I don't dream in color. I don't even dream in pictures, not any more. They were my lifeline for the first years of darkness, but they drifted away from me, or I drifted away from them, a few years after I realized that I was still in the hibernation chamber. Still in transit to the new colony. Ten years away from my new home, and forever lost to my old one.
I dream in sound. My son's laughter, as I scoop him up and tickle him until he shows all of his baby teeth, maybe a year away from losing the first of them in the next step of the inevitable transition we humans call 'growing up.'
I dream in scents. The smell of my father's chicken creole, or Nana's sweet potato pie as it baked, the odors seeming to leach into every corner of the rickety wooden house. As if the house could inhale, could enjoy the flavors in its own way. Maybe it could.
I've stopped expecting the world to make entirely the same kind of sense as before I signed on. Even at the slippery-to-grasp speeds we're traveling, time still passes. More at home than here, Einstein was forever right about that, and like Cassandre, maybe he should've been called a prophet instead of a scientist.
The machinery around me hums, softly, softly. I can hear it as clearly as the faint ringing tinnitis in my left ear which disqualified me for pilot training, but made me the perfect backup Everyman. I've the mechanic's training, the pilot's, and I'm a half-decent field medic.
It's the high, electrical whine of the tinnitis which I think will get me, eventually, not the dreams of scent or sound or the kinetic sway of rocking, whether in a porch swing with my arm around my boyfriend, or the frantic, desperate sway of the lifelift pulling me toward the helicopter and away from the vehicle tumbled down a ravine, water lapping hungrily at the broken windows.
Sometimes, the machine clicks. It's a hard, definite sound and I've learned to love it. Because whatever I'm dreaming stops, whatever is making my heart race, or tears leak from the corners of my almost-sedated tear ducts. I've begun a calendar of those clicks, after the first thousand or so.
Oh. There's silence, too, a profound and impossible silence just before a click. It ma-
-{}-{}-{}-
“Sedation proceeding. Entering stage three, Doctor,” the almond-eyed man reported. “Twenty minutes until we seal for takeoff.”
“Very good,” the steel-haired woman replied. “Is everything in the green?”
“Perfectly,” her assistant agreed. “Elapsed time, seventeen seconds, full suspension in eight more.”
I Don't Dream In Color
I don't dream in color. I don't even dream in pictures, not any more. They were my lifeline for the first years of darkness, but they drifted away from me, or I drifted away from them, a few years after I realized that I was still in the hibernation chamber. Still in transit to the new colony. Ten years away from my new home, and forever lost to my old one.
I dream in sound. My son's laughter, as I scoop him up and tickle him until he shows all of his baby teeth, maybe a year away from losing the first of them in the next step of the inevitable transition we humans call 'growing up.'
I dream in scents. The smell of my father's chicken creole, or Nana's sweet potato pie as it baked, the odors seeming to leach into every corner of the rickety wooden house. As if the house could inhale, could enjoy the flavors in its own way. Maybe it could.
I've stopped expecting the world to make entirely the same kind of sense as before I signed on. Even at the slippery-to-grasp speeds we're traveling, time still passes. More at home than here, Einstein was forever right about that, and like Cassandre, maybe he should've been called a prophet instead of a scientist.
The machinery around me hums, softly, softly. I can hear it as clearly as the faint ringing tinnitis in my left ear which disqualified me for pilot training, but made me the perfect backup Everyman. I've the mechanic's training, the pilot's, and I'm a half-decent field medic.
It's the high, electrical whine of the tinnitis which I think will get me, eventually, not the dreams of scent or sound or the kinetic sway of rocking, whether in a porch swing with my arm around my boyfriend, or the frantic, desperate sway of the lifelift pulling me toward the helicopter and away from the vehicle tumbled down a ravine, water lapping hungrily at the broken windows.
Sometimes, the machine clicks. It's a hard, definite sound and I've learned to love it. Because whatever I'm dreaming stops, whatever is making my heart race, or tears leak from the corners of my almost-sedated tear ducts. I've begun a calendar of those clicks, after the first thousand or so.
Oh. There's silence, too, a profound and impossible silence just before a click. It ma-
-{}-{}-{}-
“Sedation proceeding. Entering stage three, Doctor,” the almond-eyed man reported. “Twenty minutes until we seal for takeoff.”
“Very good,” the steel-haired woman replied. “Is everything in the green?”
“Perfectly,” her assistant agreed. “Elapsed time, seventeen seconds, full suspension in eight more.”