Today's #flashfiction The Consequences Of Learning It Was All A Dream

“They mutated the dinosaur genetic code and blended it with that of a frog's. Now, some West African frogs have been known to spontaneously change sex from male to female in a single sex environment. Malcolm was right. Look. Life found a way.”

Barney and Friends*

CJ should be coming over tomorrow. That should be a bucket of fun. Unless we run out of buckets. Then again we could run over to The Crazed Squid's Extreme Discount Bucket Emporium. Anyway onto the flash fiction!

The Consequences of Learning It Was All A Dream

          When a story ends with “It was all just a dream” it often forgets to mention the most important part. What happens when the person realizes this? The after effects on them. They don't cover this. I woke up from a several year coma recently. A coma after a car accident, and that when I was in my coma-dream, I thought I survived. My brain made time pass more slowly in my mind. So months in a coma became many, many years. So when I woke up I learned that thirty years of my “life” became instantly revealed to be a lie made up in a dream.

         Thirty years that started with a war that my brain made up. A war where I became a solider. A war where I started out a hero. Then I abused my power along with other soldiers. We took advantage of other people. We did whatever we pleased to them.

         I didn't go mad from later regret and trauma, spending the rest of my life repenting, only living free because I turned in some traitors I later worked with to gain even more by taking advantage of my own country and the one I was attacking. All those years giving accounts of the horrors of war to the nation weren't real. The horrors weren't real and the war wasn't real.

          And originally the scenario I constructed was that other soldiers convinced me to start taking advantage of those people and do all those horrible things to them. But no. When I woke up and learned it was all a dream, I learned that my brain chose to make all those scenarios exist. The real world didn't make all those horrors exist. My subconscious did. I wasn't dragged into a war, I made the war. I would have preferred to have stayed in my coma as the man repenting for his crimes than waking up knowing that it was a dream all along and that I made them exist.

         This terrible realization did give me a second chance. Lucky circumstances shortly after me waking up made me run across a great deal of money and power. So lucky you wouldn't believe them. So just like in the war in my dream I have the power to take advantage of people again.

         This time it can't all be a dream. I know I can't reset. Or maybe I am wrong and I'm still dreaming? Does that mean I can do it all again? Or should do it all again whether or not waking up can get rid of all my sins?

        I wonder if my soul is the same in the real world?