Someone Else’s Dream

Chapter 4
A Very Strange Woman

Chapter Description: Mia returns from holiday to find her best friends playing mother and baby in the kitchen. It’s best to just sleep it off and hope it’s a nightmare - or is it?

Mia stepped off the British Airways plane at London City Airport all in a daze. The past five days had been a whirlwind tour, by boat and by private car, of Avignon, Montpellier, and Cannes. With Harry’s family being as well-to-do and well-connected as they were, she and her boyfriend had spent their little break dining and drinking wine in only the finest of restaurants. Word sent ahead from Harry’s father opened many doors, it seemed, and got the couple only the most intimate tables with the most stunning views. At one point, she thought he might propose while out on their hired boat in the Bay of Cannes. That had turned out to be a romantic fantasy, but it was a magical trip all the same. 

To come back from that and face the tarmac of a small airport in East London was almost too much to bear. Had Mia been made of weaker stuff, she’d have cried when touching down in England. At least the luxury could carry on a little bit longer in Harry’s car, for which he had a driver waiting in the airport car park. When finally she was dropped off home, all she wanted to do was run upstairs to her room at the top of the house and sleep. So it was a bit of an inconvenience - to use a bit of classic English understatement - to walk in and find that the living room had been turned into some sort of crèche and that one of her housemates was spoon-feeding the other at the kitchen table. Mia, ready to throw herself on the bed and hopefully find herself waking up back on the Mediterranean, was stunned. A mixture of curiosity and revulsion gripped her, so she slowly stepped into the living room to get a better look at her two friends. 

Sophie had her back to the living room but had heard Mia all the same.

“Mia! I’ll just be a second!” Sophie cried out. Clearly, she had her hands full in that moment.  

The 21 year old Fleur was seated in a high chair that had been sized up for an adult. Across the back was a row of images that looked like building blocks with ‘B A B Y’ written across them. Her brown hair was up in two tall pigtails and her body was bare besides an oversized pink bib with a unicorn on it and a poofy white nappy between her legs. She was blowing babyish spit bubbles from her adult mouth and drumming her adult hands on the babyish tray affixed to the chair. Her demeanour did not exactly evoke a confident third year student at university so much as a giddy little infant scarcely able to control her own body.

Fleur was sticking her tongue out to receive whatever sweet little concoction Sophie had on a colourful plastic spoon. She made whooshing noises and pretended it was an airplane to get Fleur to open up. When she did so, she immediately started to slap her lips together and bounce up and down in her chair. Half of it landed on her bib, which was then scooped up in her hands and clumsily sucked from her fingers one by one. 

Mia’s heart started to race, leading her to panic and dart upstairs. She was sickened! What on earth were her friends doing?! Mia was not one to shame kinks - far from it - but to do so in full view of everyone was something else. That didn’t even begin to explain where exactly the high chair had come from, nor how any of this had started. 

Once she was in her room, she promptly locked the door behind her and threw herself on the bed. Maybe the impact upon diving face-first into her duck feather pillows would be enough to wake her up from this nightmare. Maybe she’d fallen asleep in Harry’s chauffeured car and all of the last ten minutes had been an illusion conjured up from the sickest recesses of her mind.

It was nothing of the sort. She pulled her head up to see the same walls, same pillows, and same furnishings surrounding her. This was real - all too real. 

She felt ill, embarrassed for herself as much as her friends, and she didn’t know what to do. When her heart stopped pounding so fast and her breathing calmed, she turned herself around and looked at herself in her bedroom mirror. Her dark olive-toned skin had clearly been blessed by the sun, even if only for a few days. She thought of Fleur downstairs, showing her bare skin off with no cares. Mia contemplated her own hair up in those same pigtails, though her jet black bob didn’t exactly lend itself to such creativity. The whole thing made her skin crawl, she thought. 

She wouldn’t want to join in, would she? 

“Fuck that,” she stated aloud to no-one in particular. 

Just then, the faint creeping of footsteps could be heard. Someone was ascending the stairs.

Mia clambered into bed and drew up the covers. The footsteps were then on the landing and they plodded louder and louder until they stopped at Mia’s door.

“Mia, my lovely,” Sophie whispered. “Are you awake?” 

When no reply came, Sophie slunk away and headed back downstairs, her footsteps disappearing with her. Mia heard a succession of loud, explosive giggles, which then dissipated as the theme of a familiar children’s TV show started to play. It was quiet but perceptible, which gave it a calming quality that threw Mia right back to her own childhood.

She laid there, bundled up in the covers with her blinds drawn down, and drifted off to sleep. Her dreams that night were quite unlike any that she had known before. A surrealist landscape of yellows, oranges, and greens melted away into a black canvas of stars in wild shapes for which she had no name. She was light, floating around like gravity had disappeared entirely. Above all else, it was vivid beyond belief.

