Only In Dreams is Out Now

And you can read it

Paul Samson has been obsessed with the idea of true love since he was a young child. After a series of fleeting elementary school crushes, Paul finally meets the Girl of His Dreams. Unfortunately, he meets her in a dream. When he wakes up, Paul is convinced that love and dreams are each as imaginary as each other. That is, until many years later, when he once again comes across the Girl of His Dreams, and this time she’s all too real.

Only In Dreams is now available as an e-book on the Amazon and Kobo stores.

The novel is an attempt to explain a young man named Paul Samson, who lives almost entirely within his own mind. Afraid of the world and afraid of himself, he retreats into dreams to escape the boredom and loneliness that define his existence. Eventually, his dreams start to push back. He is thrust into the real world, and into a love story that he has never prepared for.

I’ve included below a few excerpts to allow you to get a sense of the book. The first is about online dating. The second describes a dream.

EXCERPT ONE:

I created my online dating profile in the middle of the night, using a username and password I had never used before. I knew that online dating, in this day and age, no longer carried the stigma that it once did, but I still could not get over a feeling of deep shame and embarrassment. This was not so much because of the social ramifications, but because it went against how I had always imagined love would enter my life. It had always seemed that I would one day bump into the love of my life, either while out and about, or through a mutual friend, and that after the brief period of will-they-won’t-they that so excites the television audiences, we would confess our love for each other in some dramatic fashion, perhaps late at night after a long and personal conversation.

Online dating felt like giving up on my dream and resigning myself to a more prosaic and clinical form of finding love. We would know going in that we were going on a date, which in my eyes diminished much of the tension that the audience craved.

But it had become clear to me that the alternative was no longer viable. My reaction to uncertainty, as shown in my recent encounter with Jasmine, was to shut down and run away. It was never clear to me whether someone was flirting with me or just talking to me, and it was even less clear to me whether or not I myself was flirting in return. The entire concept of flirting as a sub-genre of conversation was so bewildering to me that I found it best to just avoid talking to people altogether. This made my dream of a fairy tale meeting increasingly unlikely.

And thus it was that I found myself late one night lying on my side in bed, phone in both hands, a dating app open on the screen. As I entered my information, each press of the confirmation button took every ounce of my strength. I felt that I was committing to something eternal, that there would be no turning back. I was terrified of making a mistake. I double and triple-checked my date of birth. If my birth certificate had been on hand, I would have cross-referenced.

I had this overwhelming fear that somehow everyone I knew would be instantly notified upon the creation of my account. That, perhaps this whole app had been developed purely as a trap to embarrass me. The embarrassment would come from the fact that signing up for a dating app would seem supremely out of character for me.

Sometimes, it seemed that the events and decisions of my life up to that point had cornered me. Somehow, at some time, I had made a mistake, or a series of mistakes, and now I was stuck being the way I was, and there was no way out. The World had formed its opinion of me, and that was that. Thus, acting out of character felt like going against the very foundations of the universe.

One aspect of this reputation I had earned was the fact that I would never get a girlfriend. Anyone observing my life from afar would immediately see that I fit neatly into the category of young men who are inescapably alone. The idea of someone such as myself putting himself out in the world in an attempt to date was laughable. Paul Samson, on a date? Paul Samson flirting, making jokes, acting cool, trying to convince a girl to like him? Ridiculous. “Don’t try to be something you’re not,” they would say.

However, inside of me lay this feeling that if I could reset, if I could erase these preconceived notions, then I really could be a much better person. I could go out on a date, flirt, make jokes, and act cool. I mean, why not? I only needed a fresh slate, a new chance, with someone who had never seen me before and who had no idea of what I had done or who I had become. Online dating seemed to provide just such an opportunity. I could create a new version of myself that might, quite possibly, be more accurate to who I truly was inside.

So, I carried on. I uploaded a few selfies: one in which I thought I looked okay, and another in which I looked a little silly. When it came to my bio, I kept it as sparse and uninteresting as possible. If I tried to make myself seem likeable, I was sure someone would call me on it and I would have to admit that I was lying. When I had finished writing, I set the phone down on my pillow and stared at it. My hands were shaking. I pressed Publish.

