Author's Notes and Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who or anything that belongs to the BBC. I'd like to say thank you very much to MackenzieW for all of her help with this one-shot.
Bleeding Through
You're going to think I'm crazy, but you wouldn't be the first. My whole family thinks I've gone off the deep end, and while most of my friends don't say it aloud, I think they do as well. But before you knock me off as a nut, here me out. Maybe you have the same problem. I know I found others just like me. We're out there on the internet. There are more than most people think. We've formed organizations and groups, online forums, and city centres! But I'm getting ahead of myself here so let me start at the beginning.
You all remember when the President of the United States was killed, right? It was the second Saturday in June and I remember it clearly. It happened seconds before 8:02 in the morning as my mum was washing the dishes and she always washes the dishes around that time. That was when those things – Toclafane – appeared and our Prime Minister let them kill President Winters. Remember what happened after that? It was like they suddenly vanished. Harold Saxon and the Toclafane were never to be seen again.
Do you want to know what was strange though? When 8:02 hit, I felt like something had hit me in the chest and I became dizzy. After that, the constant déjà vu began.
Have you ever walked down the street and felt like you've done it before? Everyone has! Déjà vu is one of those normal things we experience from time to time. But what if you experienced it every waking moment for six months? My continuous déjà vu ended suddenly on December 8th. I don't know how or why but it did.
But I didn't just get strange cases of déjà vu for six months. If that were the case, then I'd write it off as craziness caused by a lack of sleep. No, I also had strange dreams. When I say strange, I don't mean the average "Oh my God, there's something chasing me!" or the normal "Falling off a cliff" type dreams. I mean some really funky and odd dreams; dreams that seemed so real yet you know they couldn't be. That's what I thought at first. I always pushed those dreams into the recesses of my mind and tried to ignore them, but that didn't work. They would come back to haunt me even during the day. Some of the dreams were so disturbing and horrifying that I cannot begin to recount them, but not all were so bad.
There was one dream that I remember vividly. I was walking along a darkened street in rags looking for food. After finding some rotten apples and a banana peel, I slunk back to a normal-looking house. But once I stepped inside, I saw that there were about 100 people hiding out. I remember waking up in a cold sweat at that point. I was scared out of my mind. But dreams shouldn't scare you like that, right?
There was one dream, though, that nearly gave me a heart attack. It is too painful to recount but here's the point: I died. I was being chased by those Toclafane things and I fell off a cliff. I could feel the pain as if it was real, as if it really did happen. But it didn't, right? I am still alive and well today.
Remember how I mentioned those groups and online forums and city centres? Well, after having these strange experiences, I decided to look online to see if anyone else had similar problems. It couldn't just be me, right? Well, I found others. And when I say others, I mean thousands of people around the world with the same experiences. For some the déjà vu and dreams lasted for a few weeks and for others, they lasted for a whole year and ended on 8:02 on the second Saturday in June of the next year. The dreams and déjà vu, while varied, all have similar aspects. Some people dream about death, others about gathering food, and even others about working in yards building rocket ships. Some remember these shipyards to extend across entire countries. Can you believe that? The sheer number of what these people have described is completely mind boggling to me.
The ones who had the déjà vu experiences for the full year always remember a name. Well, not a name but a title. The Doctor. It's always "The Doctor." Some of them remember standing with groups of people in littered city streets all saying the name, like a mantra, hoping it'd help somehow. But why?
A lot of people on the net have begun to work out what it all means. They've collaborated together to come to the conclusion that it's an alien intervention or something of the sort. They think that there was a year that is now missing and that something really, really bad happened during it. No one really knows what happened during that year – if they're even correct – but it had to be big and it had to be full of death and destruction.
You want to know what I think happened? I died on December 8th and that when time "reversed itself" everyone who died during that year came back to life somehow. It would explain why I stopped getting the déjà vu after December 8th. I still get the dreams though, but not as often anymore. Everyone else I've talked to say the same thing. The dreams begin to wane after your "death date" but they never leave completely. Every once in a while I'll have a dream. Sometimes it's a repeat of an old one but mostly they're new and strange. They're hard to accept, but it's not real anymore and can't hurt me. I'm going to have to live with it for the rest of my life, but that's okay because I've been given life again. A few bad dreams are a fair price.
But then why do some people get the dreams and the déjà vu while others do not? There's a working theory about that as well. There is something that ties all of us together. We've all got huge imaginations and share a love of the written word. One of the online groups thought of it like this: pretend that a great writer such as Agatha Christie had been attacked by a giant wasp and then forgot about it due to amnesia. Then, through the years, she slowly beings to remember bits and pieces and includes it in her writing. They think it's like that.
As you well know, it's been five years since 8:02 AM on that second Saturday in June and a lot has happened to our planet. We know for a fact that aliens exist and there is no denying it now. So maybe it was alien. Who knows? All I know is that I'm alive and living a good life. The déjà vu and dreams changed me. I have a better outlook on life now and I've actually begun to write down some of the dreams like others have. We're probably going to get a group book written so people can understand that something did happen during the – as we call it – the year that never happened.