TRIGGER WARNING: SEXUAL ABUSE
I was hanging out with friends. In the midst of our whirlwind of random debates, I asked them if they’d ever died in their dreams-if they had ever been full on dead-to which they each said no. Their flow of reasoning went in the direction of our brains being either unwilling or unable to perceive ourselves as dead. I waved the topic off altogether when someone changed the subject, not throwing another thought at it.
Three months later, I dreamed I was dead. I was on my cell, driving on an unknown street. My dad was chewing my ass out about something, only he wasn’t my real life dad. Not such a big deal; I’ve had plenty of dreams where made up people played the role of a friend or family member, or were simply someone I knew in the dream world, someone conjured up.
He was really giving it to me, going on and on and on. He was so loud, my ear throbbed. I was responding, but inaudible, as if I was on mute. I was so distracted by his words, words I could not remember when I got up the next day, that I ran a red light, and a red pick up truck crashed into me from the oncoming cross traffic.
A lot hit me at the same time: I heard horrible, high pitched screeching; my phone catapulted out of my hand; my head snapped violently to the right; my body was tossed into the right side of the windshield like a rag, the glass cracking and going airborne (along with me) from the force; and presently there was blackness all around.
I was dead. I felt the same as I did when I was alive. There was no residual pain from the crash, and, moreover, there was this kind of relieved feeling, like I’d been needlessly stressed for so God damn long, hanging on by a thread, and I didn’t have to be anymore. Everything that weighed me down, that bound my arms-that breath I’d been holding my whole existence without ever knowing it-was gone. I let go.
Then I was standing over my body, bloodied and face down on the asphalt. I had red hair, matted with blood, but I was a brunette in reality. Minuscule bits of glass from the windshield were embedded in my skin.
My alarm intruded, and I was back in my life, alive.
I text one of my friends on the way to my insufferable nine to five, letting her know that I had died last night. She text back before I clocked in, saying, “Must be because of our conversation awhile back!”
The dream encroached on the border of my busy mind as I tried as best I could to concentrate on miscellaneous clerical tasks.
Freed from work, I imparted for my bed earlier than usual. My boss was driving me crazy, with his extravagant getaways during peak income tax season. My brain felt like slush, and I needed to give it a break.
I died again as I snoozed. Same exact scenario, only this time, I caught some of my dad’s vicious words.
“Ellie, you listen to what the fuck I’m saying, God damn it!” The venom in his words hammered into my ear drum.
“I can’t, I can’t listen to you anymore!” was my retort.
The crash was reenacted, every meticulous detail. As I gazed down at my lifeless body, the driver of the red pick up truck hobbled over, limping. His nose was gushing blood and he had a gash chiseled into his chin.
“Oh, Jesus! Oh, no, oh, God-Miss?”
He forced his hand into his jean pocket, pulling out his cell.
Beep, beep, beep, beep. My alarm. I groaned. Sleep never lasts long enough.
I mused over the probability of this becoming a recurring dream, so brilliant and distinct in its detail. My daily activities were front and center in my brain before I could sit in deep thought over the dream for too long.
All day I had a song stuck in my head, one that both infected me and left me befuddled-I didn’t recognize this from my mental catalog of tunes.
“Sweet dream, baby Sweet dream, baby Sweet dream, baby How long must I dream? Dream baby, got me dreaming sweet dreams, the whole day through Dream baby, got me dreaming sweet dreams, the night-time too I love you and I’m dreaming of you, that won’t do Dream baby, make me stop my dreaming, you can make my dreams come true…”
I covered up in bed, mentally singing that damn song before the sandman visited.
My brain rewound the dream, throwing in more intelligible dialogue. “I am your father, damn it! You can’t do this to me, Ellie! Blood is-”
“Thicker than water, God, I know, Dad! This is just too much!”
In my rearview mirror, a girl peered back at me. I didn’t look at my reflection long, but my brain saved the image: red hair, dark green eyes, freckled nose, creamy skin.
“Ellie, you listen to what the fuck I’m saying, God damn it!”
“I can’t, I can’t listen to you anymore!”
Death, like a welcome friend.
The driver of the red pick up called 911. He reached down and pressed his first two fingers into the side of my neck, palpating for a pulse. I watched, knowing his efforts were futile, and the tears welling up in his eyes told me he knew, too. He spoke to the 911 operator in a calm manner, explaining that there’d been a wreck, and he was pretty sure a girl was dead. I walked down the road some, standing back from the crowd that was pouring in around the scene.
My head pulsated with pain when I was aroused by sunlight. I popped ibuprofen, but the stubborn headache refused to relinquish its hold on me.
I couldn’t help but start to feel like this was more than a dream. It didn’t seem very dreamlike anymore-it was more like I was watching a dramatic reenactment on Unsolved Mysteries, but from the climax and backward, one snippet at a time. I opened a notebook on my desk and wrote every detail of what I’d dreamed so far, humming the tune of that song.
