Blog 101: My Last Dream

This building seems endless, walls covered in that wallpaper that’s supposed to look old but’s too bright and shiny to pull it off. This place is old though, ancient and possessed of such a rich history but always kept near enough with the times, too much to have maintained the ‘genuinely old’ feeling of all of the tourist sites that were barely used by the nobility that were only vaguely aware they owned them. This public house sits at the foot of the castle that was only around a few hundred years before. The two must be warm friends by now, my watering hole quenching the thirst of those who patrolled the walls above back in the days when they were under threat of hostile invasion and now that the tourists come in waves, flooding the castle without opposition.

I barely need to leave this street to live my life, the one that will end soon. My home occupies the two floors above the tavern, Indian and Chinese take-away shops either side of the pub and a chip shop that opens at midnight between the supermarket and electrical store across the cobbled road. I go weeks sometimes without moving more than half a mile from my home, why would I?

My abode is mine so long as I live up to the high standards of my university which occupies the two floors above my home, the three that rest on the arch that crosses the road and two above the other side of the road. There’s a basement somewhere but it doesn’t have a window and after all of the twists and turns I have no idea where it is.

The university accepts only the ten greatest candidates it can find every year whose family can pay the fees and keep their silence. For the money, which my parents never discussed, I’m being taught twelve hours a day by the greatest minds on the planet. It’s a tough regime with a twenty five per cent drop out rate but its alumni occupy a disproportionate numbers of pages in Nobel prize-winner lists.

I’m in my second year now; there are only eight of us now. The other two couldn’t hack it. Soon there will be seven; I’m not long for this world. I didn’t know it when I drifted off but I have a few loose connections in my brain that will be severed by my movements when I wake. This is my last dream.

Being asleep this isn’t one of the visions that people talk about when they have near death experiences whilst awake. Everything is more fluid, the world is a bit more as I’d want it than it ever was. The girl I like smiles back when I relive talking to in this last mirage. She’ll be a famous activist and campaigner for peace, she’ll oversee treaties when war threatens and because I’ll be dead she’ll actually remember me.

My best friend Martin Bashir will be the owner of the largest renewable energy company in Britain by the time he’s thirty and the largest in the world when he hits fifty seven. He’ll be nominated for a Nobel peace prize that will quite rightly go to the woman who cured Anti-Imuno-Deficiency-Syndrome.

I’m not the only one of my year that will die young, the red haired boy we never talk to will die less than a decade from now but not before he’s changed the face of music and become a legend the whole world will mourn.

My younger brother will follow me here too and my father will be happy for him to have made money with his investments though in reality the money would have made a fourth as much in a high interest account.

I will be found by Martin, my eyes open to the world I will never see. I walk my last steps through this endless shady tavern, past the fake-guild frame on the huge plasma TV that makes it look like a cheap black mirror. I know all of this and that it will be lost to the world when I walk through the emergency exit into the bright sunlight of death. This was my last dream and now I wake.