Cheers to 2025
January 5, 2025
Every New Year holds promise, as though it is any different from the turn of
“A dream is a wish your heart makes.” ~ Walt Disney
12th July 2013
“Wait – what was that noise?” Harriet froze, then cocked her head ever so slowly as though in slow motion.
Her eyes darted to the left and right, as she tried to figure out where the sound came from. She sucked in her breath lest she mistook it for the sound she had just heard.
Like spark-plugs roaring an engines into the purr of anticipation, building excitement reverberated through her body.
Her bed was her safe place, her haven, where she would snuggle into the duvet as happy as a cat in sunlight until sleep overtook her. But she wondered why she was up on it in pitch darkness.
Her digital alarm clock blinked in the dark like an owl’s rod-shaped eyes as it flicked to 1.50am. At that same time.
She held her breath, her eyes darting around her bedroom until it could figure out the outline of her window blinds.
And then she heard the sound again, but this time, she was up on her bare feet pronto.
Her gentle footsteps on the tiled hallway were noiseless, but each footfall was chaotically spaced from the last with no rhythm in a bid to get quickly across to the other room where she suspected the noise was coming from. As she drew nearer the sound seemed to echo.
The door to the only other room in the house was slightly ajar, wide enough for her to peek in. There was a lot of daylight in the bedroom in sharp contrast to hers. The light was almost blinding as she squinted to discern the source of the sound.
It was the unmistakable snuffle of a newborn yearning for milk.
Tiny toes peeked from a blanket, dangling in a cot that stood in the middle of the room. Inside the cot laid the newborn baby, his arms aloft as if dreaming of cuddling the mother who isn’t anywhere nearby.
Harriet moved closer and then slid her pinky into his open hand and watched as they curled around it, as the baby cooed on. She shut her eyes to feel the intensity of the moment as she felt his soft breath on the back of her hand.
She carried him gently into her arms. She looked at the crazy mass of black curls not yet rubbed bald from lying in his crib, as he wobbled beneath her supporting hand.
Harriet knew he was her baby. She couldn’t believe how tiny new humans are, how vulnerable, how awe inspiring.
He felt so light, looked so perfect and smelled so divine. She was going to be his protector for as long as he lived and her love for him will never diminish, she swore.
“He is pretty, isn’t he?” Came a familiar voice that barely startled her
When she looked up, it was the splitting image of herself dressed in a loosely fitting maternity gown with milk running from both nipples as they poked through the wet patch on the thin fabric.
“Yes he is. Adorable”
*****
From the blinding lights and beauty of the dreamscape, in the place between her thoughts and the movies of the nighttime, Harriet woke up in her bed with a banging headache to the rude shrill ringing of her alarm clock.
Her husband, Kunle, had left the house earlier that morning. He left for work much earlier than she did. He worked on the other side of the Lagoon as a branch manager in a tier 1 commercial bank.
They had been married for 6 years and everything about their life together was perfect. He was a gentleman to the core and never stopped letting her know how much he loved her.
She called him “my Kunle”, the same way she did when they met at the university 3years before they walked down the aisle. Since then, their love never waned as they trudged on in their daily routine.
They were the sweetest of couples and they made a beautiful family. But they had their struggles, like all spouses do, yet they were an inspiration to all who were lucky enough to be in their social circle.
They were an ambitious lot and invested time and energy in their careers while they waited patiently for a child of their own.
The first few years had gone relatively without interference from both families, but recently, the pressure on them to find out the delay in concieving, had forced both of them to regularly visit fertility clinics in and around Victoria Island in search of an explanation to the delay.
But Harriet knew where the problem was, yet they popped pills like clockwork every day as prescribed by the doctors.
At work, Harriet was the humblest of souls. Everyone loved her approach to work especially how she exuded professionalism at every task. She spoke fluently, dressed impeccably, and decently showed off her fair skin like a badge of honor at every chance.