Immediately I was bombarded with a screenful of pictures of women, staring right at me. I reeled back, as if they could see me through the screen. Paralyzed, I almost dropped the phone. My first thought was that all of these people could potentially be viewing my profile at that very moment. I navigated back to my profile, and re-read my bio. I found a glaring syntax error in the third sentence. My cheeks burned as I searched for the Edit button. I could not help imagining that someone had already seen it — perhaps the Exact Love of My Life — and taken a violent dislike toward me, swiping my profile into the garbage with disgust. A knot formed in my gut. I opened the options menu. I tapped Deactivate Account.

I lay back on the bed, staring at the ceiling. When I closed my eyes, all I could see was those women staring at me, as if expecting something from me that I could never give. I sat up and downed the glass of lukewarm water on my bedside table. I took a deep breath.

I stood up, and looked around the room. It was empty. There was just me. The women from the screen weren’t real. They couldn’t see me. The only reality was this empty room, the dripping of the pipes in the walls, and the empty darkness outside. I opened the window, and breathed the dark summer air. The world outside was still. I was alone. No one could hurt me here.

*

During the next several days, I reactivated and deactivated my account several times a day. It occurs to me now that at no point did I uninstall the app from my phone. Each time I reactivated and opened the app, either on my phone or my desktop, I would manage to scroll through a few more profiles before the panic overtook me. I just couldn’t help the feeling that the people in the screen could see me.

I read every word of each profile I came across. When I found someone I thought I liked, I re-read their bio several times, rigorously analyzing each sentence to find out what exactly it said about them. I weighed every aspect of what I had learned about them, imagining complex scenarios in order to determine how they might make me feel. For example, if they liked Disney movies, I wondered how long I would be able to hold my peace about how much Mickey Mouse freaks me out. Or, if they liked to roller blade, I placed us on a roller blading date, and tried to figure out if roller blading was any fun. This often spiralled out of control, as I imagined our first, second, and third dates, their first time meeting my family, my first time meeting their family, our first vacation, and then finally, our break-up. As I recovered from the shock, I read their profile one last time, mourning all the memories we had made. Then, I deactivated my account.

It took me a while to understand how the app worked. After searching through the menus, I realized that there was no way for anyone to look through the screen at me or even know that I was looking at their profile. The only way they could be alerted to my presence was if I ‘liked’ their profile or sent them a message. This was a great relief. However, I still had the feeling that if anyone tried to talk to me, I would have to die. Thankfully, no one did.

It was strange for me, scrolling through profile after profile. It was compelling, in an anthropological sense, to find out about all these people my age: how they lived, where they worked, what they studied, what they liked. I had always wondered how everyone else lived; whether their lifestyles were categorically different from mine, or just balanced in a slightly different way. Seeing everyone up close made them feel nearby and approachable, and yet when I tried to imagine them existing in real life, they seemed impossibly distant. In the abstract, I could imagine myself talking to them, but that was the fantastical ideal me of my dreams, not the me sat at his desk scrolling through profiles on his computer. The latter me had no business interacting with any of these people. It would be a clash of worlds, like one of those movies in which real actors share the screen with a cartoon.

It took until the third day before I worked up enough courage to ‘like’ a girl’s profile. She had not written much, but what she had written seemed nice in a cryptic, off-kilter sort of way. There was some vague sense of spirituality running through it all, the nature of which was difficult to discern. She did not list any specific activities, movies, or for that matter, things of any sort which she liked, which gave off the impression that she spent all her time simply being — being whatever it was that she was. She used a glowing filter for all her photos, giving them an angelic, otherworldly quality. It all appealed to some strange sense of mine. I figured that if I was going to date anyone, it would have to be someone who wasn’t like anyone else. I took care this time not to imagine a conversation, a date, or even a break-up. I just closed my eyes and clicked the button.

A text box appeared on the screen. If she ‘liked’ me back, it told me, we would be able to chat. In the meantime, I could write her a short introductory message. I stared at the blank form. I wrote, “Hello, I am Paul.” I took my hands off the keyboard and placed them on my lap. I looked around the room. I stood up, walked over to the window, and then sat down again. Nothing more coming to mind, I hit send.

