Nate left at one o'clock. I know that he was my best friend and all, but I felt relieved to have some time alone. I went to lie down on the couch and shut my eyes. I didn't fall asleep, thank goodness, because if I fall asleep without having seen the person before doing so, than whatever chooses who I see is chosen at random, and it's even more terrifying. I just lied down, and thought about all the previous dreams.
My mind flashed to Lara Prescott. She was nineteen, I was twelve when I was in her nightmare. She'd dreamed of mirrors, mirrors everywhere. And then her own body multiplied into ten different bodies and were trying to find the real Lara. I found her hiding behind one mirror, in an area that was darker than the rest. I sat next to her and held her hand. She told me about herself, she didn't have any friends, because she was too afraid of losing them. But more than that, she was afraid of herself, she didn't like her body, she didn't like her personality, she didn't like anything about herself, I tried to comfort her and tell her that she was beautiful and perfect, but me being a twelve year old in her dream, of course she didn't believe me. She'd started crying and the clones heard her, they came towards us and started beating us up. We tried kicking back, but there were nine more of them than of me and her. They grabbed Lara and started punching her in the stomac and face, they yelled insults at her, such as "fat", "scabbed face Lara", "ugly as hell", "stupid", "you have no friends", and anything and everything worse that you can imagine. I tried to push them away from her, but after a blink I couldn't see her anymore, they all looked the same, they backed her up into one mirror. I could hear Lara scream, I tried tp get past the nine other Laras but I wasn't able to. I told her that she could beat them, she just had to be strong, but she repeated the words she had said while we were talking only moments earlier: "I am weak". I told her that she wasn't, that she was stronger than she thought, that she would get through this, she just needed to trust herself; only that time I got no response. One at a time, the nine clones crumbled to the ground and turned to blood. Lara's body lay motionless against the glass, blood trickled from her head, and tears streamed out of her eyes. She was staring at me, I tried to smile but I knew that she wouldn't make it. I held her hand, and could still feel the warmth and her blood pumping through them. She blinked one last time before her grip let go, her eyes closed, and her head slumped forwards. It only took a second for me to wake up in my bed, with a cold sweat on my neck.
I remember my mother looking at the news paper for our town and reading out "Early this morning, tuesday february seventeenth near three am, a suicidal girl named Lara Prescott died in her sleep in the Saint Philippa's Home For Troubled Girls last evening. No causes have been determined how or why. Doctors from near cities are coming in today to inspect the nineteen year old girl's body." I had to excuse myself from the dining room to take it in. Only one person had died in my dreams before, and that was my first Sleeper, Phillip Miller, but I didn't know what was happening them, so I try not to blame myself. But for Lara's life I could only blame myself, there was only me to blame, I am the only person who could have saved her, but I failed. Since that day I decided to work out, so that when it came down to it I could beat up anything the human mind can reach. Of course, I can't, and I've failed too many times, lost too many lives, but I tried and did the best that I could.
I raised my head to look down at my watch, 2:37 it read. I had been lying down for an hour and a half. My mother and sister wouldn't be home for another four hours at least. I decided that I had much more time to spare, so I lay back down. I could see a faint dark red glow of light behind my closed eyes.
That slight red tint turned into a burning red sun. I was having a flashback of another Sleeper I had encountered.
Samuel Sanchez, was his name. This nightmare had happened about a little less than a year ago, in March. His fear was probably one of the most common ones I had seen: the end of the world. Most Sleepers had a specific thought on what the apocalypse would be like; meteors, aliens, the army blowing up half of the world, and the other half just caving in, World War Three, a flood... But Samuel had no clue, no idea he could fixate his mind on.