She flaunted her curve of softness with every skirt she wore and spared none of her leather high heel stiletto pumps any break whenever she was at work.
Her closest colleague, Dee, never stopped reminding her that she was beautiful from her heart and soul. He thought she was captivating and gave her compliments every time he saw her.
“You look amazing today, Harriet”
She worked as a brand consultant and was reputed to be one of the best in the industry. Her client portfolio had blue-chip companies lapping up every advice and strategy she milled out from her laptop.
She loved her job; she loved her husband and everything in between. Life had been fair to her, but she desired her own child.
She wanted her own baby.
The only place she found peace and solace was in her dreams. Just like the one she had that morning. Not only was it vivid and breath taking, but she also held her baby in her arms. Something she desired for so many years. She could feel it. It felt real. It had to be real.
The smile she wore that morning at the office as she waltz through the office could be credited to the dream she had the night before.
That was why she glowed that morning like a thousand stars.
Several months earlier, she had been pregnant, only in her dreams, and she nursed the pregnancy in that same room with the blinding lights.
She had the dreams often enough and kept a diary in her room of the dates after they left her confused whenever she woke up.
In her dreams, she had been pregnant for 2years! Her diary told her so.
She had gone through the motions. She threw up so badly for weeks and would wake up with spittle patches on her pillows. Kunle would panic before rushing her to the clinic so she wouldn’t choke on her own vomit.
Sometimes she held her flat tommy gingerly in her arms, in the morning when she was awake, praying fervently that the pregnancy remained when she returned to her dream state.
Now her baby had come to full term and was born.
She couldn’t wait for the next dream. But when?
*****
21st November 2013
The time was 1.50am.
Her eyes fluttered again in the familiar dream state as she drifted into one of her deep spells.
She called him “Hayden”. He was her baby. Hers alone. He was growing up so fast she could barely catch up with him. Now he was crawling all over the place.
Please follow the second part of the story as it turns here.
Please drop a comment!
Related Posts
When the Burnt Toast Saves Your Life
May 1, 2026
Adaeze had been awake since 4 a.m.
Not because she was anxious — though she was — but because this trip felt different. After eighteen months of follow-ups, phone calls, and PowerPoint presentations polished to a mirror shine, the deal was finally ready to close. An investor meeting in Abuja. A partnership that would change the trajectory of her small but gutsy consulting firm. She had triple-checked her flight, her documents, her outfit. She had prayed. She was ready.
The Loudest Person in Every Room Is Often the Most Afraid
April 28, 2026
When he told his father, Dare’s first response was a sigh. Then: “I told you to practice more. I told you months ago. You don’t listen. You never listen.”
There was no “I’m sorry, son.” No pause to let the boy simply feel the loss of the thing he wanted. Just a swift, seamless pivot to what Temi had done wrong — and, by extension, how Temi’s failure was evidence of Temi’s failure to take his father’s wisdom seriously.
You Only Heard One Side. That’s the Problem
April 28, 2026
I want to tell you something that took me embarrassingly long to learn. Not because the idea is complicated — it is not. But because it cuts against something deeply wired in us, something we are rarely honest enough to admit.
Everything You Were Too Embarrassed to Google About Mid-Life Crisis
April 28, 2026
You are somewhere between forty and fifty-five. You looked in the mirror recently and had a thought you immediately dismissed. Maybe you googled something at 2am that you would never say out loud. Maybe you bought something expensive and impractical and told everyone it was an investment. Or maybe you just feel — quietly, persistently — like the life you built was supposed to feel better than this by now.
Chekhov’s Gun
April 28, 2026
Anton Chekhov was a Russian physician and playwright — a man trained in the discipline of diagnosis before he became one of the most precise storytellers in the history of world literature. That combination of sensibilities matters, because the principle he articulated in the late nineteenth century was not merely a rule of dramatic craft. It was an observation about the nature of significance itself. About what it means for something to be present. About the relationship between introduction and consequence.
