Experimental Short Story Series #33
Title: “The Astronaut Who Dreamed in Reverse”
By Faraz Parvez (Pen name of Professor Dr. Arshad Afzal, Former Faculty Member, Umm Al Qura University, Makkah, KSA)
Blog Post:
What if memory isn’t linear? What if the most uncharted terrain isn’t space—but time itself, unraveling in reverse inside the mind of a man who’s been to the stars?
Welcome back, dreamers, thinkers, and seekers of the unconventional. Today’s experimental short story takes you on an unorthodox orbit—not around Earth or Mars—but around memory, perception, and the paradox of knowing yourself… in reverse.
The Astronaut Who Dreamed in Reverse
Captain Ehsan Rehman, now seventy-two, lives quietly in a lakeside cabin, surrounded by silence and solitude. He once orbited Earth eleven times. Saw auroras up close. Walked in zero gravity. Now he wakes up younger each morning—not physically, but mentally.
It started subtly. One morning he couldn’t remember what day it was. The next, he called his daughter by her mother’s name. He dismissed it as age. But then the dreams came—vivid, hyperreal dreams of his younger self. A teenage boy in Karachi, hands ink-stained, writing poems in a secret notebook. A child running through monsoon puddles with paper rockets. A cadet in the Air Force, breathless at the first sight of the cockpit.
The strangest part? Each dream stayed with him—not like foggy memories, but lived experiences. Real, sensory, emotionally fresh. It wasn’t nostalgia—it was retrieval. Re-living.
A neurologist shrugged. “Perhaps early-onset dementia with a strange twist,” she said, gently. But Ehsan knew otherwise. He wasn’t forgetting. He was rewinding.
Then one night, he dreamed of something he hadn’t remembered in five decades: Project Amal. A secret sub-mission aboard the Pakistani space shuttle Shaheen-II. No record of it existed. Not in flight logs, not in debriefings. But the dream was crystal-clear—he was told to deploy a cube-shaped device, silently. He was ordered not to ask questions.
In the dream, as his gloved hands released the cube into orbit, something flashed.
And every night since then, as the rain tapped against his tin roof, he descended further—back to his academy days, his college hostel, his mother’s kitchen. He started speaking like a younger man. His gait changed. He began scribbling equations from old textbooks. One morning, he woke up at five, calling for a physics professor who had died thirty years ago.
Time, it seemed, was collapsing inward like a dying star.
Then came the whisper—his own voice, from the rain:
“You weren’t meant to remember Amal. But now you do.”
“You changed something. Or will. Or already did.”
In the last entry of his diary (which he writes backward now), he wrote:
“When you escape Earth’s gravity, it changes you.
But when you escape time…
You must be ready to lose your future, to reclaim your past.”
The cabin stands empty today. A pair of worn-out space boots by the door. A chalk drawing of a cube inside a circle—on the wall.
And a note taped to the window, facing the lake:
“What I saw… was never meant to fall back to Earth.”
Why this story matters
In a world obsessed with forward momentum, this story reorients our gaze—toward the inward, the reflective, the retrograde. The Astronaut Who Dreamed in Reverse isn’t just about space—it’s about the space within. It’s about how the human mind, when untethered from chronology, might just discover greater truths than any telescope ever could.
Here at farazparvez1.blogspot.com, our Experimental Short Story Series dares to reimagine storytelling through distortion, disruption, and reinvention. With each story, we twist narrative norms, challenge genre boundaries, and tap into the unseen corridors of human imagination.
We’re only on story #33, and the cosmos of creativity still expands before us. Keep orbiting with us as we chart the unknown—one story at a time.
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And if you’re ever caught in a rainstorm, listen closely—you never know what part of your future may be echoing back.
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