In the hospital Samuel is diagnosed with a very rare mental condition: total synaesthesia. With it, the doctors tried to explain both his strange dreams and the event that led to his fainting.
Doctors explain to parents that the boy’s senses are now connected. Hearing a song leads Samuel to smells, tastes and sees imaginary images … and the more he likes the song, the more the smell he feels is good, the more the taste he feels is delicious and the more the images he see is beautiful … but if he don’t like the song, the other senses suffer as much as the hearing.
Doctors speculate that Samuel could go mad or even die from this condition, and advise parents to seek specialist doctors working largely in a very famous medical company, the same that has successfully treated genetic diseases in the last decade.
Samuel woke up like he was born with synaesthesia though.
Initially the world was just more confused than normal, for him. Everything was amplified for five times. Seeing a photo also means feeling it on the skin, smelling it with the nose, tasting it with the tongue and hearing it with the ears. All these tastes and smells, these sounds and these colors… these are all things he had never experienced before.
For the first time he saw colors that were not included in the human visible spectrum. For the first time he heard sounds that his ears could not pick up. What about the flavors and smells? Same thing.
He had been catapulted into a world that a normal human being could never hold. But he didn’t go mad, and he came out of the hospital after only five days.
He is now in his room. He turned eighteen, and since he went to the hospital he hasn’t had any strange dreams, not even one. He had occasional nightmares or sleep paralysis, but those were normal.
The booklet became empty in the meantime. It is now nameless and has a black cover instead of a red one. It turned out to be a simple pocket diary, nothing more and nothing less.
Samuel threw it away after a short time.
There is only one thing that worried Samuel about that booklet, though. The pages were all numbered, but they were too few for a diary: they stopped at number twenty-five.
For the rest, his life up to this point has been as fantastic as it is… boring.
Samuel already had a physique considered excellent by his peers, he was a fitness enthusiast, but since he left the hospital he has taken his body to a new level. Envy and admiration were common for him, especially because that body wasn’t there just for beauty, he could do anything with it.
In fact Samuel can dance any kind of dance. He can play any musical instrument. He can play any sport or games. And in every competitive field in which he works he proves to be the absolute best, superior from every single point of view to all his peers.
He is not too happy with that though. First of all he misses the competition, because now the challenges are too easy. And he’s not proud of his victories because he doesn’t know if they really depend on him or his “silent guest”.
He could have made a career in any sporting and artistic field, he could become rich and famous, but he chose not to. He does not perform too much even on his social networks; he has a large following but is decidedly contained compared to that of the “great influencers”.
He is actually thinking of becoming a normal and common personal trainer.
But for days he has been reflecting on the stories he has seen in his dream. And he’s thinking about it because he now has a steel memory, nothing escapes him, not even the smallest details. And one of the details that has not escaped him is the fact that in the last story, the one of the doctor, he saw the address of his house.
He looked for that address … and found it. The house is identical to the one he saw in the dream. And it’s a private medical practice, just like in the story.
The more he thinks about it, the faster his heart beats.
<<Hey, Sam.>> says the father entering his room <<So … are you sure?>>
The boy nods << es. Do not worry. I’ll be back immediately.>>
<<But are you going there all alone? A solitary vacation is not a nice vacation …>>
<<I want to spend some time on my own, i told you.>>
The father sighs <<Okay … well, I hope you’ll have fun. Now I go. I’ll buy you the ticket while I’m back.>>
<<Thank you, dad.>>
The plan is simple: go to the doctor’s house and make sure that what he has dreamed of is not real.