PARASOMNIA
For seventeen years, Lance has had the exact same dream every single time he closed his eyes.
01001100010000010100111001000011010001010010000001000011010000010100111001001110010011110101010000100000010101000100010101001100010011000010000001001001010001100010000001010100010010000100100101010011001000000100010001010010010001010100000101001101001000000100100101010011001000000100000101001110001000000100111101001101010001010100111000100000010011110101001000100000010000010010000001001101010001010100110101001111010100100101100100101110
When I sleep, I dream I am someone else. He has my face. He has my name.
He does not have my memories.
The things he remembers, I struggle to recall. As quickly as my memories fade into his, his memories fade to mine when I wake again.
But I do know that the world he’s known is different. So similar, yet so unlike what is real. Through his eyes, it’s comfortable- it is home. Through mine… it’s uncanny. Everything just slightly out of place.
He is the worst of it all, though. His body is the memory that comes clearest to me.
The image of skin stained in the colors of ink and blood haunts me. The memory of his form shivering and corrupting, little more than a ghost, swirls through my mind like a song I can’t get out of my mind. The shadows that cling to him, the red that drips from his face- eyes, nose, mouth, ears… I feel them stick to my own skin, even as I leave him behind for my own waking world.
And that face… my face… never ages, never changes, never grows. That man is a man slaughtered and butchered at the bright age of twenty-one. A man who will never again know what it is like to live up to his full potential, flesh mangled into the shape of that which should not exist.
These dreams scare me.
He scares me.
It feels childish, to be so frightened by things that are nothing more than nightmares. But every night- every single time I close my eyes, these are the images that haunt me- that body I become trapped in never fades. These dreams stick like tar, not to my memory but to my soul. It sings a playground taunt about how I can run, but I can’t hide, and it’s only a matter of time.
A matter of time until what?
My stomach turns at the thought. My intuition screams the answer, flashing red and black in my face. But I always find myself too cowardly to face the music.
Every passing day, and every passing night for the last seventeen years, it becomes more and more undeniable. That song grows louder. I don’t know how much longer I can keep running…
Especially when the stench of truth lingers more and more around these dreams- dreams that feel more and more like memories.
Blue had confided in me long ago about a dead reality that only he remembers, after all. And I know I never saw him as a madman… but more than ever, his words are holding more and more weight.
The scars on my back have begun to open.
I’ve started to wake further and further from my bed.
The man I am in my dreams scares me, because I fear I will soon know his pain.