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It was a curious dream.
Perhaps not as surreal as the one she'd had some time ago, the one that had unlocked her fascination with the world of dreams, but it had a certain down to earth charm about it.
Alice leaned against a large tree on the outskirts of a deep forest, overlooking a tranquil meadow; in as much as the inhabitants of her dream were allowing the tranquility to settle. The small patch of lilies at her feet felt cool to the touch, almost like she was dipping her toes in a gentle brook.
She gazed into the sky, lost in the oil painting of clouds, unmoving. The shapes seemed deliberately abstract, almost defying the creation of an image. Dreams are like that, she thought. They have a tendency to command one's attention to focus on whatever metaphors in which one is meant to engage. And perhaps she was being defiant by refusing to acknowledge the large rabbit that had so recently scurried past her (the one that she was clearly meant to follow), but Alice was at peace. And enjoying it.
But dreams always have a way of out-willing the dreamer's wishes.
An oddly shaped young woman burst through the foliage with no warning. She struggled to steady her breathing, and her long auburn hair was drenched in broken twigs. She stared at Alice with a combination of suspicion and shock.
"Who are you?" the woman demanded as soon as her heart rate would permit.
"I'm Alice," said Alice, which was true yet somehow insufficient for her newfound audience.
"Okay?" The woman stared at her for a very long time. "What are you then?"
"I'm just a little girl." Alice plucked one of the lilies from the patch and offered it to her visitor.
The woman took no notice of the flower. "Are you crazy or something?"
"I should certainly hope not. But dreams do bring out the most irrational of thought processes."
The woman appeared as though she was deciding for herself that Alice was in fact crazy, as she had previously suggested. She reminds me a bit of my sister, Alice thought, though not a precise representation.
Whatever reaction the character was meant to have was cut short by a violent thunderclap, that startled both Alice and her companion, the latter of whom stiffened in terror. "Well, that sounded a bit like a rifle," said Alice.
The woman grabbed her hand and pulled her into a sprint. "Come on!"
"Why are we running?" asked Alice.
"Because we want to live!" the woman shot back an accusing glance. "I assume?"
Strangely, the woman was leading her in a direction other than where the rabbit had gone. "We should go that way."
"What way?"
"That way." Alice pointed. "To follow the rabbit."
"What rabbit?"
"The rabbit that-" Before she could finish, a huge man dressed entirely in black on a matching horse lurched through the brush, waving a massive blade over his head. Except...that he had no head.
"Not a priority, doll."
They ran.
The man on the horse pursued them, cackling in a baritone voice. Alice and her friend had to make several sharp side slides to avoid the man's blade before reaching a dense area across the meadow. A thick wall of shrubs forced them to stop.
"Over!" shouted the woman, and Alice did her best upward scramble with a boost from below. She tumbled over the top into a heap on the other side and rolled own a small slope. A few seconds later, the other woman was right next to her on the ground. "Stay down," she whispered.
Alice didn't look up as the hoof steps came to a crescendo where they had previously been. The horse snorted and the man laughed in an odd triumph. The sounds of galloping into the distance suggested that he was leaving to search for an easier way into the woods.
"Well, that was quite exhilarating," said Alice.
The woman scowled as she pushed herself up to her feet. "All right Hades! This has gone on long enough!"
"Curious," said Alice. "So his name is Hades."
"You've seen him?"
Alice blinked. "Well, yes. Just now. On the horse."
"Not him!" She walked away from Alice and into the woods. "Hades? Where are you, you big blue ox?" Whoever she was talking to was not giving her the response for which she was hoping, and she began pacing.
Alice followed the woman, listening to her mutter something to herself about fine print. "Excuse me, miss?"
"Meg," she said, barely taking any notice of Alice. "Come on. What are we, direct to video? I know you're out there."
"Miss Meg." Alice brushed off her dress. "I was wondering. Could you tell me why the man with no head was chasing us?"
Meg shot Alice a look as if she had asked why pandas didn't read limericks. "What does it matter?"
"It is the nature of nightmares to draw one's attention to that which one is neglecting, yet unaware of its importance."
"You are really living in your own world, aren't you?"
"Quite." Alice smiled. "As do we all when we dream."
Meg shifted her weight to one hip. "Listen lilies. I hate that you missed the wake up call, but this is no dream."
"But surely it must be."
"No," Meg sneered, "it mustn't. This is an honest to gods brush with death from a very large man with a very large sword and a very large vacancy from the neck up."
"But how else could you explain why a man with no head can produce laughter?"
Meg sighed. "Look. I'm not interested in debating logic-"
"Which is the thought process of one who is dreaming," said Alice.
Meg rubbed her forehead before storming off again. "Hades!" she yelled, with a little more willingness to tempt his ego. "Get your signal twenty-five hairdo up here, now!"
Alice watched her go, wondering if she should follow her instead of go in the direction that she'd seen the rabbit go. Dreams had a way of pressing one into the situations that the person's subconscious mind demanded they visit, as opposed to the conscious mind. But in the case where one was dreaming and felt their conscious mind was active, as she did, then perhaps the dream was required to adapt around the dreamer's choices so as to still achieve the ideal result. In that case, it wouldn't matter which way she went.
But she also found Meg to be quite an intriguing character. And she would have regretted losing sight of her when there were so many more interesting discussions to be had.
"Well, that was a very carefully thought out decision," Alice told herself. "If I didn't know better, I'd think I was actually awake after all."
Continued in Chapter Three.
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