Day 6 - Eclipse

Summary: "My dad doesn't like to share his dreams. I wonder if his dreams are anywhere close to as strange as mine." (excerpt from my upcoming second-gen fic titled Eclipsed)

My dad doesn't like to share his dreams. It's always struck me as the silliest thing, though, since he'll come to the breakfast table talking about the weird dream he had the night before. Only he won't actually talk about what was in the dream, he'll just say it was a weird dream. Or a bad one. He rarely ever mentions having good dreams, but I think he likes to keep those ones to himself. Can't say I blame him for that.

The point is, we all know he has dreams, but we don't actually know what happens in them. The few times it's come up in conversation with my friends, they've made wild speculations about all the different ghosts and all the different wackiness he probably sees, given the crazy stuff he's seen and been through over the years.

My aunt has worked for more than a decade on her theories about "the subconscious processings of spectral entities," or something like that at least. She's had a lot of long chats with ghosts like Nocturne and Morpheus, trying to nail down the hows and whats and whys of the dreams of ghosts (at least, for the ghosts who can dream). With this sort of knowledge, she usually doesn't guess too much at what my dad's dreams contain. Even if she did know, I doubt she'd share, though.

My other aunt, on the other hand, has told me all kinds of dreams she's had, even the bad ones. For being so closely related to my dad, she's much more of an open book than he is. I once asked her if she thought they dreamed about the same things, but she kind of brushed it off. My aunt being herself, she quipped about how no one could even begin to measure up to the infinite realm of her mind. "It's even bigger than the actual Infinite Realms," she told me.

There was one morning a few years ago when he came downstairs and he looked way worse than normal. He mentioned something about a dream, and I made the dumb mistake of asking him what it was about. He just gave me the longest, saddest look and literally vanished from the room. He apologized to me after I got home from school, but I can't get the hollow, anguished look in his eyes out of my memory.

I decided not to ask him about his dreams again after that day.

It's probably for the best anyway. My dad has been through a lot of weird and stressful stuff, way more than the normal person. I kind of agree with my friends; that stuff probably manifests in some pretty bizarre ways. I still wonder how he has the mental fortitude to deal with it all, but I guess nearly three decades of being one of the only human-ghost hybrids in existence teaches you some things.

Still though, I wonder if his dreams are anywhere close to as strange as mine.

Case in point: the dream playing out in front of me. Don't ask me how I knew it was a dream; it wasn't a lucid dream, and I wasn't totally aware that it was a dream. The fact that it was a dream just kind of lingered in the back of my mind. One of those things you know is true once you're actually consciously aware of it, but until then it's just not something you acknowledge.

This dream was weirder than most of mine, which was definitely saying something. Normally they like to follow some sort of plot or slice-of-life type deal, as bizarre as they can turn out to be. This one, it was way more abstract. Glimpses of random places, snippets of different situations, all whirling past me in an almost blur.

There was a beach, with sand that glittered in a million shades of gold and water so black that it seemingly swallowed up any light that touched it. The air was thick and still, almost suffocating me. A crimson sun hung in the sky, partially obscured by a black moon sliding in front of it. The distant thrum of an indiscernible beat pulsed through the air, vibrating with a power I could almost touch, but I couldn't tell where it was coming from and so I turned and -

There was a shimmery, deep pink dragonfly the size of my head. Beady black eyes watched me with an air of curiosity. The hum of its wings was hypnotic and endless, and with each beat they shed flecks of what I could only describe as stardust. A hazy aura surrounded its entire body and glinted off of the gold sand, but -

I blinked, and I was falling through the icy cold water. Darkness surrounded me, so much so that I couldn't even see my own hands flailing desperately in front of my face. Through the muffled pulsing, I could hear the water whispering to me - no, not the water, the darkness - in a voice that grated on my ears and pierced me to my core and I wanted to cover my ears and just get away but water rushed into my nose and throat and I could only continue drowning and -

The dragonfly pulled me along behind it, my wrist grasped firmly in its back two legs. Was I still underwater? I couldn't tell. The water wasn't flooding my lungs anymore, but the hum of the dragonfly's wings felt muffled and bubbly. Its radiating glow prevented the darkness from coiling itself around me, but the whispers still bit at the tips of my ears. They wanted me to listen closer, to listen closer, to let it tell me its secrets, to turn around and look and see -

A flash of blue light blinded me and I found myself falling again, this time through air so hot and dry that every last bit of water on my body evaporated in moments. It filled my lungs with a stifling heat and tore my screams from my throat. The sea of shadows had given way to a blood red sky, but the whispers kept tickling the back of my mind, begging to invade me again full force, and there, out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw -

The dragonfly was crying silent, silvery tears. It laid helplessly on the crumbling stone bridge I stood on, but it was at least a couple hundred yards away. Even with the distance I could still see the spiderweb cracks across its wings and how it no longer shed stardust and how its shimmer had dulled and tarnished and how its tears pooled like a mirror beneath it and -

I could still hear the darkness, those grating whispers pulling at my consciousness. If only I would just stay still for a moment, if only I would just let it swallow me up, I would see that I never stood a chance, that it would be so much easier if -

I ran and ran and ran, away from the looming shadows behind me, away from the sky falling in glassy pieces all around me, away from the rumbling bridge threatening to collapse any minute, away from the whispers that crescendoed into deafening roars that clawed at me and left angry red marks on my skin and -

I blinked again and the dragonfly was cradled in my arms and -

I blinked again and the dragonfly was snagged by a tendril of darkness and -

I blinked again and the bridge finally gave out under my feet and I fell deep into the darkness below and -

- this time I didn't stop falling.

y'all don't know how excited I am for this fic to come out but also how painfully slow it is writing it lol