22/01/2023
When I was a kid, my little brother disappeared for a night while we were out playing near the woods. My parents were so mad at me for losing him that I didn't think they would ever forgive me.
The next morning, after the search party found him, he swore that he'd been transported away. He was convinced that he had gone to a land unlike anything he'd ever known -- that anyone had ever known. A land governed by wonder and whimsy, where creatures of dreams and nightmares alike roamed the streets in harmony.
It probably goes without saying, but nobody believed him. And after a while it seemed like I was the only person that had even entertained the idea that he was telling the truth.
My brother stopped bringing it up to the adults in our life soon after. Our parents, teachers, neighbors, none of them were open to it in the slightest. For a while he even stopped talking altogether. I suppose being told you basically went crazy for an evening gets old after a while. But as beaten down as he seemed, I could tell that my brother never truly accepted their explanations and accusations of psychosis.
Tired of seeing him so dispirited, I decided I would give him a chance to explain himself. I sat him down one night and told him that while I don’t necessarily believe him, he had a safe space with me. That no matter what he said or how his story might have changed I wouldn’t hold it against him.
But to my surprise, his story remained consistent. Not one thing about it had changed, now weeks later.
His story staying the same was something that could easily be explained. Much more easily than his account of what happened, at least. But no amount of logic and reasoning could dissuade my curiosity when I saw just how wholeheartedly my brother believed what he had seen.
Happy to have someone in his corner for once, my brother showed me something rather curious: a strange coin that he said showed up in his pocket the morning he was found. He had tried to show it to the search party, but it wasn’t exactly useful evidence of his alleged trip to another world. It could have come from anywhere, after all.
I couldn’t say whether the coin was exactly otherworldly or not, but it was definitely a peculiar trinket at the very least. It was slightly misshapen and brandished a crying face with deep features on the front. My brother, insisting that the coin was undeniably alien in nature, let me borrow it for a while. He claimed that it would guide me to the truth. I clutched the coin for a while and stared at its strange markings, but ultimately felt nothing. I slid it into my pocket and went to bed.
I awoke the next morning with the most intense of sensations. My whole life – the paradigm of existence, even – was wrong. I couldn’t make heads or tails of the feelings I was having, but what stuck with me was the influx of bizarre imagery in my dreams. For the next few days every ounce of sleep was like a ticket to peer into another realm. A universe of absurdity and whimsy. I decided to only tell my brother, given how poorly his tales had been received by the others in our life. He insisted that it was the coin’s doing, and that I’d been handed a glimpse of the very realms he had entered before.
It wasn’t until the coin disappeared nearly two weeks later that the dreams stopped. Maybe there was some truth to my brother’s story after all. But without the coin we had really said all we could about it at that point, and it’s not like our parents would suddenly be fine with us bringing it up again. We tried to recreate the event from time to time, sneaking out to patrol the woods, but to no avail. Eventually we just kind of dropped it.
It’s been a long time since we’ve even talked about it, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t always wonder what really happened back then.
UPDATE: I finally found a picture of the coin! After nearly 20 years I was starting to question if any of what I remembered could be true. It looks weird, right? I remember it a little different, but close enough!
Is it possible that there was some truth to this and we just shrugged it off as we grew up and shed our sense of wonder?
