After laying in bed for an hour or so, with no means of falling asleep, I got up to get my computer. I lay a pillow on my stomac, then put my computer on it. I winced as the brightness was high, and started punching at the keyboard to find the key on the top left to turn down the brightness. Finally, after my eyes ajusted to the screen, I opened up Safari to look a few things up.
First off, I signed into Facebook. It's not that I was addicted, it's that I actually had friends there, that I didn't really have anywhere else. I haden't exactly met them yet, but that didn't matter. "Do the rest of you guys start back school tomorrow? I really don't feel like going to school." Andrea Mason has posted, she lived in the United Kingdom, like most of the members of this group we were in. "After Christmas and all, who would want to go back? --' " I commented on her post.
I was really close with all of them, more than with any of the humans I call friends here in Nebbeville. But my mother would never approve of me knowing and chatting with strangers, so she didn't know about them.
I opened up the google search bar and typed in the words "dream shifting". I always tried to find people like me, people that's only purpose is to help others out. I once had asked about in on Yahoo, but everyone made fun of me, it was pretty awful, but it didn't matter, I was determined to find someone like me.
"Dream protector" I typed in next, no results resembling what I had been experiencing the last three years of my life appeared.
My first Sleeper, is what I was calling them, had appeared to me right before going to sleep when I was twelve years old. It was an old man, and he stood in my room, with his eyes shut. Of course I was terrified, so I went to sleep with my mother in her room. But when I fell asleep I saw the man again, and it was a nightmare, we were in a war, I still am not sure which one, but this man's biggest fear was of dying a painful death, and I let that happen in his dream, he got shot over and over again, while I had just watched in horror. When the man died in the dream, I woke up, and the next morning, while watching television, the news caster for our town announced that the old man from my dream, named Phillip Miller, had died in his sleep for no apparent reason. Since then, every day or so I would see a person while I would be awake, and if I don't sleep as fast as possible from the point that I see them, then they die. If I do get to sleep in time, then I have to protect them from their nightmares, which are always their deepest, strongest, worst fears. If something happens to them in that dream, if I wasn't able to protect them, it will affect them in the real world. Sometimes I see it on the internet that a random person from this or so country died in their sleep, right after I had seen them in my dreams and wasn't able to save them. It's horrible, and no body knows about it. Not my sister, or mother, or my dead father (not my fault), or any of my friends at school, not even my friends over seas that I have never met. From what I could tell, I was alone.
"Jay, are you awake?" I heard my mother knock on my door.
"Yeah, mom. Come on in," I said, while quickly closing the tab of the Google search I had just done.
"Hi, honey," my mom said while walking in with her mug of coffee. "Did you sleep well?"
"Oh yeah, fantastically," I answered sarcastically. I knew that she was trying her hardest to be a good mother, she had even suggested a shrink a year or so ago when she found out that I wasn't sleeping well, which I rejected with disgust, but she was trying.
"Oh, okay," she hesitated before sitting on my bed. "Are you ready for school tomorrow?"
"Yeah, I guess," I said dryly. Don't get me wrong, I love my mom, but sometimes it can just get really awkward between us, and her sitting on my bed while I was shirtless wasn't the most comfortable situation.
