I Often Dream of Trains

I often dream of trains. Actually, I always dream of trains. Every time I sleep.

At night or even during a quick nap, I dream of an unending railway journey. I’ve had this reoccurring dream for so long that I can’t remember where I’m going, or even where I started.

Three nights ago, I dreamt I was in a buffet car, planning to transfer to the Kensbruck line at a stop named Roundings. Roundings wasn’t my ultimate destination. Roundings was just a way-point. A place where I would transfer to another train which would bring me closer to my final stop.

I was sitting at a buffet-car table, gently holding an empty, coffee-stained paper cup so that it wouldn’t slide off the Formica surface when the train decelerated. The conductor stood in front of me, feet shoulder-width apart, swaying gently in opposition to the rocking of the train. “Unfortunately,” the dream-conductor explained to me, “when you bought your ticket, you didn't account for the every-third-Tuesday line restriction. I’m sorry to say this train won't stop at Roundings. But not to worry. You can disembark at Abingwell and exchange your ticket for an express on the Southway line, then transfer back to the Kensbruck line at Dawson. Might even save you time in the end.”

It’s always like this. In every dream, I’m on the wrong train, or I’m going the wrong way, or there’s some obscure reason why I can’t get off at the stop I planned to. Third-Tuesday line restrictions. Seasonal rail schedules. Limited-express transfer tickets. There’s always some damn thing that prevents me from getting where I need to go. Wherever that is.

These waypoints, the transfer stations like Roundings and Abingwell, don’t exist. Sure, you might find a town or village named Roundings or Abingwell somewhere in the real world. But the real-world places that happen to share the names of places I dream of have no connection with each other. Roundings and Abingwell are linked by train in my dreams. In the real world, if there are any places with these names, they have nothing to do with one another.

For the remainder of my fitful sleep that evening, my dream-self obediently did what the conductor told me to do. I stayed on the train as it rolled through Roundings without stopping. I disembarked at Abingwell, like he told me to do. I woke up.

The next night my endless dream continued like it was a TV show I had paused during my waking hours and restarted once I became unconscious. My dream episode started on the platform at Abingwell, arguing with the clerk at the ticket window. Behind me fumed a line of a dozen prospective train travelers who each urgently needed to speak with the clerk. The customers behind me took turns glaring at me, sighing loudly, and checking their watches with exaggerated, frustrated gestures. A man wearing an enormous backpack was stuck at the end of the queue which I was, apparently, solely responsible for. Backpack man verbalized the travelers’ mood with a series of stage-whispered remarks. “Really? Come on! Let’s go! …”

I continued to monopolize the small station’s sole ticket window.

“I was told that I could get to Kensbruck from here,” I plead with the ticketing clerk.

Behind me, from the track, came a shouted “all aboard” followed by the sounds of a train slowly accelerating out of the station. I hoped that wasn’t the train I was supposed to be on.

"Of course, you can,” the clerk replied. “But...” she paused and looked at me over the tops of her glasses, “you cannot get there from the next train. The next train is an Express-Limited which skips the transfer stop at Dawson. You want the Express-Full, which doesn’t stop here until 5:00. At that time, the station at Dawson will already be closed due to the reduced summer hours."

"So now what do I do?"

“I can issue a voucher for a discount non-re-entry return on this line. You'll re-board the 8673 when it stops at Barnsworth, cross the platform and return to Roundings on the 8674. You’ll arrive there just after midnight, so the Tuesday restrictions will have lifted.” I woke up.

In the next dream something else has gone wrong with my plan to disembark at Barnsworth. And, of course, there is no return to Roundings for another day and a half. Of course, after giving me the bad news that I cannot return to Roundings as planned, the conductor on this night’s dream train tells me how I can correct this. Before I woke, I ended up on another train, heading in the wrong direction with a scheme to transfer again to a train that will get me to the train that was the one to correct the problem from the previous dream.

The trains always run on-time. They never break down and are never delayed. Indeed, if there is anything about my dreams that distinguishes them from reality, it is that the railway functions flawlessly. The problem is with my ticket. It’s like I’ve found a flaw in my dreamland’s miraculously complex rail schedule. Despite the extent of the rail network, and hundreds or maybe even thousands of trains that ride those rails, there’s no way to travel from my long-forgotten origin to my mysterious destination. The train schedules just don’t line up. It’s impossible to get to where I’m going from where I started.

