[Exhibitionist] What Dreams May Come

I got to a bad place in life, and I wasn’t sleeping well anymore. My husband and I were divorced about five years ago, and our boy had left for college, so I decided to move somewhere new, somewhere amazing, and just start over. That was almost a year ago. I had been working a night shift at a hospital, sleeping the whole afternoon and barely ever getting a decent dinner. Living alone in an apartment in the city wasn’t as glamorous as I thought it would be, and I had no time to put on a dress, meet people and enjoy the scene the city had to offer. For me, it was the city and no sex.

I asked one of the doctors at work if she could give me something to help me sleep, and she recommended I try some herbal supplements. I knew a health food place a little ways from my apartment building, a real throwback to the 1960s with tie-dye sheets hanging over the windows and a psychedelic storefront with “Mind & Body” in big letters above it. After a shift that was supposed to end at 6 AM stretched on for another four hours – if you work in a hospital, you’ll know what I mean – I plodded through the door of Mind & Body with my shopping list in hand. I was still wearing my scrubs and must have looked like something the cat wouldn’t bother to drag in.

Inside, the store was like some kind of weird greenhouse: warm but darkly-lit, with lots of huge potted flowers and ferns, as well as some wild vines creeping along the exposed rafters. The shelves were full of imported pottery, brown plastic bottles with hand-written labels, probiotic juice concoctions, and strange, locally-grown vegetables. I stumbled bleary-eyed towards the cash register, but was blocked by a young couple standing in one of the aisles. She was a short-haired platinum blonde in yoga pants and a red sports bra pattering on to her handsome but disinterested boyfriend, who was inspecting some kind of hemp-based bread. I waited for her to get out of the way but she was just oblivious, going on and on about a friend who had screwed her over somehow. Finally, I squeezed by her, and as I brushed past, our eyes met for a moment. She was young and good-looking, fit, never could have had a kid with a body like that, basically living the life I couldn’t lead right now. When she looked at me, what did she see? With a sigh, I pushed on towards the register.

Behind the counter was a real earth-mother type, short, stout and brunette, obviously wearing no bra even though her huge boobs strained against her t-shirt, which had a faded picture of a big cartoon mushroom on it. Since I didn’t want to shout loudly enough to be heard over the platinum blonde, I just handed her my shopping list, which she studied from behind thick glasses. “Having trouble sleeping?”

I just nodded. She stared at me sympathetically for a few seconds, and then replied, “You look like you could pass out right now?”

“Oh I can get to sleep just fine,” I answered with resignation. “The problem is I wake up like two hours later and can’t get back to sleep.”

She tapped a finger against her chin. “Well, I can get you most of the stuff on this list, but I’m not sure it’ll solve your problem. If you’re falling asleep but not staying asleep, you need something that will balance your dream cycle. Tell you what, I’ve got something really good for this. It’s called oneirine.” As her hand dropped to her side, I noticed a tattoo on the inside of her wrist that looked like a pentagram.

I sighed. “Is it expensive?”

She shook her head. “No, we don’t even know what to charge for it. We’re the only place in the city that carries it. We import it from a small grower in South America. If you buy all the rest of this stuff, I’ll throw in five tablets for free so you can try it and see if it helps. It’ll make your dreams so amazing you’re bound to stay asleep. Deal?”

That sounded fine to me, so she rung me up and I made my way out with a cloth bag rattling full of little vials of pills. The platinum blonde and her beau left right before me, so I had to follow her clenched ass, annoying banter and skinny legs out the door. I got in my car and parked in the garage beneath my building, took the elevator up and then stumbled into my apartment. Exhausted, I dropped onto the bed still wearing a t-shirt and panties. I sifted through my bag from Mind & Body. My hand fell on the bottle of oneirine, and I figured, why not? I took one and washed it down with the bottled water on my nightstand. Then I totally passed out.

I always sleep like a log for an hour or two, and I’m sure I did before the dreams started. I was abruptly thrust into vivid, bizarre fantasies, and the whole time I was acutely aware that I was dreaming. At first it was a floating, out-of-body sort of experience, brightly colored lights and a feeling like a gentle breeze over my body. Then I spent a long time going through doors that opened on unexpected places, at the hospital, at my old house, someplace medieval that I don’t think I’ve ever been before. But finally I found myself in a bar, sitting at a table, talking to a girl I didn’t recognize but who I felt as if I knew well. I’d never been in this bar before, but every detail was perfect: the sullen bartender, the sodden barflies, the late afternoon light from the transom, the half-drunk margarita in front of me, the battered counters and the neon signs.

