Introduction

Dreams are strange things.

Some disappear the second you open your eyes.

Others leave behind a face. A place. One sentence that won't stop replaying for no reason.

And sometimes you wake up with a whole world stuck in your head and genuinely no clue what you're supposed to do with it~

That's kind of where this anthology came from, honestly.

I want to be upfront about something first.

Fragments of Our Dreams isn't just me writing down my own dreams.

A few of these did start that way. Actual dreams, mine, half remembered by the time I sat down to write them.

A couple came from other people. Friends telling me something weird that happened in their sleep, usually starting with "okay this is going to sound weird, but."

Some started even smaller than a whole dream. Just an image that stuck. A feeling I couldn't shake off for a day or two. A moment that never technically happened but felt like something I'd lived through anyway.

And a few of them stopped being dreams pretty fast. They just turned into stories on their own once I started writing.

Not sure how else to explain it except that I don't think a dream has to stay a dream.

A feeling can turn into a character, if you sit with it long enough.

A place you only saw for a few seconds behind closed eyes can turn into an entire world, if you keep asking what else might've been there.

Something that made zero sense at 3am can end up being the closest you get to saying a thing you never had the words for while awake~

So yeah. That's basically the whole project.

Fair warning, these stories don't really match each other.

Some read like memories.

Some are more like poems wearing a story's clothes.

A few are mysteries I never fully answer, and that's on purpose, not laziness.

Some of them you kind of just have to feel instead of understand, and I think that's fine.

I tried, at one point, to make everything fit one tone or one genre. Neat little box, easy to sell.

Then I remembered dreams don't work like that.

So why should the stories~

You can wake up from one dream feeling completely at peace, and from another feeling hollow for no reason you can point to.

You can dream about someone whose face you never even saw clearly and somehow miss them the whole next day.

You can walk through a place that's never existed and still remember exactly what color the sky was there, years later.

If dreams get to be that messy and inconsistent, I figure these stories are allowed to be too.

Not everything gets explained here.

Some questions stay open, on purpose.

Some characters won't tell you who they really are. Honestly, half the time I'm not sure either.

A few endings might have you rereading the last line, trying to figure out if you understood the story or if you were only ever meant to feel it~

I think that's okay.

Might even be the point.

If I had to sum this whole note up in one line, it'd be this.

Dreams fade. Stories remain~

The second you wake up, details start slipping away.

The face blurs. Half the conversation is gone. The room forgets its own shape.

But a sentence can hold onto a feeling long after the dream that made it is gone.

A paragraph can keep a moment alive.

A story can hang onto something that never technically existed in the first place.

That's really the whole reason I'm doing this.

Not because every dream hides some perfect story inside it. Most don't, honestly.

Not because every dream has to mean something either.

But every once in a while a dream hands you a little fragment, and I wanted to see what happens when you actually do something with that instead of letting it fade by breakfast~

Maybe you'll find romance somewhere in here.

Maybe a mystery.

Maybe something warmer than you expected, or something lonelier.

Maybe one of these reminds you of a dream you had years ago and completely forgot about.

Maybe another makes you think of someone specific, for reasons that have nothing to do with what I meant when I wrote it.

That's one of the stranger, better parts of putting a story out there.

It stops being only yours the second someone else starts reading it~

So, welcome, I guess.

What's ahead isn't just a record of my dreams.

It's a bunch of fragments. Found, remembered, borrowed, reshaped, eventually turned into something with actual sentences.

And if you've ever had a dream that just won't leave you alone (strange, beautiful, painful, ridiculous, barely remembered, whatever it is) feel free to send it my way.

Tell me what you remember.

I'll see what I can do with it.

You bring the dream.

I'll bring the words.

And maybe, between the two of us, the story outlasts it~