Prologue

"To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil."

They say we carve our own hell, so that when we arrive we cannot say we didn't earn it. But I like to think Allison had a part in shaping mine.

She appeared to me in a dream. At first I thought she was a muse, a personal herald of divine madness that would inspire me. Until I spoke to her, and she politely noted that my lambchop keychain and worn out chucks suggested I was trying a little too hard to hold on to my youth. And then she smiled, in a way that meant that in truth she really liked my chucks, and right then I knew Allison was something more.

At night I dreamed and she would come to me. Sometimes in a diner, sometimes on the street. In the grays and whites of Seattle, she was a photograph who's saturation was set too high. Every night I'd find her, on the bench in the Square reading Ginsberg, under the bridge having a lively conversation with the Fremont troll. Though more often than not she was at our park. Discovery Park, sitting in the lighthouse on the beach. And in the morning I'd wake up, drive down to the beach, and wait. My heart would jump at the sight of a green moss coat, at the sight of a long black haired woman walking in the distance, an echoing laugh I could've sworn was hers. And as dozens of women walked on by, I'd catch sight of their unfamiliar face, and suddenly I'd become tired and overcome with sleep.

I have never held her hand. I have never touched her cheek. Never in the waking moments of my life have I met Allison face to face, and yet I know her better than I know myself. I like to believe that if I had known her in my waking hours, it wouldn't have worked. I would have never fallen in love. Perhaps we would have been to busy, for in dreams your only obligation is to eventually wake up. In dreams, we are the only two people in the entire world. And in truth the world is so vast, had it not been for these dreams I am sure I would have never known who she is.

How beautiful it was to live a separate life in dreams. To wake up looking forward to something no one else could understand. To be consumed wholly, fully, by the unconscious mind. To feel a tranquility no living fantasy could ever bring. To realize that the nightmares lie not in the mind, but in life itself. And to love, to love someone who was never really there at all.