I've had these dreams for years. Every time I sleep, I board a different train in an attempt to correct whatever problem happened in the previous dream. Night after night I get farther and farther from my forgotten destination.

I'm not the only person who experiences part of the same endless dream every time they sleep. From the age of 12, until his death at 85, every time he slept, a man from Illinois dreamt he was locked in a forgotten prison cell. A woman from Seattle reported dreaming of practicing piano every night for forty years. In each dream, she struggled to learn a different part of the same piano concerto. A concerto that, if played all the way through, would last centuries.

The medical journals report a handful of other, similar cases. There’s a name for this sleep disorder: Somnocontinuum.

As far as chronic medical conditions go, somnocontinuum isn’t that bad. My sleep-specialist reassured me that it has no effect on my lifespan and no increased risk of co-morbidities. She pointed out that since I have no problem falling asleep, and I wake up feeling rested, it’s considered a mild sleep disorder – one that’s not even worth medicating. Perhaps the only significant impact of my disorder is that I am afraid to travel by train.

When I’ve needed to travel, for work or to visit family, I’ve always managed to find a way to get where I need to go without boarding a train. I'm happy to fly. Airlines’ hub and spoke systems are too simple to hide a bizarre scheduling trap like the one my dream-self is stuck in. Buses don’t cause me any anxiety. Taxis are expensive but otherwise feel safe to me.

Eventually, though, I had to face my fear of being indefinitely stranded in a transit system. Two weeks ago, I was asked to make an important work trip to my firm’s satellite office in Redding. Flying there wasn’t an option, since I would necessarily land at an airport that was as far from Redding as our home office. The bus was too slow and would require an overnight stop. The firm couldn’t afford a private car and, I discovered, after checking prices myself, neither could I.

I suppose I could have refused the assignment. But this was a new account, and our potential new client asked for me, specifically. I am loyal to my firm and I have the ambition of one day joining the executive suite. I knew that no matter how carefully I described my phobia – no, my medical condition – all my colleagues would hear is that I refused the assignment because of a scary dream.

I convinced myself that I was being childish. I needed to face my fear. Besides, I told myself, I’ll be traveling in the real world, not in a surreal dreamscape. If anything goes wrong, I reasoned, I’ll just get off the train, get a taxi into town, and figure out what to do from there. In my dream journey, the option to just get off the train and leave the station never occurs to me.

I spent three hours booking my ticket, scrutinizing the schedule and fine-print to make sure there were no hidden glitches with the ticket. An express train that doesn't stop where I need it to. An every-third-Tuesday schedule that throws a wrench in the whole itinerary. I saw no problems. I told myself I was just letting my overactive imagination get to me, then I clicked the “Purchase Ticket” button.

I live in an outer suburb. The train station is only a few stops from the end of its line and is not very busy. I arrived early and sat on the bench on the empty platform. I scanned my ticket again, looking for signs of trouble. I was to board the 11:29 local, transfer to the Northworks line at Rodingham (which are real places, unlike the fictional waypoints in my dream), and ride six more stops to Redding. The ticket was nearly as straightforward as possible. Board one train, transfer to another, get off.

I put the ticket back in my pocket and looked around. A man stood on the far end of the platform, facing me. Was he staring at me or just looking down the tracks, waiting for the train to round the corner? I squinted to bring the opposite end of the platform into better focus. He was formally dressed, wearing a black suit and tie. However, in a jarring clash of styles, he also wore an enormous red backpack – the kind of pack you’d wear if you were setting out on a long, multi-day hike through the wilderness.

The clatter of the arriving train sounded from behind me. I turned around and saw the locomotive round the bend – a tall, rectangular machine painted in the smart navy blue and sunflower yellow livery of the railway line. Behind it a dozen passenger cars slid into view. The summer sun was shining. The train proudly sounded its whistle. The scene was a postcard-perfect image of a train approaching a remote station. Norman Rockwell couldn’t have done a better job composing the iconic scene. I looked at my watch – 11:27 am. The train was running perfectly on time – just like in my dreams.

The train squealed and hissed to a stop. The doors opened with a quieter and lower-pitched pitched hiss. I glanced down the platform. The man at the far end was staring in my direction. I walked to the nearest open door, then paused before stepping inside. The man at the far end of the platform also walked to the door nearest him and paused. I took a deep breath and stepped into the train. The man in the suit and backpack did the same.