Then I Googled the lyrics and clicked one of the first links on the results page: Roy Orbison. That was the song. But why was it in my head? I’d never heard it before, never.
Intrigued by the workings of my subconscious mind, I took a nap, hoping to shed some light on the dream or, better yet, to not have the dream again at all.
“You don’t even know what you saw, Ellie!”
“Don’t do that, don’t try and make me feel crazy! I know exactly what I saw! I didn’t do this, Dad-you did!”
“Please, honey, think about this-”
“No! How could you ask me to do that? How? I don’t even know you anymore!”
“I am your father, damn it! You can’t do this to me, Ellie! Blood is-”
My cell phone trilled. It was my mom, wanting to know if I wanted to go out to eat. I said sure and met her at our favorite sit down restaurant an hour later.
We were waiting for the hostess to call our name, chatting on leather booth seats. People were crammed in the compact space in front of the hostess’s podium, buzzing with talk and laughter. The bell on the front door tinkled and I gave a perfunctory look up. I stopped breathing. It was the girl from my dream. She was with an older man, good-looking with salt and pepper hair.
“Marie, are you even listening to me?” my mother asked.
The girl locked eyes with me. She made an unhappy expression at my open staring. I tore my attention from her and back to my mom.
“Marie?”
“Yea, yea, sorry.”
“How many, sir?” the hostess asked the good-looking man.
“Two, under the name of Hunt.”
“We want to be seated at the bar, please,” Ellie (presumably) said.
“Aw, hon-”
“C'mon, Dad, it’s Saturday. We don’t get to do this kind of thing often,” Ellie said.
It was her dad.
“Marie, I don’t even know how you hold down a job-your head is so airy, it might float away at any given moment,” my mom teased.
“Sorry, sorry. I was…”
“Distracted?”
Ellie and her dad walked passed us and out the door, to wait outside.
“Yea.”
We were called soon after that, and I didn’t see Ellie and her father again.
I couldn’t have just walked over to them and said, “I’ve been dreaming about you,” so I drove home after our meal and watched TV, attempting to get her and her dad out of my head.
What did this mean, though? I kept dreaming about this stranger’s death. And the argument with her dad, it was over something very serious.
When I dreamed of her after the chance encounter, there was nothing new thrown in. I found myself suddenly thankful for that because whatever revelation awaited was odious.
I scheduled a doctor appointment that week. I was struggling to get through the week without getting six headaches, at minimum. Over the span of a couple months, she ran all sorts of tests on me, the scary ones, but found nothing panic-inducing. She told me it must be all the stress from my job.
All the while, I continued to have the dream. I was starting to feel crazy; it was so damn redundant.
My cousin’s wedding came, and I was a bridesmaid. I drank too much champagne, and my mom and dad drove me to their house after, putting me to bed. That was the night my dream changed.
I was in a dark, dank space. I felt like it was a basement. That song was playing, Orbison singing away. I was carrying a knife. I sauntered over to a corner of the big, wide room.
A girl was grasping her knees tightly, staring up at me with animalistic fear. I could smell urine and feces and…menstrual blood. The clothes she was wearing were extremely dingy. The crotch of her jeans had a stain of blood that grew before my eyes, spreading like a cancer. There was a bucket next to her, and I knew that it was the source of the offensive odor.
“Please, I stink-could I at least have a change of clothes-”
I slapped her with the force of ten men. A string of slobber was slung out of her mouth by my hand. She grunted.
I ripped open her shirt as she wept, running the blade of the knife over the parts of her breasts that spilled over her bra.
I was excited. Not just sexually; there was some pure sense of exhilaration in my core. Shaking with the effort to keep my pace slow, I slit superficial cuts into her flesh. Without warning, I plunged the blade into one of her breasts.
She moaned, weakly swatting her bound up hands at me. I drove the knife into the fatty part of her upper arm, to discourage her from fighting me. She took the hint and turned her head up toward the ceiling. I cut into the flesh of her soft belly some, then tore her pants off. The foul smell of menstrual blood and unwashed female anatomy intertwined, wafting to my nose.
This further excited me.
I raped her. Repeatedly.
I woke up alternating between whimpering and screaming. My mom and dad raced in, asking what was wrong, but I couldn’t stomach telling them. I was repulsed by myself and showered four different times.
How could I dream up such filth? What the fuck was wrong with me?
There was no relief. I dreamed that one again that very night.
After I raped her, I took her picture. She wasn’t even emotional. I knew she’d become numb-I’d kept this one for way too long. It was time to dump her and get a new one, full of spunk and fight. That was where the fun was, in the fresh ones who thought they could win, overpower me and escape.
This one was broken.
So, I slit her throat open. There was this awkward whistling sound and her eyes gleamed in…relief? It wasn’t terror, whatever was there. I dipped a finger in the blood squirting out of her neck and tasted it. When she was dead, I got a tarp out of a nearby box and covered her up.
My alarm rescued me from having to endure anymore. I wretched into the toilet and got ready for work.
