70 - Dreams and Memories

Maia soon found herself pregnant from her night at the museum with Derrick.

But it was the nights where she had her recurring dream that affected her the most.

Maia read through all the books she could on dream analysis, but trying to decipher its meaning wasn’t easy. It seemed that fire symbolism in dreams could mean any number of things: anger and destruction, desire and passion, enlightenment and illumination, purification, regeneration, transformation… Maia figured any or even all those things could point towards a valid interpretation given what she remembered of the dream, but none of them necessarily felt like the correct meaning, at least not one that would explain why she was having it night after night. She had to be missing something, but what? All she could do was continue searching for an answer.

In the meantime, Maia’s pregnancy progressed and she went into labor.

She gave birth to twins.

Welcome Thaddeus!

And welcome Layla!

Soon afterwards, it was time for Zak to become a teen.

Happy birthday Zak!

And her son made his IF Jester real.

Maia taught both of them to drive.

And then it was time for her toddler quads to age to children.

Happy birthday Elise!

Happy birthday Chloe!

Happy birthday Brielle!

Happy birthday Ian!

But in all that time, Maia still hadn’t found the answers she was seeking concerning her dream. It wasn’t that she wasn’t trying, but her duties as a mother and working to advance in her job didn’t leave her much time to allot to it, and the time she was able to spend wasn’t very successful.  Maia closed the dream dictionary she had been reading and sighed. 

Isak had been visiting to perform routine maintenance on A.C.E. and heard her sigh. “What’s the matter?” he asked her.

“Oh, the usual,” Maia said and gestured at her book pile. “Too many dream interpretation books to go through; it’s like trying to find a needle in the proverbial haystack! I suppose I should really be spending time with the kids or scrying for my clients instead of trying to figure out this dumb dream I keep having anyway.”

“It’s great that you’re committed to your family and doing the best you can at your job,” Isak said slowly, “but you do need to take some time for yourself too. You should get out more; have a spa day or something, or just hang out with some friends. The break would do you good.”

Maia chuckled wryly. “Other than you, I don’t have many really close friends; just casual acquaintances and baby daddies.  And I doubt you’d like to take a spa day with me!”

“Yeah... spas aren’t my thing.” Isak laughed. “But maybe that’s the problem. I’ve never seen you hang out with any female friends who share your interests.”

“I guess that’s because of having to do the challenge; I’ve always focused on relationships with men for obvious reasons, and never tried to make female friends...” Maia trailed off.

“Maybe you should.  What about that social worker Joy? You know; the one who handled Caspian’s adoption? She seemed nice, and at the very least you’d have your love of children in common.”

“I guess I could try... But Isak, I already feel so swamped with work, raising the kids, progressing with the challenge and trying to figure out what my dream means that I don’t know where I’d get the time to add anything or anyone else. And then there’s the gardening, and the cooking…”

“Whoa! Okay, one thing at a time. You need to continue the challenge, of course.  And being a good mom to the kids is also a given. I can even understand the drive you have to figure out what this dream means if it’s plaguing you so much, and maybe figuring it out would relieve some stress.  But there are alternative solutions for the other things. I could program A.C.E. to do the cooking and gardening in addition to the cleaning if you wanted. And you could cut back with working, or even quit if it’s getting to be too much.  It’s not like you need the money, but it seems you do need the time that you’d get back from not being employed.”

“But I can’t quit—I’m so close to my final promotion!  And I have clients depending on me! And I’m supposed to be learning things that will help me understand my dream—that’s why I got the job in the first place! Figuring out that dream is something I am doing for myself, for my own peace of mind.”

“But you haven’t found any answers there, have you?”

“Well, not yet, but I’m sure eventually I’ll—”

“When is eventually, Maia? How many more years do you need to put into this job before you realize it isn’t giving you the results you need?”

“I don’t know!” Maia exclaimed in frustration. “But I can’t give up on it—I don’t know what else I can do that might help me decipher my dream! Besides, it could be that I just need a little more knowledge and experience... ”

“So why not talk to someone who already has both, like your boss Shravan?  Instead of being a fortuneteller, become the client for a change. No one ever said you couldn’t have help, and Shravan knows his business. When I want a reading, he’s the one I see.”