My car was nearly empty – two or three other passengers sat alone, separated by four or five rows of seats. I took a seat in an unoccupied row in the middle of the car. Outside the window, the little train station slid backwards as the train gently accelerated forward.

The train reached its final speed. The acceleration that pushed me into my seat was replaced by a gentle rocking and swaying that was pleasantly synchronized with the clacking of the wheels on the tracks. Despite my extensive experience with trains and sleep, I had forgotten how relaxing the rolling-on-rails part of train travel can be.

The train gently rounded a turn, and the sunlight shifted a few degrees, bathing my face in light. I closed my eyes to avoid the glare.

I woke up. The train was still moving. I struggled with confusion for a moment. For as long as I can remember, the experience of being on a train meant that I’ve fallen asleep. That I’m still asleep. I had to reason about what was going on – I’m not dreaming. I’m actually on a train. I’m awake.

The slumber I had awoken from was dreamless. For the first time in decades, I slept peacefully, without dreaming of trains.

The window framed a picture of winter beauty – the train rode along the shore of a massive frozen lake. A dense forest of pine trees, bent low from a foot-deep load of accumulated snow, stood between the tracks and the lake. On the far shore, tall, snowy hills rose sharply from the water.

I shot to my feet, motivated by a primitive and pointless urge to run. The gesture was useless – the summer had turned to winter overnight. How does one run from the incoherent flow of time?

“The lake is beautiful, am I right?”

I spun around aggressively. My lizard brain was still firing “something is wrong” signals into the rest of my mind. Signals being blasted at a volume of eleven on a scale of one to ten.

The speaker was the man who boarded the train with me. He was older than I had imagined when he was a small man-shaped blur at the far end of the platform. Mid fifties? A well-preserved sixty? He was, unmistakably, the same man – he wore a black suit and tie. He was sitting in the seat directly across the aisle from mine. His huge red backpack sat on the seat next to him.

“No! It’s not!” Hey, give me credit for at-least putting a few words together.

“You don’t think so?” His calm reply somehow made me more agitated. “Why, then, did you take us here?” He studied me with unblinking eyes. Looking for meaning in my expression, in the pattern of my breath, in my panicked eyes.

“I’m just a passenger. I’m trying to get to Redding.” Then I started a half dozen sentences that I never finished.  “Where - . No, What -. I need to know -….” Finally, I just pointed out the window.

“You want to know where this train is going?”

He waited patiently for my breathing to slow enough to form a reply. “Yes, please tell me where we are going.”

“I will tell you exactly where we are going. In fact, I can’t wait to tell you where we are going. But first, I want to tell you about my medical condition.” He gestured for me sit. I sat.

“I was hit by a train,” he said. He unzipped the main compartment of his huge red backpack. It was filled with protein bars and energy drinks. He pulled out a chocolate protein bar and offered it to me. I absently took it and put it in my pocket.

“Hit by a train,” he continued. “A fully loaded taconite drag out of Gladstone. A hundred fifty hoppers, easily. Two Dash-9s pulling and three pushing. These were Canadian National locomotives. DC-traction units.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. Taconite? Dash-9s? DC-traction units? He either didn’t realize I had no idea what this meant or he didn’t care. He kept on with his story.

“My accident happened at a grade crossing. Just outside of Hendricks. That’s a section of high-speed track so the train was probably going sixty, maybe seventy miles an hour.” He pulled an energy drink from his pack and cracked it open. “God, it was a beautiful train. The locomotives were freshly painted. Bright red and shiny black. I was racing it to the crossing. Thought I could beat it. But that big, beautiful locomotive snagged my truck and dragged me a quarter mile. That’s what they told me anyway. That was on June tenth, nineteen eighty-four. I woke from the coma on July twenty fifth.”

He took a large gulp from his energy drink, and studied the can for a moment.

“That’s when the dreams started. Dream – singular – actually. The same damn dream every night – every time I sleep – like a new episode of the stupidest TV show you can imagine. They said I had somnocontiuum caused by traumatic brain injury.” He pronounced somnocontinuum carefully, as if I had never heard the term before.

“You also dream of trains?” I couldn’t believe I met someone else who not only suffered from somnocontinuum but had a continuous dream that pertained to trains.

“Not trains. Not exactly.” He grinned like he was telling an inside joke, and I wasn’t in on it. “Every time I fall asleep, I dream about you.”

