Carlo was used to dreaming, but he wasn’t used to remembering them. This time was different, for this dream stuck with him for the rest of his life.
He was walking, head down through his high school, the one he had just graduated from.
Just then, when he raised his head, he was in a desert, walking amidst a flowing desert of sand dunes.
His apparel changed from T-shirt, jeans, and a backpack to a sort of headwrap he had not really seen before, raggedy and sand-soaked clothes from the middle-east adorned his clearly tanner skin.
An odd sight developed on his chin, a beard. Scraggly at that. But, by God, a beard was starting to develop on his chin!
Just then, when he looked around, everything had changed to a huge green field. Towering green mountains shot into the sky on the horizon.
Then he was on a road.
He looked around and suddenly he was on a small biplane. Going across a large body of water with someone else, whom he had never met.
Their head was covered by goggles and a leather aviation cap.
“What’s this about?”
Suddenly he was in a castle, an old one made of cobblestone. People with headdresses were dancing and playing music.
“Well, I’ll be.”
And suddenly he was running through the jungle, as if escaping armed forces following close behind.
The thrill sunk into his heart, but he felt no fear.
Only excitement.
Then he was in a boat, a dinghy really, getting ready to go off the ocean onto a waterfall, as if he were falling off from the edge of the world.
And he fell, he fell, and fell, and fell, until… blunk.
He landed on his butt with a “blunk”.
He stood up, looking around. He saw nothing other than darkness, but it was as if there was a spotlight shining from above.
And suddenly he saw it – the face of a T-Rex, sniffing him.
It opened its wide mouth and took a step forward. Carlo could feel the dampness of its breath, and he began running, but couldn’t go anywhere.
He ran and ran, but the T-Rex ran after him, also going nowhere.
Carlo looked back in the dream and wondered at the phenomenon.
But when he returned his gaze forward, he saw the silhouette of a man with the horns of an ibex curled atop and around his head.
A red glow illuminated his figure.
“Lucifer,” a voice whispered deep inside.
And then he fell, as if falling back into his body, and woke up.
“Oh my– oh,” he said.
He was sweating gobs, his sheets and pillows were wet.
“Jesus! Oh, ok, it’s just sweat.”
He looked out his window and saw a full moon, turned the pillow and the sheets over, and tried to fall back asleep.
But he couldn’t. He laid there wide awake, though he tried to sleep.
Suddenly, in front of his eyes, a figure made of light appeared.
“That was weird,” he woke up saying, and immediately picked up a magazine that was next to his bed that had been there for a while.
“Traveler’s delight” is the title, and he looks through an image of Cairo, Egypt, then Machu Picchu, Peru, and then Mecca.
Wow, I want to travel, he thinks as he puts the magazine down. How will I ever get to be that special one? Only in my dreams. He leans back and puts his hands behind his head. How? And when? Why would that happen to me?
He goes out of his room only to see his mother again.
“Hola, amor, cómo has dormido?”
“Bien, mamá, gracias.”
She immediately walks on over to him, while he’s brushing his teeth.
“Y cuando vas a empezar a trabajar?”
“Cuando me emplean.”
“Y cuando va hacer eso? Has aplicado en un logar todavia?”
“No todavia.”
“Y porqué no? Carlo, ya sabes.”
Carlo closes the door. He doesn’t want to put up with this. No, not right now.
“Solamente sal y anda a la oficina de empleo hoy, ya?”
“Ok mama,” he said under his breath while finishing up brushing his teeth.
“Que?”
“I said OK!”
“No me grites. Yo soy tu mama. Don’t yell at me. If I did that to my -“
Carlo opens the door, “Ok, I will”, and storms past her to his room.
“¡Y ponte tu traje!”
MARK SOTOMAYOR 