“But Kizzy Tem from Moonlight Falls said my future was too cloudy for her to be able to see any more of it,” Maia protested weakly. “And wait... you go to Shravan for readings instead of me?!”

“No offense meant, Maia, but after that reading you did on me where you... uh, misinterpreted things... I thought it best to go to someone with no preconceptions. And just because Kizzy couldn’t help you further doesn’t necessarily mean that Shravan can’t, and it doesn’t hurt to at least ask.”

“Great, so I’m a failure.”

Isak pulled Maia into a hug. “No, you’re not a failure.  You’re smart and brave and wonderful and I’ve never met anyone who tries as hard as you do to always do the best they can. But you don’t have to do this all on your own; there are always people who are willing to help us figure things out, people who can see things more clearly—better than what we can for ourselves. And that’s why everyone needs other people in their life; no one  is perfect at everything. And even if it were possible, as your friend I wouldn’t want you to be perfect; just imagine what I’d look like by comparison!”

Isak’s last comment along with the silly face he made worked as intended, and he and Maia laughed together.

“I suppose you’re right,” Maia said. “I guess I’ve just gotten so used to having the fate of the world resting on my shoulders with this challenge that I’d forgotten that I don’t have to do everything else on my own too.”

“I can understand why you’d feel that way, and I know it’s been a lot for you to handle.  But even the weight of your task isn’t one you carry alone. Your sisters completed their own challenges as part of the prophecy, and the men who’ve fathered all these children have contributed too,” Isak pointed out.  “So even though you bear the heaviest burden right now, we’re all in this together. You’re not alone, and I’ll always be here for you.”

Maia held onto Isak tightly for a long time. “Thank you,” she said simply.

When she finally released him, Isak asked, “So what are you going to do now?”

“I’m going to take your advice and go talk to Shravan,” Maia answered. “Even if he can’t help me with deciphering my dream, he is my boss. If nothing else, he might be willing to adjust my work schedule and make it a little more manageable.”

So Maia went to the Goodman’s house to speak with Shravan.

The door was answered by one of Shravan’s brothers, who introduced himself as Jeromy Goodman. Maia asked to see Shravan, but Jeromy said that Shravan was working late at Lucky Fortunes. When Maia said she’d head over to the caravan to see him, Jeromy offered to accompany her while she waited.

Maia chatted with Jeromy at Lucky Fortunes while she waited for Shravan.

But the whole time they were talking, Maia was thinking about the fact that Jeromy was on her daddy list, so she asked him what he thought of pursuing the idea.

Jeromy agreed immediately, and he and Maia went into the all-in-one bath for some steamy, baby-making woohoo.

After they emerged, Shravan was there waiting.  “Perfect timing!” he said with a smirk.

Maia rolled her eyes. “I’d expect nothing less from you!”

“And I expect that you won’t be surprised to hear that I know what you came to discuss with me,” Shravan told her.  “Why don’t we head back to my house so we can talk about it,” he suggested.

So they went back to the Goodman residence and settled down in one of the sitting rooms so Maia and Shravan could have their discussion.

Maia explained to him how difficult it was to both work and do all the other tasks she needed to, and Shravan agreed that he would be able to easily alter her schedule to just a couple days a week and shift her currently heavy client load to some of the other psychics. “But this isn’t the primary reason you came to see me, is it?”

“Not entirely, although lightening my scheduled hours will help out a lot. So you know about my dream then?”

“Some,” Shravan said.  “But pretend I know nothing and tell me everything in detail, and also elaborate on how it makes you feel.  I don’t want to miss anything that might be important.”

So Maia explained the dream to Shravan; the connection she felt with the man she knew as Samael, the feelings of unknown danger and of being watched, and of catching fire abruptly and burning eternally in the darkness of deep sky.

