-- I Dreamt --
By: Brett "BreakxMexAgain" Williams
Feeling the heat, the withdraw, the hunger…
"I need." I said. The dream was… disturbing… How had it came so clearly into my vision, yet so warped by my mind?
I take all I know about dreams into perspective, starting with the first thing I'd ever heard about them in kindergarten.
The class was quiet as the teacher read the students a book. The most recent page had consisted of a troubled dream, where the main character had awoken to see it coming true. One student protested at this fact as the teacher turned the page.
"Some say-"
"Yes Jamal?" The teacher interrupted, a bad habit of hers was to ask what the person was wanting, even though they were already telling her.
"My daddy says that dreams happen in a split second entering your brains… But it takes longer for your brain to tell you what happens in the dream because you are aseep…" Jamal stated.
There was that, and before long, thousands of things were circling my head as the very clear dream kept stationary position. The thoughts circling the thought, guarding it. Making sure it wouldn't escape. Occasionally a good thought would attempt to penetrate the dream, to break it open and show me why it had occurred. None succeeded.
The first thought that attempted to penetrate the dream's defenses was a symbolic understanding. The dream had occurred in almost a sephia effect. Like that you would see by changing the properties of a camera. This was an effect usually used to give the viewer an idea that the flashing images they saw before them happened in the future, and occasionally the past of a person with amnesia.
"Past… Future… I would have remembered something like that… But this can't be a futuristic event, because I live too far away…" I said to myself.
The second thought was a reference to my past: The girl, you love her, that's the only way you can explain it, you have unsaid feelings for her.
"No, our feelings were closed months ago, we know how we feel for each other." I said.
The third thought: She had a weird outlook at the end, maybe she'll reach the same conclusion in the future?
"No, I have dreams with that sort of thing in them all the time." Said the brain that had conceived the dream in the first place.
The fourth thought: You could still have feelings for her, even though you think you closed them.
"No, I'm sure I don't have feelings for her."
The fifth thought, sixth, seventh, fifteenth… They were all useless. They helped in small ways to analyze the dream, but not in big ways to solve it. Finally, I fell asleep again, the dream still in my thoughts, it pushed itself up again in the dream…
"Brett!" The girl yelled, running away from me. I was in a house I did not know…
I wake up to the sound of my parents yelling and it's hard to sleep after that. I have insomnia, and it's a hell to sleep in any condition, much less when I'm wide awake from a scream that loud.
Finally, as the yelling dies down, I'm tired and the thoughts that had been used up on the dream just seemed to forget about the fighting.
The girl had yelled at me, and her face was so indifferent in that sephia coloring. The doors had been jet black, and her and my skin were the same color as the wall. She had ran away from me… Why? Hours later, I'm sleeping when the dream comes back.
"Brett!" She yells. Teasing as she runs around the corner. I jump behind her and see that she was standing right in front of me. She grabs me and puts her hand on my back.
Wordless… Maybe she was tired from our childish game of chase, maybe… But her hand pushes on my back, shoving me closer, and she smiles as we are right beside each other, holding each other in our arms.
Death was on her lips, but life was on her tongue, and as such, she kissed me. As our lips met I felt a sting all down my body. Pain. Ripping me apart. Normally, I'd yell, but I couldn't, because I knew life was on the other side.
And it was, as more than our lips met the pain disappeared, and I was ripped apart by something else. And the entirety around me was changed. It became something I could use. I could manipulate. Now, I had power…
She breaks the kiss and smiles at me, and runs off to continue our game of tag. But she gets caught by a large man, who resembles my dad greatly, who seems to run her over with his weight, killing her.
Life was on her tongue, but death was on her lips, and she gave all of her life to me, to let me be as strong as her, to let me control as she once controlled. But she had to die. She'd given me everything I needed to be powerful. She filled me up. The thousand thoughts surrounding the dream's purpose were gone, shattered, blasted away. I understood the dream now.
And all around me was the understanding that now I could control and manipulate. I fell into a hypnotic state easily, simply because I wanted to, and around me I felt the strong grip of drowsiness.
Millions of things were happening in the crowded city street thousands of miles away from anywhere I could ever reach on my own. I had complete control. Pulling purses from bandits, cushioning the air between cars who were about to collide with one another, smothering the air of a murderer and turning his knife into a pile of rust at his feet. Gangs at war, robbers, smugglers, drug addicts, dreamers, weepers, politicians, children. Everyone was in some invisible war with life, each wishing for something to happen, some wishing for things that shouldn't happen, very few wishing for things they actually needed. The truth was… I felt like I was God. Controlling everything that happened to them, answering their invisible prayers, granting the sides at war to steady, and failing the attempts to cause harm. And I awoke.