* * *

I rode the train through three stops. Each tiny one-room station served a minor town or outlying village. A few passengers disembarked at each stop. Nobody boarded.

Mister brain-damage-with-the-backpack hadn’t followed me when I stormed away from him. Somnocontinuum with me as the dream focus? Crazy. And impossible. How could our dreams be linked?

I felt the train start to slow again – another stop coming up. The vestibule door hissed open behind me. I turned around, expecting to see backpack man lurching towards me. But it was only the conductor, dragging a wake of winter air from the vestibule with him.

“Basingstoke!” he shouted. “Next stop is Basingstoke.”

“Excuse me,” I asked. “What’s after Basingstoke?”

“Next after Basingstoke? The train will continue to points west.” He continued his march through the car, disappearing through the forward door a moment later.

Points west. West of what? What does points mean? Cities? Nowheresville stops like the last three? Where was I going?

I shifted in my seat to face the window again and felt something in my pocket – the protein bar that backpack-man gave me. He said he knew where we were going.

I rolled my eyes, passing judgment on my own plan even as I started to put it into action. I walked back to the door the conductor had just come through, moved quickly though the cold and windy vestibule between cars, and into the next car. Backpack man was still there. Still sipping his energy drink.

“Well, if it isn’t the man of my –”

“What do you mean, you dream of me?”

He took another healthy swig from his energy drink. “I dream of you being on a train. You are always you. Always stupid you. But in every dream, I’m a different person. Maybe I’m working in the buffet car, listening to the conductor explain to you that the train you’re on doesn’t stop where you thought it did. Maybe I’m behind you line at the ticket counter, listening to you whining about being lost and confused, trying to get a new ticket to go back to where you made the previous dream’s mistake. Or I’m a passenger, watching you lurch around the train, asking why it didn’t stop where you wanted to get off. No offence, but you have got to be the dumbest railway passenger in the history of trains. In the history of travel, maybe.”

“Look, Its not my fault that I’m lost. In my dreams, the train schedule is impossible to unders-“

“The worst part,” he interrupted, “is that you don’t even know where you’re going.”

I stopped trying to defend my dream-self’s decision-making. “Where am I going? I’ve forgotten. Or maybe I never knew.”

He smiled. “Your ultimate destination?”

“Yes.”

“The place your dream-self booked a ticket to travel to?”

“Dammit, yes! Where?”

“You, my fellow dreamer, are trying to get to paradise.”

I had spent three and a half decades wondering where my dream self was traveling to, yet I was completely unprepared for his answer. My mind raced. I’ve died and this is the afterlife. Maybe I really am going to paradise – won’t that be great? I didn’t pack for this weather. This guy is trying to scam me. It looks cold out there. Maybe I’ll just go back to sleep. I should get off this train. The ideas were in no particular order – drops of thought that hit my cortex like rain hitting a windshield.

“I should get off this train,” I was just verbalizing the last thought to go through my mind. But hearing my own voice state the idea somehow made it feel like a deliberate decision. I turned around and walked towards the vestibule. “I’m getting off this train.”

“Woah there, You can’t. It’s prohibited.”

“I’m getting off this train. At the next stop.” I punched the vestibule door button and it slid open. Track noise and winter air overwhelmed the warmth and gentle clacking of the car.

“You have a lovely mid-century modern dining room set.” He shouted at me to make sure I heard him over the track noise. “The Ansel Adams print is a little cliché, though!”

The vestibule door slid shut. I stared at him through the door’s narrow, rectangular window. He smirked back at me. He had me at a disadvantage. He knew things. About me. About my dream journey. About my real-world apartment. I pushed the door button and stepped back into the car when it slid open.

“How do you know what’s in my apartment? Are you spying on me?”

“Four days ago, my dreams of you suddenly changed. I fell asleep and for once, thank God, you weren’t on a train or at a train station! For once, you weren’t a stupid, bumbling, and clueless traveler. You were awake. Sitting at a lovely rosewood dining table. You’ve got an Ansel Adam’s Half Dome print on the far wall. You had a laptop in front of you and you were buying a train ticket to Redding. So I bought the same ticket.”

I stepped back into the car. The vestibule door slid shut behind me. “Walnut. The dining room set is walnut.”

“My bad.”

“Who are you?”

“My name is James. I hope that clears everything up for you.”

“James. How do you know where I’m going?”