EXCERPT TWO:

I found myself sat in a shallow artificial pond in the middle of a forest glade. A light breeze sent ripples across the water. The branches of the willow trees that loomed overhead swayed in the wind. There was a gap in the brush before me, and a dirt path leading through it toward a clearing, where it then branched off in two directions. A young woman was standing at the intersection, looking up into the trees. She was wearing a wicker hat with a light blue ribbon, and a long, grey dress that reached her ankles. Her dark hair, wavy and shoulder-length, gently rustled with the wind. She didn’t notice I was there.

She was watching a small blue bird that sat on a branch high up a tree. It was cocking its head back and forth in a frenetic manner, as if searching frantically for something it had lost. It did a little hop to adjust itself, and then, letting out a squawk, jumped from the branch. The forest was so silent that I could hear the flap of its wings as it flew away.

As it disappeared into the depths of the forest, a strong wind blew through the glade, a damp breeze that chilled my skin. The woman’s hair swirled up, and she had to raise her hand to hold down her hat. She was still looking up at where the bird had been. She lifted her other hand and laid it against her cheek, before letting it slowly fall back down. She closed her eyes, and scrunched up her face. Opening her eyes again, she turned to the pond, where she saw me sitting in the water. “Are you okay?” she asked.

I nodded, and raised one hand in a motionless wave. As I stood up, water dripped from my suit. In a futile gesture, I patted down my jacket. I looked behind me and found a hat floating in the water. I bent down and picked it up. I put it on my head.

My socks squelched with each step I took. As I neared the edge of the water, she held out her hand, and I took it as I stepped over the stones that lined the pond. Her hand was smooth as satin. We stepped out into the clearing. I looked up into the sky. It was a light blue, with small wispy clouds passing gently by. The two of us began to walk down the narrow dirt path. After a few steps, I found that my suit was dry. I opened my mouth to say something to her, but she turned to me with a smile that revealed that she knew exactly what I was going to say, so I just smiled back. We continued to hold hands as we left the clearing and entered the forest.

She began to speak. She was telling me about the bird she had seen. She called the bird, “darling.” She seemed to breathe her words more than she spoke them, and I could see the letters appear before her in the air, leaving a trail of words floating along behind us, slowly drifting away in the breeze.

She stopped walking, midway through a sentence. She stared straight ahead, with no expression on her face. The sun passed behind a cloud. “In this world,” she began, before closing her mouth and standing still for a few seconds. Looking up at me, she asked me my name. I told her it was Paul. She laughed. The sun returned with her laugh, and we began to walk again, as she told me about the sky and about the trees.

The wind had been slowly rising, but now it seemed to pick up in an instant. I could barely hear her over the rustling of the trees and the cry of the wind as it swooped between the branches. Her hair was flying across her face, and she once again had to hold her hat on her head. My hat flew off, too quickly for me to do anything about it. It followed her words as they scattered haphazardly into the thick of the forest. She started to speak louder, and faster, and more intensely. I couldn’t understand the words but they burned with fire as they left her mouth, and her grip on my hand became so strong it was painful. Her gait hadn’t seemed to change at all, but we were travelling much faster, as if she was being pulled along on a conveyor belt, the scenery behind her turning into a blur. I struggled to keep up; she was pulling me along faster than my legs could carry me, but her grip did not let up. I could feel the bones in my hand crunching together.

We soon left the forest and were now walking atop the ocean. We were in the midst of a storm; the sky was grey and rain poured down. Water sprayed from above and below, the waves pummelling me from all sides. I fell over, crashing into the water, but she kept her hold on my hand and dragged me through. The water spilled into my eyes, and I was swallowing large mouthfuls of salty brine with each breath. Through the haze, I could see that she continued to breathlessly mutter her mysterious curses, despite the waves and the rain and the wind. She withstood it all as if she didn’t notice it was happening.

Then, she stopped. We were stood in the middle of the ocean with no land in sight; the world was a storm around us and she looked straight at me — her damp hair streaming across her face — she looked straight at me with her crystalline eyes and she opened her mouth as wide as she could and she screamed…

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ONLY IN DREAMS

Now available on the Amazon and Kobo storefronts.

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Thank you to everyone who made this book possible.