A Nightmare Within A Dream

Sleep has always been my greatest enemy.

“Please, not today,” I whisper as if any being can turn a scary sunset into a relieving sunrise. The number of times I let the three words escape my lips does not matter because I always do it and I always will. I close my eyes to reveal the horror that is in my mind. I don’t know what it is that makes me feel this way but I am certain that once I find out, my wide eyes, regardless of it being dawn or dusk, will fail to give me the same sense of safety that I forget every night.

I see my bedroom, perfectly saturated. Perhaps too perfectly. Though, her color contradicts the aura. She is an artwork, a sketch waiting to be painted, or maybe a bundle of all the horrors in a human mind. The lights turn crimson and even though her face and body are black and white, I can tell she went pale. 

Her hands find the neatly folded sheets at the foot of her bed and wrap them around her body. As her fingers connect with the comforting cotton, it becomes the same color as her. It becomes her. It seems as if her body was a bottle of ink on a thin sheet of paper while endless drops of greyscale embrace the once blue blanket. In partial consciousness, she attempts wrapping it around herself and ends up getting tangled in her own little mess. With one arm through a loop, a leg wrapped in a blanket, so invisible that one might think the leg will be sound asleep in the morning. If only she was.

From the top-right corner of my own bedroom, I see the girl shift, facing her back to me and soon enough, she shifts again, allowing me to observe her messily sketched face. Her eyebrows furrow and a shiver run down her spine. The next thing I know, she is shaking, hyperventilating, tossing, and turning. She starts shaking her head and all I want is to wake her up from the terrifying tale she is forced to experience when I realize it. The tale I am forced to experience. The girl I see so much of myself in is in trouble and I can't do a thing to stop it. This is my terrifying tale.

A man with dark, curly hair rushes in the room. He lightly holds her shoulders, yet doesn’t make a move. He bends down to whisper words of comfort but the second his lips almost graze against her delicate, silver earring, her hands untangle themselves due to the force and speed of her reflexes and make their way to press right beside her hips, clutching the sheets. Her body jolts when she sits upright, screaming as loud as her throat allows her to. Despite the fact that I could not hear a sound in this story, her shriek pierces my ears and travels through my body. He looks unfazed as if this was routine, normal, completely contrasting from her imagination. 

As cliche as it may sound, time stops. The concept of time being in her hands or mine for the owner to control. Either way, her screams go on for around five minutes when it seems like thirty. 

I sense the presence of a palm contacting my shoulder, sense his lips almost grazing against mine when my hands make their way to the sheet under me, next to my hips as I jolt and sit upright. His messy dark hair disturbs the thoughts and questions in my mind. The last thing I remember is looking to the top-right corner of my bedroom before collapsing.