"Woah…" I said, "That was crazy…" and I snap my fingers and fall asleep.
I'm sitting in a desk at my school, and everyone is kissing a partner. Just kissing like lovers and I don't understand a bit of it. I just know that I am alone. The emptiness makes me sad… Next to me is my ex girlfriend, and she stares into my eyes.
"Well, do you want to?" I ask, not really sure how I'd gained the self esteem to ask her that.
"Why don't you ask me before you kill everything within me. Before you left me like trash. Before you gutted me out. Why don't you never ask me that again!" She says, not angry, not happy, cold… Ice cold the words shake my body like the wind of a storm.
She reaches out and grabs me by the throat, tugging at my neck. She cleans a spot bare and lunges forward with her lips, ripping into the flesh, cutting off the air I needed to pass to my lungs. She kicked my legs and I fell backward, but she held my neck firm and my head stuck in her hand, separating to pieces of my body. My mouth opened in horror, but nothing could be done… I awoke.
I ran to my computer and send her a message telling her that I'm sorry I was such an ass to her. I was sorry I left her just like that. I was sorry I left her so I could sort through all my shit, when all she'd ever wanted to do was help me. I told her that I was sorry. The pain filling me as I type out every word… I don't hear from her again until three days later.
I haven't used my new abilities since then. That last one left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. Like a drug leading you to a crash and nothing else… But she sends me this message three days later… It's short and bitter…
Why don't you ask me before you kill everything within me. Before you left me like trash. Before you gutted me out. Why don't you never ask me that again! I'll never forgive you, you ass! And as I finish reading the last word. I know what's been happening. Why I haven't been getting messages from the girl who gave me these powers, why there was such good humor in a city far, far away, and why my ex was so angry.
It began very clear to me all of a sudden that I was going to lose control of all this stuff. I was going to die because I didn't know how to contain this… this… this thing. And the more I tried, the harder it became to take control. I spent years fighting for the way to claim this power as my own, and my alone, but I've gone no farther than the starting line, and the race is about over.
The time until the power consumes me whole is drawing near. The time when all the pain and suffering will come and take me down was drawing near.
I'd always looked upon heroes with sympathy, always saddened because they lived day after day struggling with problems of others. I was struggling with problems of my own, others, and the power itself. Sure, I could snap my fingers and go to sleep. I could force pockets of air the right way, but only enough to make a small twist of wind. I could manipulate things, but never very much at all. And is the day drew nearer and nearer where I knew the power would kill me…
Of course, I was never sure the power would kill me… But I knew it would eventually take me over if it was stronger than me. The power was a lot stronger with me and the only things of it I could control where simply impossible to do any good with.
So one day… I was practicing. I had practiced a lot; it was the only way you could get better, although it never worked for me. I never got better with my power control and I was going to give up that day.
I had damned that girl who had dropped dead after giving me the power to manipulate life, and after time a dream showed me that my ex girlfriend would die. Before long, everyone I'd ever known were dead.
So I laid down and snapped my fingers, and I was gone into my own little world. I disappeared into my own room. I was laying on the bed sleeping, and a knife was suspended above my bed. The light in the room was flickering on and off too quick for me to see the movements of the knife as it swept across the body I knew was my own.
"No, no, NO!" the body on the bed yelled and it felt so eerie seeing myself screaming like that, even though I knew the body was asleep.
The pain was excruciating, even though in this dream, I wasn't really in my body, I still felt the knife running through my organs. Cutting into me. Slicing up my heart.
And as the final life was drawn out of the body on the bed, I felt a startling jump. A tap on the head. A strong force pushing me away. And I woke up….
I woke up in a room with my ex girlfriend, sitting in a desk, in the classroom where she had said those cold, cold words to me. With the girl who'd kissed me in the first dream. With all of my friends who died in my dreams, they were all here…
"Are you okay, Josh?" My ex girlfriend asked me. But she wasn't my ex girlfriend really… Only in my dreams…
"Yeah, I just had the weirdest dream." I told her, and as the bell rang, we stood up.
Five days later, Josh was discovered in his room, murdered. No one knows how he died, but many are sure it was his father. A knife had ripped him to shreds and the last person to see him was a girl with death on her lips, and life on her tongue. And till this day, not a single soul can explain what really happened to him.