“So I was in a coma, right. After I was hit by the train. And suddenly I’m awake. But I really wasn’t awake – it was some kind of brain-injury coma medication-induced crazy dream. I wasn’t me. I don’t know who I was, but I was working in train station ticket booth.”

“Where? What station?”

“The sign on the platform said Hitchcock. I don’t know where that is, but the station was in the middle of nowhere. Surrounded by corn. Corn to the horizon. Suddenly you were standing in the ticket window. I said ‘where to?’ And do you know what you said?”

“What did I say? Where did I want to go?”

“You said, ‘Paradise.’ And you know what’s funny? My ticket machine actually had Paradise as a destination. So I set the destination pins on the ticket printer, cranked the handle, and it spit out a one-way ticket. But before I gave you the ticket, I told you about the special conditions of travel.”

“What were the –”

“Special conditions of travel? Well, don’t ask me how my dream-self knew this. I guess I was just really good at my dream job. I remember what I said to you, exactly. I said ‘Before I can issue you this ticket, you must acknowledge that you understand the two conditions of travel. First, know that this is an unusually long journey. Are you prepared for the rigors of extended travel by train?’ Then you said ‘yes.’ Then I said ‘Second, you must not disembark a train, except for the purposes of transfer. You are prohibited from leaving the premises of any station on the route. Do agree to this condition?’ Then you said ‘yes’ and then I gave you the ticket.”

“Then what?”

“Then nothing. A train eventually stopped at Hitchcock station. You got on board. Then I woke up in a hospital room, plugged into a ton of tubes and wires.”

I didn’t respond to him immediately, and he didn’t say anything else. We both silently stared out the window. The track had turned away from the shore of the lake a few stops ago, and we now travelled through a dense, snowy forest.

“James,” I finally asked him.  “Why did you buy the same ticket as me? Why did you get on this train? You dream about me traveling by train every night? Why follow me onto a train in the real world?”

“I dunno man. I guess I just want to go to Paradise too.”

    * * *

I had managed to tame my fear of traveling by train by telling myself, over and over, that if something went wrong, I could just get off the train and take a taxi into town. But according to James, I agreed not to do this when I bought my ticket.

The train slowed to a crawl. The conductor marched through the compartment shouting “Basingstoke. This station is Basingstoke.”

I stood up and took my overnight bag off the luggage shelf.

“Whoa! Hey man, what are you doing?”

“James, I’m getting the Hell. Off. This. Train. Good luck.”

“You can’t! You acknowledged the conditions of travel – you said you wouldn’t get off!”

“No. You said a dream version of me that happed to be in your brain-injury-induced hallucination agreed to stay on the train. I, me, the actual person that actually exists in the actual world, never agreed to anything. I’m getting off. Basingstoke sounds like a nice place.”

James jumped up from his seat and slung his enormous backpack over a shoulder with a grunt. “You can’t. We’re going to Paradise! Look – I even brought a bunch of snacks for the long ride.” He shifted his backpack around to show me how stuffed it was. “I got all these to share with you. We’ll be okay.”

I was already walking away. I stepped into the vestibule as the train came to a halt. “Leaving the station is prohibited!” James shouted as he followed.

I stepped down off the train onto the Basingstoke station platform. James stopped in the vestibule, and wrung his hands. “This is a bad idea!”

I ignored him and started walking down the platform to the station exit. I heard him hop off the train behind me. “I’m going to wait for you here,” he yelled. “Be sure to come back as soon as you can.”

I had no plans to return to the station. I was going to find a taxi or a bus or a car rental or something, and figure out how to get back home.

I marched towards the platform exit, following a handful of other passengers who also got off at Basingstoke. All were bundled in winter dress – long coats, colorful scarves. A woman in a red wool jacket and matching knit hat carried a package wrapped in candy-cane print paper.

I passed through the station’s wrought-iron gate and into the town of Basingstoke. Basingstoke, I discovered, wasn’t a very big town. It wasn’t much of a town at all.

A dozen old buildings sat on each side of Baskingstoke’s only street. Signs over storefronts advertised basic-sounding store names: Pharmacy, Grocery, Shoes. A brick building bearing the gold-leafed words Town Hall stood at the other end of the street.

There were no side streets. None that I could see from the station, anyway. It seemed that Basingstoke consisted of a train station, a main street, and nothing else. Wasn’t there a bus station? A taxi service? A Car rental place?

I pulled out my mobile phone – no signal.