I was so absorbed taking in the room that the girl next to me seemed to notice my distraction. She was a cute little thing, in a dress with shoulder straps that strained to hold up her bosom, salon-curled auburn hair and a freckled nose. She interrupted whatever story she had been telling to ask me, “Hello…? Are you even listening?”

Suddenly I was very much in the moment, sitting in the chair at the table in that bar – it was as real as anything I’ve ever experienced while awake. I became very self-conscious as the girl stared at me expectantly. I didn't even know her name! So I excused myself. “Sorry, I’ve got to visit the ladies room.” Despite her confused protest, I quickly stood and blundered towards the back, and I felt like all eyes in the room were following me. With a glance back at my table, I pushed into the bathroom and then stopped in shock.

In the mirror in front of me, I saw who I was. I was the platinum blonde from the Mind & Body store. As the door swung shut behind me, I just stared at myself in the mirror, mystified. I guessed I was about twenty-five, and my face was caked with too much make-up for a young girl. I wasn’t wearing that sports bra or those yoga pants anymore; I’d traded them in for a tight striped tube dress that really showed off the hours I put in at the gym. I turned my torso a bit to highlight my flat stomach and my protruding chest. This was a girl who was living the life that I thought I would be living when I came to the city, dressing up and going out to drinks with her girlfriends and flirting with the guys. She had the life and the body I wished I could have.

But it was just a dream, and anyway I was in the ladies room, so I reached down to my thighs and pulled the dress up over my head and let it fall on the tile floor. She was wearing a strapless bra underneath to corral her medium-sized boobs, and a pair of panties with “Love Pink” in little letters on the front. I was intensely curious what it was like to have a body like this, so I undid the bra in the back and it dropped to the bathroom floor. I was surprised to see that her boobs weren’t nearly as firm as I would have thought. The left one drooped quite a bit to the side, actually, and studying them in the mirror they looked very asymmetrical. My own areolae were so broad and pale they blended in to the rest of my tits, but hers were dark ovals, angled a bit, with the skin all scrunched up from the coldness of their exposure. I bounced a few times onto my tippy-toes to see her tits jiggle around. They felt light but very sensitive.

In the gap between her skinny legs she was sporting quite the camel toe in those “Love Pink” panties, so I pulled those to the floor as well. Her pussy had been waxed sometime recently, but dark hair was starting to grow back in. Of course she was a bottle blonde. Her lips were very plush, and dipped down quite far between her legs to meet in a very pronounced slit. I was so absorbed in inspecting her body that when I heard the toilet flush and the stall door open behind me, I whirled a bit too late as a balding man emerged from the stall and turned bright red to see me standing totally nude in front of him as he struggled to buckle his belt. It was only then that I saw the two urinals in the corner, and realized that I had made a pretty serious mistake.

But it was just a dream. I laughed as he stared at my nakedness, up and down, occasionally making brief eye contact. I could tell he was trying to guess my intentions, and that paused the hands that had been securing his pants. So I explained, “Oh, sorry, my mistake,” and without bothering to pick anything up off the floor, I purposefully exited the bathroom door and walked back into the bar.

You could have heard a pin drop after I strode back into the main room completely nude, my tits dangling and jostling for all to see. But the silence was broken by a pint glass shattering, dropped by the bartender who was staring at me in shock. He was a young, skinny fellow with dyed black hair, and tattoos that extended from his forearms under his black t-shirt up to his neck. My friend, the girl at my table, gasped and rushed towards me with a jacket to cover me from the gaze of the men the room: the two businessmen with loosened ties downing shots at the bar, the old fat man who looked like he hadn’t left that barstool in a decade, the leather-clad couple in the booth, and of course the bald man peeking his head out of the lavatory behind me, staring at a bare ass I’d never seen.

As my friend approached hissing, “Oh my god, what the hell,” the bartender was clearing his throat and moving towards the pair of us as well. This felt much more real than a dream should ever feel. My friend was saying, “Hello? Hello? Do you know me? It’s me, Marcy.” Suddenly I remembered something of the platinum blonde’s complaints to her boyfriend at Mind & Body earlier, and I reflexively answered back, “Marcy? You told Kacey that I didn’t go to her bridal shower because I was in Vegas that weekend, you b*tch. So you know what?” I bit my lip and extended a pair of middle fingers to her.

Stunned, Marcy let the coat she had been shielding me with drop, and huffed defiantly. “Okay, you fucking crazy sl*t, fine, then, you just do that.” Furiously, she stormed to the table, grabbed her little sparkling purple purse and headed for the door, leaving me alone to defend myself, totally nude, against a room of strangers ogling my bare boobs and pussy.

