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[color=darkgreen][i]In my dreams I fly...[/i][/color]

I soar through clouds of tangerine coloured mists and every cloud plays different music.  I dive through a fog playing Big Band by Count Basie, and sweep through a wisp of Gershwin’s [i]Rhapsody in Blue[/i].

I bend physics and kick off of a floating dandelion seed, spinning and rising through Billie Holiday backed by Louis Armstrong.  I briefly feel saddened at the realization that Dian can not experience this with me, but then dream distracts just as life does and my spirits soar once again, as I do, with Sinatra.

I feel the familiar tug and experience a flash of existential dread, as I know what it means.  The dream’s once again taking control.  Believing I need to know something, filling me with purpose.  I plead for it to let me go.  I’m an old man now.  Haven’t I earned the right to peaceful sleep?  To sweet dreams?

The answer comes abruptly as I’m dragged down to Earth.  I produce my mask from the back of my head and put it on in preparation of the turmoil to come.

It would not take long.  I’m surrounded by others wearing similar masks.  Soldiers, pushing forward in a war before my time.  The telltale sign of horror – [b]THE CREEPING DARK GREEN MIST[/b] pushes towards us.  A gas I would never have used myself in my own past, I see soldiers first try and outrun the gas, before those it had already caught slowed as trained.  It would attack the respiratory system more insidiously if the victim were running and taking larger breaths due to fleeing.  But the officers also knew it helped disperse the gas.  Which one of these two facts was the greater reason the officers trained the men so remained to be seen.  As men's clawed hands grasped at their own throats, some men frothed, others eyes wide with terror from the seeming inevitability of their demise.

I look on in horror unable to help, my own mask perfectly sealed and keeping my own lungs clear of the poison.  I had long ago made alterations to my own mask to better prevent the passage of gas.  It was important in my task.  But I suspect my mask’s complete immunity has more to do with my own dream state and the message I’m supposed to take from it than from any alterations I had made to it in the real world.

I see one soldier stagger right to me, his mask foaming and eyes wide.  The gas has started to dissipate.  Its purpose complete.

This man.

He’s drowning and panicked by the thought of the end.  His airway blocked, despite the gas’s passing.  I throw the man down onto the ground and pull the mask off to try and allow air, and am suddenly met with the rising froth and foam as he tries to spit the obstruction clear.

The dark green of his army uniform starts to bleed into the dirt as I pat him down, looking desperately for some kind of solution.  Anything that can help this man.

The dark green uniform has bled out into a lime green suit, somehow repelling all of the mud from the trenches to remain in pristine condition.  I keep patting down and feel a solid object in his breast pocket.  I hold it to the light, its significance clear.  It’s some kind of pen.  The man still squirms, drowning in his own fluids.

I jam it into his throat, attempting to perform some kind of field medic tracheostomy.  Blood starts to pour from his throat, he raises his hands to his neck from the pain, but I pin his arms so I can keep trying to save his life.  I pull the pen back out and am met with muffled moans.  I try to quickly dismantle the pen to separate the tube from the rest for a makeshift cannula whilst he screams even more violently.  Wincing slightly at the unpleasantness of what must be done I push the pen’s outer tube into the hole I created and watch bubbles of blood burst through the pen.

I push back to a seated position and hope I’ve done enough.  The blood keeps pouring from his throat and bubbling out of the pen.  I watch and hope.  The blood pours into a sort of sideways figure ‘8’ shape across his neck, before rapidly clotting into what is instantly recognizable as a bow tie.  It starts to change colour as it dries in the hot afternoon sun.  Still the bubbles of blood continue to rise from the pen, then finally.

He gasps a final rustle as whatever’s left of him leaves this mortal coil, his eyes left wide-open in terror but empty.

I look down at my hands but they’re not bloody.  Just… hands.

I gasp and jerk upright in my bed, trembling from the nightmare.  My old wrinkled hands envelope my face, trembling from the shock of what I’ve just experienced.

“Wesley, dear…  Are you alright?”

I look beside me in the bed and see Dian.  Lying in a wedding dress, stroking my leg and trying to calm me from the vision.

I smile, and she takes my hand and pulls it under the covers.  At first I wonder where exactly she’s taking me, but then she places my hand on her stomach.  But it’s not her stomach.  I flip the quilt back and find her holding my hand to her pregnant belly.  A smile crosses my old wrinkled face, and a tear falls to my cheek.  I cling to this despite my cognitive dissonance.  Wedding bells.

And then a crack of [b]THUNDER[/b] and a flash of [b]LIGHTNING[/b] and for a second I can see Dian’s skin go translucent and the outline of her skull through her face.  The chiming of bells.

I jerk upright with a start.  Alone.  And I can hear the old landline phone besides my bed ringing.

I struggle and wonder whether I’m still asleep or awake and then conclude it doesn’t matter.  I’ll find out soon enough.  After all, if I’m awake then I know exactly what this phone call is.

I look to the empty space in my bed besides me and immediately feel worse.  Then I look to the phone.  It rings again.

[color=darkgray]“No point in putting this off any longer…”[/color] I murmur to myself as I lift the phone off of it’s receiver.

[color=darkgray]“Hello?”  “Yes, speaking.”  “…”  “Yes.”  “Look, this isn’t…”  “Jay…”  “Just tell me.  Enough of the small talk, you’re going a mile a minute.”[/color]

I’m awake.

[color=darkgray]“Funeral’s Tuesday at three?”  “Okay.  I’ll be there.”  “Talk to you then, Jay.”[/color]

I’m wide awake and it happened.  Johnny Thunder is dead.

[color=darkgreen][i]When I’m awake I can’t fly.[/i][/color]