0K3: which version?

DR3@DFU1WAKE: etta james

4CHANC0K3: cool

DR3@DFU1WAKE: yea but i sounded like a tone deaf version of etta mixed w/ bono flair

4CHANC0K3: weird

DR3@DFU1WAKE: yea specially since i have perfect pitch irl

4CHANC0K3: oh yea? u still sing?

DR3@DFU1WAKE: in the shower sometimes lol

4CHANC0K3: cool

DR3@DFU1WAKE: u ever dream you were someone else?

4CHANC0K3: yea a few days ago actually

DR3@DFU1WAKE: who were u?

4CHANC0K3: Lincoln

DR3@DFU1WAKE: did u emancipate people in ur dream? Hahaha

4CHANC0K3: nah. i wasnt abe. i was elmo Lincoln

DR3@DFU1WAKE: who the fuck is that?

4CHANC0K3: first guy to play tarzan in hollywood

DR3@DFU1WAKE: w…t….f

4CHANC0K3: yea cept i was an online video game version of him

DR3@DFU1WAKE: WTF DO U MEAN?

4CHANC0K3 took a mug half-full of stale CoCola to his lips between typing and slurped down the last of it.

4CHANC0K3: i could see outside myself as this 8-bit video game version of tarzan with futuristic-esc powers and i could predict the outcome of things before shit went down. but i could only realize the prediction a split second before it actually happened so in the end i guess it was kinda a lame power

DR3@DFU1WAKE: wut kind of stuff did you predict in ur dream?

4CHANC0K3: stupid shit

DR3@DFU1WAKE: like wut?

4CHANC0K3: the first thing i predicted was that a glass of mercury would spill off of a table in one of those portable photo labs theyd made out of tents on location when photography was first invented

DR3@DFU1WAKE: ok……

4CHANC0K3: yea it was weird. i was tarzan in the middle of a jungle developing a photograph i took of a monkey getting struck by lightening and as the photograph appeared on the paper floatin in chemicals before me, i had this flash before my eyes of seeing the glass of mercury falling off the table next to me

DR3@DFU1WAKE: WTF? and….

4CHANC0K3: totes the dream was so vivid man. it creeped me out when i woke up at the end of it all. i havent been able to sleep in like three days.

In that moment he thought to himself out loud… When was the last time I slept?

DR3@DFU1WAKE: so wut happend to the glass of mercury in ur dream?

4CHANC0K3: i dont know. i suddenly ended up in a new part of the dream. it was this multi-part dream or something

FACT: Bishop Lanyi dreamt Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination the night before he was murdered. In his dream, the Bishop saw a vision in a light blue picture, like a postcard, on the upper right hand corner of a letter from the Archduke himself. The words in his dream read:

Dear Dr. Lanyi,

I herewith inform you that today, my wife and I will fall victims to an assassination. We commend ourselves to your pious prayers.

Kindest regards from your Archduke Franz
 Sarajevo, the 28th of June 3:45 A.M.

After waking from the dream in a panic, the Bishop rushed to make frantic prayers and documented the events of his dream in detail. It would be a few days later that he heard Ferdinand and his wife were indeed shot to death that day. These two deaths would start the First World War.

DR3@DFU1WAKE: wut happend in the next part of ur dream?

4CHANC0K3: after the mercury fell off the table, i was suddenly transported to a desert where i was holding an external hard drive in my hands and the sun was blaring so much i could barely keep my eyes open

4CHANC0K3 recalled for a moment the intensity of the light in his dream. He could even remember the feeling of the weight of the hard drive in his hands.

DR3@DFU1WAKE: wuta ya think was on the hard drive?

4CHANC0K3: no idea but then suddenly everything went black for a split second in my dream and i had this premonition of helicopters encircling above me. then the sun’s lens flare shot into my retinas, blinding me and i noticed that the hard drive in my hands had disappeared. in the distant i heard a droning sound of machines. just like i had envisioned… helicopters suddenly surrounded above me like a death shroud drowning out the sun’s light. i could feel the sand between my toes and realized the hard drive suddenly reappeared again in my hands. the sensation of the sun felt different on my skin in pixilated form. it even somehow burned me in a synthetic way too. it was fuckin insane…

DR3@DFU1WAKE: DUDE…. did u do MDMA this weekend or something???

4CHANC0K3: nah…. the dream weirded me out man…

4CHANC0K3 interrupted the fast clicks of his fingers. The screen before him began to shake with electric pulses that were hypnotizing. His eyes watered up at the edges and he found that, although he wanted so badly to blink, he couldn’t seem to anymore. It felt as though a repulsing magnetic field was separating his eyelids intentionally. He could feel the cool breeze of the air-conditioner flowing over his eyeballs and it stung like paper cuts.

He thought to himself again in racing frames… What happened next in my dream? Why can’t I remember? There was something mesmerizing about the sand. The light was so intense. Something about a mirage happened… right? What was the figure I saw? Why can’t I fucking remember anymore! FUCK…

FACT: In The First World War Adolf Hitler had a dream that caused him to unexpectedly jump out of the trench he was huddled in just moments before a shell struck and blew everyone else up inside who had been around him. He survived unharmed. In World War II he committed mass genocide.

4CHANC0K3 continued to tap his foot repetitively on the carpet, still glaring at the screen in frustration. He wanted so badly to remember what happened next… that something about this part of the dream was what kept him awake all these days since. But nothing came. He started grinding his teeth and a sharp spasm took over his neck. Then, suddenly pain surged down the left side of his body.

In that moment the electricity went out in the apartment and his room was left dark and empty, void of the usual humming of machines.

“I remember now!” He suddenly recalled in excitement out loud to himself.

Hypnotized by his realization, a grin appeared on his face and he didn’t even seem to notice the unexpected power outage.

“The mirage…. it was a leopard that morphed into a woman.” He began to mumble to himself, still not realizing that he was disconnected from the Internet now. “…And she was coming towards me with a hovering light just in front of her. And the helicopters above started falling from the sky……” He kept mumbling to himself as someone at the door started knocking.

A familiar young female voice flooded questions to 4CHANC0K3 through the door:

“Hey… are you in there? Is your power out too? Do you have an extra flashlight I could use?”

4CHANC0K3’s eyes turned down to his lap, which was to his sudden surprise holding a hard drive. On the outside it looked perfectly fine minus a few minor scratches, but on the inside it’s magnetic component would no longer spin anymore.

FACT: Mark twain predicted in a dream that he would die on the day Halley’s Comet would be seen on planet earth just like it had the day he was born. On May 18, 1910 Halley’s comet reappeared the same day Mark Twain died.

“Shit!”

4CHANC0K3 said out loud,

“My whole life was on that hard drive.”

 

 

 

2014

Michelle Lee Proksell