The tattooed bartender slowly crept toward me from the right, saying in a low voice, “Listen, you can’t be naked here, understand? You’ve had too much to drink. You’ve got to put your clothes back on and go. Your clothes are in the bathroom, right? Why don’t you go get them and get dressed?”

Gleefully, enjoying this dream of humiliating the platinum blonde, I turned my ass to the bartender, bent over a bit and slapped it playfully a few times. “You gonna make me?” But suddenly he leapt to my side and grabbed my arm, pulling me towards the bathroom. “Let go of me!” I shrieked. Turning the tables, rather than trying to escape I suddenly clutched the bartender, wrapping my arms around his neck and my legs around his midsection. I tried to smother his face with my boobs. “Let go or I swear to God I will piss all over you!” Staggered under this weight we both flopped onto one of the bar tables, him cursing and me laughing hysterically. I could tell that my spread legs and ass were exposed to the whole room behind me, and looking over my shoulder, I wasn’t surprised to see that the two businessmen were aiming their camera phones right at my pussy, taking pictures or maybe video.

The bartender for his part shouted, though muffled by my boobs, “Get the fuck out of my bar! I could get fired for this! Get off me!”

Feeling bad for him, even though I knew this was just a dream, I conceded, “Fine, carry me out of here and I’ll go.” He grumbled something to the effect of “what the fuck” as he struggled to his feet with me still totally wrapped around his body. What must he be thinking, a naked stranger wrapped around him, with all those customers staring and recording the moment. Shuffling as best as he could while wearing my nude body as an outer garment, he made his way to the back room, pushing open the door. Some kind of alarm went off as he opened it, a soft repeating beep. He closed the door behind him and demanded, “Okay, look, get off me.”

Gently I disentangled myself from his body and stood in front of him totally naked. I put my arms behind my back and clenched my knees together and faced him coyly. “Oh, I’m sorry,” I whispered with saccharine sweetness. “I know I’ve been a bad girl and you deserve to punish me.”

It took a moment for the tattooed bartender to process this, and then he chuckled incredulously, rolling his eyes. “Look, you’re already punishing me, okay? I’m going to be in big trouble.”

I could barely make out his soft words over the beeping of alarm, but I replied in a louder voice. “Well if you’re already in trouble, a little more trouble won’t cost you much, now will it?” I was pleased to see that he couldn’t take his eyes away from body, especially from my bare vagina. I repositioned with my legs apart a bit so he could get a better look at it. “Do bad girls deserve a spanking?” I twisted with my feet in place, gyrating an ass he couldn’t see. From the movement of his Adam’s apple I could tell that this made him swallow a little bit. “Or does a bad girl need to make it up to you with a sincere…” and here I opened my mouth obscenely wide and slathered my tongue slowly over my upper lip “… apology. Or do you need to tie a bad girl up back here and have your way with her?”

That last suggestion clearly broke his will. There were a few crates of booze in the storeroom, and he instantly stripped a bungee cord off of one of them and strode towards me. Silently, I held my wrists together in front of me as he started wrapping the cord around them. I opened my mouth to goad him on a bit more, but he sn*tched a bar rag from his back pocket and stuffed it into my mouth, rendering me mute, with a tasty of whiskey in my mouth. Maybe this was the kind of adventure I’d always wanted in the city. He started giving me some instructions, but I couldn’t hear him over the sound of the alarm, which was growing steadily louder… beep… beep… BEEP.

Then I sat up in my bed, and slapped my alarm clock. In my utter disorientation, it took me a few moments to realize I was back in my apartment. I hadn’t heard my own alarm in weeks, since I always woke up so early that I turned it off. I had just slept for eight full hours, for the first time in as long as I could remember. I could tell it was getting dark from the gray light that seeped in around the edges of my window curtains, almost time for me to get ready for work. Although I felt strange, almost like I was on drugs, I also felt refreshed. I went to the bathroom and turned on the light, and saw myself in the mirror. It was me, in a t-shirt, with a body fifteen years older than that platinum blonde. I had to study myself for some time to really believe it was me.

“What an incredible dream,” I muttered to myself, as if to reinforce that what had just happened was only a dream. It didn’t feel like a dream, it didn’t fade like a dream.

I turned on the shower; it would be a few minutes before the water got warm enough. In the meantime I walked slowly back to my nightstand and picked up the bottle of oneirine. What the hell was this stuff? And where did that girl with the pentagram on her wrist get it? There were four tablets still inside. I laughed at myself a little bit, and felt a little bit scared. It was just a dream, right?

[To be continued, if there is interest]