The Offering

Chapter 1

1 month earlier

Lately my dreams have changed. The line between reality and my subconscious mind has always been strangely clear to me. What I mean is that I have always been aware that I am dreaming. The older I've gotten and the more experience I've gained has even allowed me to manipulate my dreams in my favour. To conjure my own divine imaginings, to filter my mind of worry or fear and to participate in an entirely visceral and even at times pleasurable experience. To me, my dreams have always offered a sense of comfort and escapism that my real life often lacked. My territory. My rules.

But lately my dreams have attached to them a surreal quality I have never recognised before. A 'fuzziness' that has prevented me from quickly identifying them as fiction and asserting the level of control I had become accustomed to. I feel like I am suddenly a part of somebody else's game but I have no idea whose or what the stakes are if I lose. This is to me is unnerving enough without the highly disturbing content of the dreams themselves.

Of course, I have had nightmares before. I have feared the boogie man like every other child but always, always I knew that the danger was not real. I knew that I would wake and the danger would be gone. I would wake safe in my own bed and comfort myself with the fact that 'it was just a dream'.

This dream is different. I doesn't feel safe at all, it begins with a slow and repeated opening and closing of heavy eyelids. I have a first person perspective but the perspective itself feels alien. I see flashes of distorted shapes through thick mascara laden lashes that I distinctly don't recognise because I wear barely any make-up.

Next, an indistinguishable shape hovers above me and I feel the sudden urge to identify it but my eyelids are so unnaturally heavy that it is impossible to keep them open long enough to do so. It takes every ounce of strength I possess in the dream to force them to open mid way. As I do I see a thick canopy of trees overhead and I realise that I must be in the woods. The shape I thought I'd seen before is nowhere in sight which alarms me in a way I can't understand because I don't know who or what I am meant to be afraid of.

I taste the unmistakable metallic tang of blood in my mouth and for a moment a vision flashes before my eyes of a little girl with matching blonde pigtails learning to ride her first bike. A blue bike with white ribbons on the handlebars. For just a few seconds she is filled with pride as she steadies the bike but then the little girls frayed bell bottomed jeans get stuck in the chain of the bike. The bike jerks to the left, forcing her aside and as she clatters to the floor, she bites into her bottom lip upon impact. Instantly her mouth floods with the same sickly sweet taste of her own blood. I do not know the little girl, I don't believe I have ever seen her before and yet the memory feels as though it is my own.

I am suddenly aware that I am being dragged. The little girl is gone and I am back in the woods, at least that's where I think I am as I stare up at the endless stretch of canopy overhead. I flicker in and out of shadows, dependant on the amount of daylight filtering through overhead. I can feel debris beneath me, twigs, small rocks and thistles scratching and pulling against my back as I am pulled by my feet across the woodland floor. It should hurt, I know it should but I feel numb to it all. I can't feel anything.

There is a whistling sound above me, a cheerful tune made by the mouth of a human. I try to raise my head up from the ground to identify the person who is pulling me but again I can't. As each second passes my strength is seemingly seeping from my pores

Then I stop abruptly, I feel my legs drop like deadweight to the ground from the hands that held them and I am unable to move them once they land. I wonder then if I am dead. Is that why I can't move? A thick ray of light is breaking through the canopy overhead and shining directly into my eyes. I wonder then if this is heaven? Do I believe in heaven? Is that where I am going? Have I been a good person? Or will I be punished eternally for the time I pushed Sally Reynolds over in fifth grade causing her to break her arm?