Thus, it was something of a disappointment when a hole opened up beneath her and she was swallowed up only to be spat out at the end of a hallway. All the doors flanking her were shut and had no discernible means of opening, but at the very end was a closed door with a golden knob that glistened even in darkness. A matching golden light peered through the crevices around the door, as if trying to escape some kind of prison. Mia saw nowhere else to go.

As she drew closer to the door, all manner of voices in frantic and overlapping conversation rang in her ears. It sounded… busy? When finally her hand touched the knob and turned it, the voices cut out. Everything was silent. When the door opened to reveal a beautiful terrace overlooking the sea, Mia felt a sense of relief. It appeared as if she would get another holiday even sooner than she wished.

This place, however, wasn’t the south of France. If it was, she hadn’t noticed a restaurant terrace carved into the side of a cliff where candles hung upside down from the  ceiling in suspended animation. Harry would certainly have taken her there if it was real, she thought.

At the terrace’s edge, sat at a table all on her own, was a woman in a powder blue cocktail dress. Her auburn hair was done in an elegant bouffant and her neck was adorned in beautiful pearls. She was, to put it simply, gorgeous in an old Hollywood fashion. Mia was drawn to her the moment she caught her eye. The woman noticed her and beckoned her over: an invitation she could hardly refuse. When she looked back, the way in had disappeared into the craggy wall as if it had never been there. 

When she neared the table, Mia was stunned by the woman’s glamour. She even smelled gorgeous. Her lips, bright red in colour, curled into the most radiant smile that Mia had ever witnessed.

“Hello Mia, my darling. Would you take a seat?” As if by magic, the chair in front of her slid back on its legs. When she sat, it slid right back to the table.

“How do you know my name? What’s… what’s going on?” She thought the questions would come across as demanding, but in execution her voice shook like a leaf in a gale.

The woman just chuckled and reclined in her chair, which shifted like liquid to accommodate her new pose.

“Oh, I know much more than just your name. Rude of me to not tell you mine, though, isn’t it? My name is Desideria and I’ve become something of a… friend to your two housemates.”

“Fleur? Sophie? What have you done?”

“I’m… well, I’m a facilitator of sorts. Dreams and desire go hand-in-hand but the execution must be handled properly - in the right spirit, so to speak.” The woman could see that Mia wasn’t quite comprehending and her nostrils were flaring. “There is the desirer and the thing desired, no? My job is to bring them together.”

“Desire? What desire? Fleur and Sophie aren’t a couple and they certainly aren’t into any of that weird shit,” she replied while rolling her eyes. Her confidence, though sincere, was misplaced.

“Oh, my sweet Mia, you don’t know them as well as you might think! Sophie has desired Fleur for a long time, though she never admitted it. Strange, isn’t it, to be so close to someone and to be totally unaware of who they really are? Indeed, Fleur herself has been practicing her littleness for even longer, but she kept it hidden. She feared judgement and desired delivery from it - she desired a carer, a truly loving person to give her everything she needed. When their desires converged, that’s when I stepped in.” The full weight of the revelations came fast and hard, smashing apart Mia’s understanding of her two best friends in their entireties. Shellshocked, she wasn’t sure what to say nor where to look.

“So you can - what? - wave a magic wand and give anyone anything they want?” Mia meekly gestured to the fabricated world around them, as if proof of the full extent of Desideria’s power. Desi herself found her adorable.

“Ha! Oh no, no, no,” Desideria tutted. “Maybe the head of department could just change anything, not that he would. But the rest of us have our constraints.” 

“The rest of you? There’s more of you?” 

Desideria looked wistfully off into the darkness, where the black water met the black sky and the stars disappeared beyond the horizon.

“We’re somewhere, anywhere, and everywhere. I’m not the spirit of desire but one of many. We are - well, were - summoned up by the strength of people’s passions, by the sum of all their longing and craving and yearning. Now, though, there’s not a lot of that going around…”

Mia interrupted, “… wait, head of department?”

“Gods, you are full of questions. Humans are so cute.” Desideria reached her hand out to playfully pinch Mia’s cheek, though Mia recoiled. “Oh, I’m sorry. I’ve gotten so used to playing with Fleur.” 

“Anyway. Yes, my head of department. The Department for Desire, that’s what we were called. Now, though, we’re the Department of Desire & Expectations Management. It’s a load of nonsense now, all bureaucracy and boredom and crap.” Mia once again gave her an uncomprehending look.

“Look, it might just be easier to give you the tour.”

The sea lapped against the cliff, rising higher and higher until the waves reached the very level at which Desi and Mia sat. They then stopped dead, solidified into stone, and formed into a staircase. Desideria rose from her chair and held out her hand.

“Come on, Mia. Have you really never wanted to see into someone else’s dreams?” 

Mia couldn’t resist.