Maia went on to explain what she had discovered in her books on dream interpretation, but how they didn’t seem very helpful.  “So what do you think?”  Maia asked anxiously after she finished her explanation.

“Fire is a powerful metaphor in dreams; it can indicate playing with fire, regeneration through hardship as in the case of a fire in a forest, the companionship of a campfire, and old flames from the past. That last part is especially telling, considering you said you were both wearing animal skins. Put together with the history of fire you have—being a witch, destroying mummies with fire spells and of the house fires you've experienced—it makes me wonder... have you ever considered this isn’t so much a dream as it is a memory from a past life?”

“A past life? You mean you think this all really happened to me?”

“It’s possible, given the setting and clothing you’ve described. And it would certainly explain why the dream dictionaries aren’t helping you if the dream consists of actual events you experienced rather than being purely metaphorical.”

“But how could I be on fire, surrounded by absolute darkness, as if I were in the sky? That’s the part that makes the least sense to me.”

“Look to the nighttime sky. Stars burn,” Shravan answered. “It is said that all things originated from them; galaxies are born and life materializes from the resulting chemical reactions, so technically speaking, we are all made of the stuff of stars.  And did you know that there is a star called Maia?”

“Actually, yes,” Maia said slowly. “It’s one of the stars in the Pleiades constellation, the Seven Sisters. My daughter Kimberly told me about it long ago, and my own sisters bear the names of those stars too. I wondered about it at the time, but I never could understand the significance... And honestly, I still don’t.  Why would we all share the names of stars?”

“In the old mythologies, those who had done extraordinary deeds or great wrongs during their lives were said to be placed into the sky as stars or constellations in order for their actions to be remembered, as a lesson to those who’d look upon them.”

“I guess I find that hard to apply to myself; it sounds like something out of a fairy tale.”

“Well, I am a fairy!” Shravan laughed.

“Haha, I didn’t mean it like that!  But what could I have possibly done ‘once upon a time’ that was either so great or terrible that I would’ve been placed in the sky as a star for someone to remember that deed?”

“I suspect it has something to do with this man Samael, since you were with him right before it happened. It fits with that sense of being in danger that you mentioned you felt around him. Perhaps he was the one who placed you there?”

Maia frowned and shook her head. “That doesn’t feel right. I loved him more than I’ve ever loved anyone, and I just know... somehow... that he loved me the same way! It was like he was a part of me; I felt so complete in his arms, like our very souls were united.”

“A soulmate?”

“Exactly! But then why would the dream jump from us being blissfully in love to me burning alone in torment?”

“It didn’t.  It seems a piece is missing. You did say that you felt as though you were being watched right before you caught fire. Something must’ve happened in between those two separate events that you don’t remember yet; it may be such a bad memory that you've blocked it. The only people who have that answer are you, Samael and whoever else was there unseen back then; that’s all I can tell you with any certainty.”

Maia couldn’t help but feel disappointed. “I don’t mean to be ungrateful, and you have given me insight into things I never would’ve come up with myself, but I guess I expected more solid answers from you so I would stop having this dream every night.”

“I’m sorry, but anything else I could say would just be more conjecture; I’m better at predicting the future than I am of seeing into the past.  And regarding the future, I don’t think this dream is going to go away, at least not until you remember it fully. I wish I could be more help to you in this now, but since I can’t, I will say that if anything involving the missing bits of the dream comes back and you don’t know where to turn in that dark hour, I’ll be here to help you through it.”

It was quite late when Maia finally left Shravan’s, and after getting the kids tucked in for the night, Maia headed to bed herself. And she dreamed...

But before she got to the part where she burned, Maia managed to wake herself up.

Throughout the night, whenever the dream got to that point, she would force herself to awaken again.  She didn’t want to feel the agony of burning in the fire of a star, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to remember how she had gotten there. But dreaming of Samael—her soulmate from a past life!—without the pain of fire and loss was more than worth having her sleep cycle broken.  The only thing better than that would be having him in her arms again, in this life, outside of her dreams...

Author’s note: I wonder where you are, I wonder if you think about me, once upon a time, in your wildest dreams...