Lucid

Chapter 2 | The Depths of Dreams

The sensation of waking (or what I assumed was waking) was like a large drum pounding in my head that subsided into a dull ache latched inside my brain. Slowly, I eased my eyelids open from their heavy closed state. My vision was a blurred mess, the outside world seemed like a humungous mess of mixed colour with unidentifiable shapes dancing across my eyes.

I couldn't exactly remember what had happened the previous night, but I could assume since I was relatively used to this hazy sensation. The memory of the sensation stemmed from when I was about thirteen years old. It was a time when I became 'adventurous' in my dreams, I knew they could hurt me but at that point I wasn't being hunted (the shadowy figure only started appearing about two months ago) but with this new adventurous side meant that Id get hurt a lot more causing me to wake up screaming to high heavens.

My mother hated the sounds of my screams of pain during the night, she said it was because she hated to see her baby in pain but I sometimes felt inclined to believe that she just hated missing her good nights sleep. My mother was usually cold and distant with me, not the way a mother should act.

Thankfully, for my mother my father visited a doctor and eventually found a capsule pill in a shade of deep purple. These pills were each night forced down my throat, the purple pills made my dreams non-existent. Instead all night my dreams would melt away into a medley of memories.

The purple pills were meant to slow down or reduce brain activity during REM sleep, effectively taking away the dreams. However the pills would leave me waking up dazed and out of my mind for about an hour after actually waking, until the purple pills eventually wore off.

For an entire year of my life I dreaded taking those pills while walking home from school each night. The same cycle repeated everyday: first doing my homework, then my relaxation only to be ruined by empty dreams filled by a deep despair that dwelled from within my own cold mind. But thankfully after many weeks and months of begging my father, he finally agreed to stop forcing the pills down my throat against my will. Instead he would leave one pill on my nightstand incase the dreams got too 'dangerous' and I only ever used them in an absolute emergency. Nowadays with my dreamscape stalker the pills were my best purple friends taking away the danger, but the only problem being they were in limited supply.

From that time in my youth of being forced to have those purple pills my recovery time from their haze had shortened from around an hour to about ten minutes. Steadily, I awoke fully my vision became clearer like steam being wiped away from a window while the ache in my mind started to recede becoming increasingly quieter until silence returned to my mind and my vision fully restored itself.

I found myself on the covers of my bed as rays of light poked through the curtains and reached out towards me. I dragged myself up from my bed, uncurling my body as I did so, as I did bones creaked and joints made cracking sounds due to their limited use.

Immediately, I recognised the figure on the bed across the room from me, it was Katherine typing away at her laptop. She seemed completely transfixed on her screen, but if she did look up she would see a tired eyed, creature wearing a very weary and disorientated version of my face.

Katherine looked up from her laptop and looked across at me. She gave a friendly smile over the top of her laptop screen shinning light on her face.

"Morning Lucy did the pills help you sleep?" Katherine asked her face alit with a smile of compassion.

I raised myself up until I was sitting up on the bed and responded. "Yeah they helped. I didn't dream last night but I'm pretty sure the room is spinning" I joked as the corner of the room twisted before returning to it's original state.