PANDORA’S BOX (a true encounter)

I was only eighteen, still seeing the world far smaller that what it was. My life was simple or so it seemed. Doing homework, dating and hanging out with friends kept life easy and comfortable. Though it was my dreams that bought about chaos and confusion.
Dreams about people I hardly knew, or places I never been.

In my grade ten year, I attended a mechanic’s class and there I met a young man named Carl. He was new to school that year, and was living with his grandparents for the semester. His mother lived in the city, and due to her trouble with drugs and hardship he had ran away to live with his grandparents. He was a handsome boy, but quiet and withdrawn. We became friends for a short time, but before the semester was completed he moved back to the city with his mother. During his stay at his grandparents farm he had made mention of them fighting an awful lot, and he was concerned he was a part of the conflicts that arose.

Soon after he left, life went on and I hardly ever thought of him after that.
Untill one night deep in my dreams two years later.

I dreamnt of him, in a home I had never been. I could see him very clearly asking question upon question to his mother. I could see his mother in my dream, a women I had never met and knew very little about. She was frail, but younger, almost too young for a boy of his age, her hair long and blond with deep burdened eyes. As my dream played out the grandparents appeared in their younger years raising a family of four girls. Carl had told me that his grandfather was a step grandparent, as his grandmother had separated from her husband when the girls were teenagers, and remarried. The dream played out in the night and by the wee hours of the morning I awoke to a terrible tale.

In the morning I gathered my thought and wrote them down like many dreams I had experienced. And as I wrote the pieces fall together and tale unfolded, the hair on the back of my neck stood tall.

Carl had revealed to me that he never knew his father, and although often questioning, people seemed not to know or refuses him an answer. My dream had played the life of his mother, his grandparents and him and a terrible secret.

In my dream, Carls mom was about 14 when he mother remarried. Shortly there after she became pregnant and moved out on her own. She lost contact with her mother and stepfather, and after Carl was born, her live spiraled down into one of drugs and hardship.
For years the family remained distant, though social services would sometimes interveen and Carl was sent to live with his granparents for short periods of time.
As Carl became older, he would visit his grandparents farm on his own. Though it seemed if he stayed for too long conflict arose, especially times when his mother was brought into the conversation.


You see, his step grandfather was his father. The only two that knew this was his mother, and stepfather. So as the visits increased, the tension of reality became to dreadfully close to the surface and Carl was sent packing.

In my realization of this through my dream and the lives it affected I sobbed. I felt as though a burden of others had been given to me, and now the years of anger and deceit placed in my hands. I could wash my hands of it and forget it, or could I.

The next day was Friday, I went to school and tried to distract my mind. I had not seen Carl in two years, so this could easily be put behind me. Or could it.

That evening my girlfriend called, she wanted to go out to the bar for a few drinks and dancing. I was tired from my week but felt a need to go, that their was a deeper purpose to the evening.

In dim lights off the bar, the dream was all but forgotten, we danced and visited, and soon I felt a tap on my shoulder. When I looked to see who it was, I gasped ad their stood Carl.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him almost annoyed.

“I came up for a visit, as it has been a long time,” he said.
“ I also need to talk to you in private, if you don’t mind.” he asked.

We went outside around the corner of the building, and I asked him what was new.

“This may sound crazy, he said, but I really don’t know why I am here. You see I had a dream the other night that I was here in the bar, talking to a woman, someone I had to talk to, it sounds so crazy,” he said. “Though when I got here I didn’t know who or why, and then I seen you, and then I knew it was you in my dream, I needed to talk to you?”

So Carl and I went for coffee, we talked into the night and into the early hours of the next day. I revealed my dream to him in it’s entirety, and he responded already knowingly like. He has always suspected but noone confirmed it. He was shocked at the details of my dream. Just as shocked as I was about the whole events of the night. Who wouldn’t be? For life can truly be a mystery. My dream had provided missing pieces from the puzzle, and although he felt it, it was still an unnerving reality.

I never seen Carl after that night, today many years later, I often wonder why this happened to us.
Though I did hear, through the grapevine, that his grandparents separated shortly after that night.
As well, a year following his mother was found dead face down in her dinner, as a chicken bone got lodged in her throat. As for Carl, I ran into some old friends of his, they said shortly after his mother died he got mixed up in heroine, and became a junkie living on the streets noone had seen or heard from his since. Noone even knows for sure in he is still alive.

Today I often wonder had I not gone to the bar that night would life for Carl had been different. Had I been given an evil seed of destructions of so many lives and sowed it unknowingly. Today, I am much more cautious of my dreams, and although I am revealed many secrets in the sleeping state of my mind, I go there not. Would you?

To other Carls, that may dream they need to speak to me, I hold my dreams, as it is too tragic to open PANDORA”S BOX.