Short Stories

Prompt #1

A/N - I though I'd do a quick introduction to explain things, I'm gonna add the photo of the prompt to the chapter, but just in case it doesn't load or isn't visible I'm going to write the prompt at the start too. Hope you enjoy my first piece!

Every so often a dream catcher must be 'emptied' of the nightmares it has caught. Who does it and what do they see?

Dream catchers were delicate things, sometimes decorated with beads and feathers, they were believed to have the power to catch bad dreams, and to steal them away as they crept upon you as you slept. Children often had dream catchers near their beds, hoping they'd protect them from the scary thoughts of darkness that arose in their sleep. Everything you heard about dream catchers, it's all true. Their hidden magic is often unnoticed and mocked by the world, non-believers saying they were just silly decorations or pieces of tat that cluttered up your house. But everything about the dream catchers is true.

Late at night, when the sun sleeps and the moonlight fills the sky, the bad dreams creep out to play, to torment the good dreams sent to the human race by the starlight. And that's where the Dream Hunters step in. A Dream Hunter was invisible to the naked eye, it's invisibility came from its power, the power of dreams and star magic. While humanoid in shape dream hunters were not human, they were mystic beings of immortality. They had no gender and no name, they were not born but created. The starlight was their source of magic and power, but the moon was their creator, the watchman of the Dream Hunters. They had emotion, however, they were never given ones such as hate and anger or fear. These emotions would've made their jobs seem impossible and so they were created without them. A Dream Hunter's sole purpose was to defend the good dreams and fight the bad ones. Once created a Dream Hunter was assigned to a specific person or family and its job was to watch over them. All their lives they fought the darkness that hid itself in the dreams of the people.

However, tonight was different. One day a week all the dream catchers of the world would be emptied and cleaned of the nightmares it stored. Dream catchers were the Dream Hunter's favourite tool, and even though they themselves did not have the ability to buy one, and leave them in the room of their assigned family or person, they could encourage the thought of them into good dreams. Once in the homes, it allowed the Dream Hunters to watch over more than one person at once, making their jobs a whole lot easier, especially if they had been assigned a large family of seven.

The Dream Hunter would go into the rooms as they slept and look for the dream catchers. Once found they would check the feathers attached to the woven frame and check for the nightmares. It is said that the browner the feathers of a dream catcher, the more nightmares it has caught. After examining the fragile items that hung from it, the Dream Hunter would use their magic to examine the nightmares. They would watch each one thoroughly, watching to see what had scared the child or person so much. Sometimes it was an imaginary, horrifying, creature a child had thought of, sometimes it was reliving an incredibly nervous and stressful situation as a student or adult at school or work, other times it was the heartbreaking experience of losing a loved one or reliving a catastrophic accident caused to the dreamer. Each nightmare was looked over very carefully so that in the future, the situations that were so feared, could be somehow manipulated into a good dream, lessening the fear the dreamer had.

The average Dream Hunter would've seen over millions of nightmares in a lifetime and seen some that probably looked exactly the same. They were never frightened by what they saw and never felt intimidated by the things they'd seen in them. They protect our soundless sleep loyally, providing us with good dreams using their starlight magic, to help us through the night, and even sometimes the casual daydream during the day.

So if you wake up one night from a bad dream, the weird, hazy, view you have, as you rapidly blink your eyes to adjust to the darkness, just know that it's created by the Dream Hunter's. It's their way of cloaking themselves and the bad dream as they fight the nightmare that tries to attack you. Just know that as you sleep soundly away, smiling in your dreams, they sit smiling too, as they create the dream which fills you with so much happiness.