I was really missing the dying dream. Depression hung over my days of the rape and murder dream, like a black cloud. Night after night after night it ended with me starting to clean up any evidence of this poor, poor girl’s stay in my basement.
My headaches grew more intense. I was calling into work too much due to their debilitating power. When I was at work, I was short and snarky with everyone I interacted with.
The day I got fired, I stood up from my desk as a client yelled in my face.
“Did you even graduate from high school-do you even have a G.E.D.? Because, I tell ya, I’ve never seen someone so incompetent-”
“Shut up, you moronic bitch!” I shouted.
Her mouth snapped shut.
“That’s right-you, you fluffy, obtuse cunt!” I slammed a stapler onto the desk so hard that it shook.
“Fuck this,” I muttered and made for the bathroom.
My boss, listening from his office, was charging passed and stopped me.
“Get out-get out! You are done here!”
I nodded and left.
My dream that night changed again, thank God.
I was sifting through memorabilia and photo albums on the messy, carpeted floor of a sunlit room. Warmed by the pictures of myself as a child, happy and secure in the arms of my mom and dad, I lifted another photo album off the floor. When I opened it, a picture fell out. I picked it up and studied it.
As revolting as the picture was, I couldn’t break away from it.
It was a girl, maybe 19, tied up and naked. She was bleeding from multiple places. Judging from the objects around her, it looked like the basement of this house. The picture got blurry from behind my wall of tears. I dropped it and turned to the photo album it had fallen from.
There were eight other pictures like this. The girls were anywhere from 18ish to 20ish. They were all bound, some naked, some clothed, some partially naked.
My alarm pierced itself into the scene, sharp background music. The room faded and I opened my eyes.
Things were starting to come together, but I couldn’t be sure. I had to be sure. But even if I was sure, where would I go from there?
Back in that scene that night as I slept, I sat looking at the lewd, abhorrent pictures.
“Ellie? What are you doing here? And why are you going through my stuff?”
I paid him no heed, just kept looking at the pictures.
“Ellie-Ellie, what do you have there?”
“Why don’t you tell me?” I asked.
My dad stood in the doorway.
“Ellie, let me ex-”
“Let me out of here-” I jumped up and tried to slip passed him.
He reached out to me.
“NO! Don’t you dare, don’t touch me!” I got around him and sprinted down the stairs outside of the room.
Worried lines etched in his face, he asked, “Where are you going, Ellie?”
At the bottom step, I pivoted and glowered at him.
“To the police.”
“What? No-honey, stop-”
But I was already outside.
On the familiar, yet unknown, road, I quarreled with my father on my cell phone. I wrecked and I died.
This was the last of those dreams.
I woke up in a cold sweat.
I had so many things renting spaces in my overwhelmed head. For one, I was jobless, and bills weren’t going to just stop coming. Then, what was I going to do about these dreams? How was I going to get the police to take me seriously? And was I willing to gamble that these dreams were fact? What if my mind just created some twisted, elaborate story, and I caused a lot of trouble for an innocent man?
My mind hadn’t made up the young woman, though. The young woman was real, the spitting image of Ellie.
I had to give myself some space from all of that. I needed some breathing room. I took up the least taxing of the two problems at hand and started job hunting.
A couple days later, my GPS was giving me directions to turn right onto Gawin Road. It was a long stretch of road, with rows of industrial businesses on each of its sides. I had never been on this road and kept a watchful eye out for the business I had an interview at.
A screeching sound sounded out of nowhere. Jumping in my seat, thinking I was in danger, I saw ahead of me a red pick up truck had plowed into the side of a white car. The intersection was instantaneously familiar to me, as was the truck.
I’d dreamed about it for a good few nights.
I drove closer, before pulling over to the right shoulder and carefully crossing the busy street. The driver of the truck was already talking to 911.
There she was on the asphalt, Ellie. Dead.
The accumulating crowd was talking in hushed tones. Someone was crying. Someone else asked what happened.
“Yes, I checked for a pulse. She, she went out the windshield, you see. I-I-OK, yes, I’ll stay right here.”
My mind blanked.
When they peeled her off the street, her father ran up, hysterical. I couldn’t stomach looking at him, so I took off then.
Needless to say, I didn’t go to the job interview.
I went to my mom and dad’s, upset. Concerned, my mom cooked me dinner and demanded I stay for the night, which I did.
I schemed up stories to tell the police about Ellie’s dad, to offer them something they could use to start up an investigation, but they were all too crazy or stupid. In the end, I went with the truth. They didn’t openly ridicule me, like I’d thought they would. They said they’d look into it, but I knew they were all talk. They couldn’t do anything without evidence.
I had a couple dreamless nights, a vacation from the nightly mayhem, but last night I dreamed I was a man, cheating on my wife. I was fighting with my mistress when she slammed a heavy vase into my head, rendering me dazed and confused. She ran off and returned wielding a golf club. She beat me to death with it.
Headaches are as much apart of me as my heart is now, the price I pay for this kind of insight.
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by reddit user SuperQueen0208 via: reddit.com/r/nosleep
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