The Dreamer's Blood

Chapter 6: Arsian

Chapter 6: Arsian

I am in a closet. In the dark. On Saturday. I am not in my room and nobody knows I'm here.

I repeated this in my head so as not to flip out when I opened my eyes and found I wasn't in my bedroom. I heard movement beside me.

"Liam?" it was Skip.

Oh yeah, this whole thing is his fault.

I rolled over and rubbed my hand over the soft grass underneath me.

Grass?

My eyes flew open and I bolted upright. We were not in the janitor's closet; we were laying in a beautiful green meadow. There were some woods in front of us and behind the green plain stretched far to large, purple mountains in the distance. Some bright yellow rays were peeking out above the mountain, painting the morning sky orange and pink.

Skip stood and looked around. "I've never had a dream like this before. And who would have thought I'd sleep so well on the floor of a janitor's closet?"

"This isn't your dream, it's mine," I knew that to be a fact. "You're just a . . . a . . . projection."

"No, no. I'm sure this is my dream," Skip argued. "I'm thinking, I'm feeling . . . my dream."

"Skip, I've been having these kinds of dreams for a while now. I dreamed of a place just like this a couple nights ago. Except the forest was darker, the mountain's were closer, the grass was--"

"I'm dreaming, Liam!" Skip interrupted. "And for goodness sakes, when Bree wakes up, she might think she's dreaming too!"

I thought for a moment. "So if you think this is your dream and I think this is my dream, what does it make this?"

Skip paused, "A conjoined dream?" I was about to point out how ridiculous his answer was but Bree started to stir.

"Hmmm?" She opened her eyes and looked up at the sky, a perplexed expression growing more visible on her face with every passing second. "Am I dreaming?" she finally asked.

"Yes you are," Skip answered. "And so am I and so is he." Bree sat up and flipped her wavy hair.

"Is that possible?"

"How else would you explain all of . . . this?" Skip gestured to the picturesque scene around us. I looked to the rising sun and closed my eyes, soaking in the warmth.

If this is my dream, how could Skip and Bree both think that it's theirs? I thought. Unless I somehow dragged them into my dream, so they are dreaming the same thing. Or perhaps their minds are trapped in my dream so they think it's their own.

Before I could suggest my crazy ideas to my friends, Skip blurted, "We should just kill ourselves." I snapped out of my trance.

"What?"

"Or jump off a cliff or something. So that we'll wake up."

"Why would you want to wake up from this?" Bree asked.

"I'm just curious about figuring out whose dream this is. Because I'm 90% sure I'm 100% correct that this is my dream," Skip looked around. "Unfortunately I don't see a gun or a cliff."

I had never intentionally killed myself in a dream before, but since it was a dream, no harm would be done, right?

"There's something stuck in that tree there," Skip said and dashed the several yards to the woods. We watched him struggle with something for a bit and then return with a sharp arrow in his hand.