No problem, I told myself. I’ll just deal with this the old fashioned way. I’ll actually talk to someone myself and ask for help. Maybe even use a landline, like the good old days. I looked around to find one of my fellow passengers who got off the train with me, but they were already gone. The streets were empty. Correction, the street (singular) was empty.

Even though it was only 4:00pm it was already getting dark. What would happen when the sun went down? Would the few stores that were open in this single-street town close up? If I was going to find someone to help me, I had to do it soon.

I focused on the store named Pharmacy about halfway down the street. The lights were on, meaning, I hoped, that the store was still open.

The sidewalk was clear, but I had to cross the street to get to the pharmacy. By the look of the snow accumulation on the roofs of buildings and the small median strip running down the center of the street, about eight inches had fallen recently.

My shoes were the ones I decided to put on my feet when I left for my trip.  A shoe choice made when it was summer in the real world. I looked for a way around the snowy median. Seeing no other way to get to the Pharmacy than walking over the median, I grimaced and crossed.

I plopped my foot onto the snow-covered median, expecting to instantly feel cold and wet powder fall into my low-cut shoes. Instead, my foot didn’t even break the surface of the snow. I probed the white surface with my foot. It wasn’t even snow! It was a thick, white, spongy blanket that had been laid over the middle of the street. It wasn’t even cold.

I looked around again to see if anyone was watching me, but the street was still empty. I stepped onto the fake snow with both feet and experimentally hopped up and down, feeling the springiness of the material.

With three long strides, I crossed the springy, faux-snow median, then jogged to the opposite sidewalk. I looked around again, this time studying the scene more carefully.

The street was still empty – nothing moved except me. There were a few cars parked at the curb in front of the store named Grocery. They were old models. Really old. With tailfins and whitewalls out of the 1960s. The signs above the stores – Grocery, Shoes, Pharmacy – were printed in red letters using an old-fashioned typeface that reminded me of the iconic Fabulous Las Vegas sign. Retro. Olde-Tyme.

I studied the snow on the store awnings and rooftops – at a closer look, it was the same springy white carpet that was laid across the road median. The more I looked around, the more wrong the scene was. The trees in the median were all the same. I mean, exactly the same – they had the same pattern of branching limbs and leaves. Leaves? It was winter – the trees should be bare.

Even the air was wrong. I was dressed for a summer business trip – inappropriate shirt, pants, and shoes for winter. Yet I wasn’t cold at all. The air was comfortably room-temperature.

I jogged to the Pharmacy and pulled on the door. It didn’t open. I tugged harder, but couldn’t get the door to budge. I peered into the store and saw that it was empty. Completely empty. No shelves. No counters or cash registers. No rows of fluorescent lights on the ceiling. The Pharmacy was just an empty box with a single, blazingly bright bulb suspended in the center of the space.

“Damn.” The scope of my problem still hadn’t fully hit me. Despite the wrongness of the place, the fake snow, and the seasonally inappropriate leaves on the trees, my brain still fought to stay in the space where I was just an inconvenienced traveler, stuck in a small and run-down town.

I turned to the street, looked both ways (a useless gesture since the town was completely devoid of human activity) and jogged to the median. I tripped on the layer of fake snow, and grabbed one of the trees for balance. It fell over.

The tree was plastic. Lightweight, and hollow. Where it should have had roots, it had a small cylindrical plug that fit into a matching hole in the median strip.

I ran to the store named Grocery. My heart was beating fast – way faster than the short jog called for. It was the same as Pharmacy – an empty shell with a single bare bulb burning inside. I kicked the door out of anger and despair. It was plastic, not glass.

I ran to one of the cars parked on the street and rapped my knuckles on the hood. Plastic. And also completely hollow – it was just a plastic shell of a car. A small ridge ran down the center, from the headlights to the trunk. The kind of seam you find on cheap injection-molded plastic toys where the two halves of the injection mold fit together.

The other cars were the same – scaled up plastic toys. Toys placed along the side of a street with fake snow and trees on the median. A town consisting of fake plastic store fronts. The town of Basingstoke wasn’t a real town. It was a one-to-one scale model of town.

Somnocontinuum, I thought. This is all just a vivid episode of my sleep disorder. That’s all it is. I’ll wake up and just have a regular boring Wednesday. Alarm. Coffee. Shit. Shower. Commute. Work.

