This is a fantranslation of the strange story Wakako Masuda uploaded to her notes page!
The story is narrated in first person from Wakako's own life experiences.
(Cover art by Wakako Masuda)
In my case, I always see a certain scenery. It's a real shrine in the area I used to live as a child.
The person I met in the neighbourhood shrine in my dream... that's only for relatives. For some reason, something unfortunate happens to that person.
The first dream I had was when I was in early elementary school. I was walking up and down the steep path to the shrine. The area was foggy, and I could see the sacred shrine forest. As I approached the entrance of the shrine, I saw a familiar figure behind me.
It was my grandfather.
"Grandpa, where are you going?" I spoke to him in my usual tone, but he turned around and said,
"I'll go on ahead, so you can keep playing," he muttered and walked quickly through the fog.
The next day, I received the news that my grandfather had passed away. My grandfather lived with my uncle's family and was a relative of mine. He had prepared an art book to give to me a few days before he passed away, and all my relatives all wondered why he acted as if he was prepared for it.
Maybe I really did meet my grandfather in a dream.
Next, before I moved up to junior high school...
In my dream, I was climbing a cedar tree in the forest of the local shrine. As I looked down from the top, I saw a procession crossing in front of the shrine through the mist. It was a funeral procession, all dressed in white. For some reason, the lid of the coffin was open, and there was my maternal grandmother's face.
I jumped up with surprise and woke my mother up at the crack of dawn.
"Grandma is in danger!"
But she didn't take me seriously and scowled me.
However, when I came home from school that day, my mother greeted me with a pale face and panicked that my grandmother had broken her arm. She told me she had fallen in the middle of nowhere and broke her leg and ribs.
From that time on, I began to think that the dream of the shrine might be a warning of some kind.
As the years passed, I eventually married and left my parents' home. During that time, I had few dreams about the shrine, but none of them were memorable.
But right after my second child was born... I dreamt of the shrine again.
The area was dark and shrouded in a deep blue hue. On the grounds of the fog covered shrine, I was praying desperately for something. Then the door of the shrine opened and my father jumped out, with sacred sake and sakaki. My father fell to the ground, moaning in agony. As I was cringing, my dad's head rolled off.
That's when I woke up. My whole body was drenched in sweat, and my hands were shaking. I was convinced this was a sign that my father was going to die soon. At the time, I didn't have a good relationship with my father and avoided seeing him by marrying far away. However, due to the ominous circumstances of the dream, I began to think that the birth of my second child would be a good opportunity to start working on repairing our relationship.
My father had been disappearing for a period of time, abandoning his family after his business failed, taking the title to the house and his savings with him. Because of my experience with him, I couldn't forgive him for his actions.
Despite my feelings of biting the sand, my father started to love the children as if he were a new person, enjoying playing with handmade toys and nostalgic games with them.
As I watched him, I began to feel that my father may have actually wanted to live like this...
As more and more photos of my father smiling innocently with my children appeared in the photo album, I began to feel as though he truly wanted to live like this. The prickly feeling that stuck with me began to fade gradually.
About a year later...
The warning of the dream came true, and not long after, my father was diagnosed with head and neck cancer. It was already too far gone to be removed by surgery, and his condition quickly worsened. He was begging people around him to cut off his head, and he was failing around.
My mother told me it might be the last time...
So I took the children to visit him.
Strangely enough, only a few hours after we arrived, he seemed to have calmed down to the point where it was hard to believe. In the hospital room, my father looked at me with great joy and said,
"I was playing in the real blue... The older one, the younger one... you were there. Its the most beautiful blue I've ever seen..."
It was probably a side effect of the morphine... a couple of days after the blue dream, my father passed away.
My mother was worried about abandoning him, but after she heard about my dream, she patiently encouraged him until the end, because she didn't want him to regret it.
As a result, I now think that the dream of the shrine has brought us together, even though we were so different.
※ This series of events was so strange I submitted it to a magazine called "Scary Stories That Really Happened" (本当にあった怖い話) published by Asahi Sonorama. Here is the manga published at that time - "Dream Company" written by Mr Taimu (November 2009). The story was composed almost exactly as it was written, and was drawn by a beautiful girl, so I still keep it in my possession.
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