“My sleep wasn’t peaceful, though. I have the sense of emerging from a world of dark, haunted places where I traveled alone.”
― Suzanne Collins,
Night Terrors
What’s the worst nightmare you ever had? If you haven’t told anyone, please comment below and tell me yours, because I doubt I’ll ever forget mine. Even though I’ve more in depth nightmares before and my dreams are often very vivid and detailed. Some I still remember even though it’s been a decade or more since it occurred, because the terror of it had always just stuck with me.
So I doubt I’d ever truly shake the feeling my most recent nightmare had left me with.
In my dream, I had ran into this person as I was leaving the park. It was a bright and beautiful afternoon and I had almost made it back to my car when I heard someone behind me shout my name.
I turned and saw this person who I knew in the dream, but can’t remember who it was after I awoke. But I remember trying to be civil with this person, but somehow we still erupted in a heated argument.
Realizing he would never see reason, I simply threw my arms up and gave up, deciding to simply walk away and retreat to my car But as I neared the driver side door, I heard this loud pop, almost like thunder which struck me as peculiar, since it was as I said a beautiful day without a cloud in the sky.
I remember trying to tilt my head back to look for any clouds on the horizon; instead I felt my body pitching forward. I tried to catch myself, but body wasn’t responding.
Then I was lying on the warm, sunbaked pavement feeling an odd pain in the back of my skull which began dissipating almost as quickly as I felt it…the pain itself didn’t really hurt, but was more of an peculiar throb. I soon found myself being unable to draw breath and I could feel a wetness running down the back of my head, and bubbling from a hole just above my left eye. Again I tried to move but found I was unable. I couldn’t move, blink, or even shift my gaze from pavement. All I could do was stare blankly at down at the concrete, feeling the warmth of the sun baked blacktop lulling me into darkness.
My vision then turned red as my blood ran down into my eyes. Slowly I began to realize that I had been shot and I could hear the panic in my brother’s voice as he paced somewhere behind me,
“Why did I do that?”
“Why did I shoot him?”
“I can’t believe I just did that.”
All the while, I could feel my life leaving me, rushing out of me, like water out of a balloon after it’s been punctured.
“No!” I screamed defiantly, “It can’t end like this, I have too much to do and I can’t die, not now!” But no sound escaped my lips and then I could feel myself being pulled from my body, despite how much I struggled, or strained to remain where I was, like a child slowly being lifted from the crib, there was nothing I could do, but still I raged on, I strained and struggled to live by sheer force of will alone. Thinking if I fought hard enough, I would somehow escape this fate and earn another chance at living my life. But nothing I did worked, I was being pulled effortlessly from my body as easily as one would pull a sheet from a corpse and suddenly there I was, slipping out of my body as a snake would do it’s skin.
Then I saw myself laying there on the ground with blood slowly pooling around my head, my killer was masked in shadow, but I could see him, with his hands on his head, pacing back and forth, with the gun lying on the ground by his feet as he stared at my prone, lifeless body. He was crying now, telling me he was sorry as a crowd of people I never seen before slowly gathered around, murmuring to themselves and to each other, I could hear their voices fading to a dull murmur as I drifted away, longing to live, to feel the wind against my face and to feel the comfort of a hug from a loved one.
I awoke, in cold sweat, with the feeling of death still all around me, in my room, just waiting. I still felt the pain and fear of dying, of blood running soaking the back of my head and how it ran down into my eyes. More than anything I wanted to reach out, talk to someone, hear a friendly voice, get some confirmation that I was in fact still alive and well, I wanted someone to tell me it was all just a dream. But being single and seeing that it was only 6:37 in the morning, I knew that there wasn’t anyone I could talk to, no one who would care to hear about some crazy dream where I had died. It’s one of the many drawbacks of being single and lacking that comfort of knowing, of having someone tell you that you were alright, that it was all just a dream. I longed just to be reminded that I was still here, so I brought a hand to check by chest just to feel the rhythmic beating of my own heart. In that moment, I felt more alone than I thought possible and even though I could feel my heart beating, a part of me still didn’t believe any of it was real, that instead I was stuck in a sort of in-between.
The strangest thing is, I’ve never been afraid dying. I’ve struggled with depression for most of life, though nowadays, before this dream, I had viewed death as nothing more than a simple change between two states, no different from a changing of the seasons. So I’ve always felt that when my time comes I would embrace and accept it for what it is, but now I’m not so certain.
J Cooper 