The thought of a routine Wednesday brought me comfort until I realized that it already was Wednesday and I had been traveling on a train. My waking self was on a train. I woke up already on the train. Or did I? If this experience was a manifestation of somnocontinuum, it was presenting itself differently than the thousands of previous nights of dreams. Maybe this is real?

I couldn’t reason my way through it. I stopped trying and started acting. I ran back towards the train station. I’ll get back on the train. I’ll get on the train, and go to sleep. This will all be fixed when I wake up.

I ran through the station’s gate. The tiny station was different than when I left it a few minutes earlier. The basic structure was the same – it was still a commuter station serving two tracks. A small brick building held a waiting area and a ticket counter. A pedestrian walkway gave access to the platform on the opposite track. The train I had arrived on was gone and both tracks were empty, waiting for the next arrival.

But now the station was made of plastic. I banged on the brick wall of the ticketing building – plastic. The benches for waiting passengers were like cheap plastic toys, scaled up. The clock – at first glance an ornate wrought-iron pedestal holding a four-sided clock – wasn’t real. The hands were painted on the clock face, forever announcing that it was 4:00. I pushed on the pedestal and it wobbled – a plastic facsimile of a wrought-iron object. I pushed it again out of frustration. It fell over with a plasticky-sounding clack.

Backpack guy was still standing where I left him. “James!” I called. He didn’t answer. He didn’t even move. I walked towards him, shouting his name. Still no reaction. I got even closer. His clothes. His backpack. Even his skin was shiny and smooth. James was now a life-sized replica of the human version of James.

I experimentally tapped his chest. Plastic. Hollow. “James, what happened?” He didn’t answer.

A small arrivals and departures board hung from the roof over the ticket counter. It also appeared to be plastic, with an unchanging train schedule printed on a sticker that had been applied to the departure board:

• Paradise: track 1

• Redding: track 2

  
  

I sat on the plastic bench next to the ticket window. It sagged under my weight. It was designed to look like bench, not to function like one. Designed. By who? Why? Why was Basingstoke a life-sized version of a model railroad set?

I pulled my phone out, and found that it was dead. A rectangle of black glass.

The town was a lifeless model and the station was perfectly silent. The air was completely still. The loudest sound was that of my own breathing. Underneath that, I could hear my heart – a rhythmic sloshing sound that seemed to emanate from my inner ear.

I don’t know how long I sat in on the sagging plastic bench listening to my own breathing. The sun had set while I was exploring Basingstoke’s fake main street, and the railroad station clock was a fake – painted clock hands on a plastic model. Nothing moved – not even James. I might have sat there for twenty minutes. Or five hours.

Finally, I heard a sound that wasn’t made by me. A train whistle. Then a second whistle from the other direction. Soon after, the familiar clanking sound of trains came from both directions. If the printed sticker on the plastic departures board was right, the train on the track next to the platform was the one for Redding. The other train was destined for Paradise.

Both trains arrived at the same time. From the right, the Redding train crawled to the station and squealed to a halt. The Paradise train stopped on track 2. The trains were real. Metal. Heavy. Grimy. Noisy. Real trains stopping at a model train-set station.

Both trains opened their doors with a hiss. Nobody got out of the train bound for Redding. The Paradise train was on the far track, obscured by the Redding train. I couldn’t see whether anyone disembarked.

For just a moment, I thought about getting on the Paradise-bound train. Some version of me, a version that lived in someone else’s dream, wanted to go there.

“Nope.” I had spent enough time attempting to travel to Paradise. I climbed onto the train for Redding. I looked behind me from the vestibule. James, or the plastic statue of James, stood on the platform. Hunched over under the weight of his fake backpack. A worried expression painted onto his plastic face. The door hissed shut and the train slowly rolled away from Basingstoke.

The Redding train traveled back the way I had come. Through three tiny stops. Past the frozen lake. I fell asleep, and dreamed of Basingstoke.

When I woke, it was summer. Other passengers rode the train with me. And Redding was the next stop.

I still suffer from somnocontinuum. But my symptoms have changed. Each night is the same dream. Not a continuation from the previous dream, but one that is exactly the same as the previous one. In my dream, I am the frozen, lifeless, plastic figure of James. I stand on the silent platform, looking at the fake clock lying on the ground. Every night, I spend hour after hour staring, unblinking, at the painted clock’s hands forever announcing that it is 4:00. Still, I often dream of trains.