Fear Is a Prison with Invisible Walls
April 28, 2026
There is a prison that has no concrete walls, no iron bars, no guards posted at the gate. Nobody built it for you. Nobody sentenced you to it. And yet, for many people, it is the place they spend the better part of their lives — circling its perimeter, brushing their fingers against its invisible boundaries, and quietly retreating each time they feel the edge of something that might require more of them than they believe they can give.
The Closed Fist
April 25, 2026
Picture a hand holding sand. The tighter the grip, the faster the grains escape between the fingers. Ease the grip — open the palm, allow the hand to become a vessel rather than a vice — and the sand stays. This is one of the oldest paradoxes of leadership, and one of the least learned: that control, pursued too aggressively, produces the very loss of control it was designed to prevent.
The Growth Trap
April 25, 2026
There is a version of ambition that builds. And there is a version of ambition that consumes. From a distance — and especially from inside it — they look almost identical. Both are energetic. Both are forward-moving. Both speak the language of vision and possibility. The difference only becomes visible later, usually at the point of fracture, when what was built begins to come apart under the weight of what was promised.
The Frontline Disconnect
April 25, 2026
There is a particular kind of organisational absurdity that most people who have ever worked in a company will recognise immediately. It is the policy that was clearly designed by someone who has never had to implement it. The restructuring that looked elegant on a slide deck and chaotic on the ground. The customer-facing process that was overhauled by a committee that has not spoken to a customer in years. The directive that arrives from above, fully formed and non-negotiable, that causes the people closest to the work to exchange a look — the kind of look that says, without words: they have no idea what we actually do here.
Burnout Is a Leadership Failure
April 23, 2026
We have built an entire mythology around exhaustion. In boardrooms and business culture — perhaps nowhere more so than in the high-pressure, always-on professional culture many of us inhabit — busyness has become a currency. To be tired is to be serious. To be overwhelmed is to be important. To be burning out, quietly, is somehow proof that you are fully committed.
The “Polite” Failure: How Kindness Without Courage Quietly Dismantles Teams
April 23, 2026
There is a particular kind of failure that never makes the headlines. It does not arrive with a scandal, a public collapse, or a dramatic resignation. It builds slowly, almost imperceptibly, in the space between what a leader sees and what they choose to say. It lives in the meetings that end without the real conversation ever starting. It grows in the silence after a poor decision goes unchallenged, not because nobody noticed, but because everyone agreed — unspokenly — that it was simply easier not to say anything.
The Hubris Trap: When Confidence Curdles into Arrogance
April 23, 2026
The boardroom at Crescent Capital Partners on Victoria Island smelled of leather and ambition — the kind that had been earned, aged, and perhaps left out a little too long. Emeka Osei-Bello, Managing Director and Group CEO, sat at the head of a long mahogany table, his charcoal suit immaculate, his posture the kind that says, I built this. He had, in many ways, done exactly that.
Be Loyal to Your Future, Not Your Past
April 12, 2026
When you stay loyal to a version of yourself that no longer exists—the one who was hurt, the one who failed, the one who was overlooked—you are still choosing. You are choosing to let one moment in time define the whole arc of your life. And that choice costs more than it keeps.
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Discover more from Akin Akingbogun
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
11 thoughts on “Dreams from Yesterday I – short story”
Pingback: Dreams from Yesterday II – short story – Akin Akingbogun
In dreams, we imagine the occurrence of something.
Right. But how much of a dream was this?
Pingback: Dreams from Yesterday III – short story – Akin Akingbogun
Awwwwn!!! Let me go to part two, hopefully Harriet has triplets there. *running*
Part two awaits you!
I wish her lofty dream becomes reality in part 2. Looking forward to a happy ending to this pulsating story.
I hope its a happy ending too
Good piece.
You write like James Hadley chase.
God bless your hand
Amen. I am still work in progress
Breathing imaginations to life!