The Dream

1

An afternoon nap after a tiring day before doesn't seem to be harmless. Having said that, I was clearly wrong as the one I had today afternoon was surreal and had me gasping for breath while lying in the comforts of my soft bed.

Dreams, as people say are better than reality and there are infinite things one can dream of. The scope to dreaming is not one that contains boundaries but what happens when a dream is so terrifying that it feels like it's borderline reality while actually knowing that you are dreaming.

That's just how it started - I was tired and my phone had low battery, so I turned it off and went to sleep as I had a tiring night before. I was sleeping peacefully listening to music on my mp3 player (yes, people still use that) until I knew I was about to fall asleep. I turned it off and closed my eyes again and finally embraced the impending sleep I was craving for since a few days.

Every thing seems perfect till now but nothing can be too perfect. I woke up, quite out of the blue and was ready to walk out of my room to drink some water but as I walked up to my bedroom door, I realised something was different - it was locked and I knew nobody ever disturbed me while sleeping so that begged me to ask the question - who locked the door? In a split second I decided to stop over thinking about something as trivial as a locked door and tried opening it...

I couldn't open it. I couldn't open a locked door! All I had to do was rotate the doorknob but I didn't have the strength in me to even do that. I could feel myself getting weaker and that's when I began to panic a little. I banged on the door loudly so that someone on the outside - Either my sister or my grandfather would open the door but as I banged the door there was no sound of it to be heard anywhere. That is when I knew something was really eerie and I realised that I was dreaming because the whole setting seemed like a bizarre dream and I decided to snap out of it and wake up - All in vain, though, as it did nothing. It was a futile effort as I was still there in my room, locked, trying to get out of it. That's when I thought I wasn't dreaming but it all still didn't seem real. I was confused because of the fact that everything was exactly the same as my room yet it all somehow felt different like I was not in reality but my efforts of trying to wake myself up didn't work and a part of me definitely thought that I was in fact awake and was stuck in my room.

I thought I'd jump from the window of my room but immediately dropped that idea after remembering that I can't get out of a window with grills.

I was in an overdriven panic mode. I knew I had to get out but all I could think at that point was how I'm feeling weak and that nothing could reach on the outside - not even the loudest of my shrieks. I thought to myself again and concluded that this is too weird to be true and that I must be dreaming and decided to focus everything on waking up but to no avail again. I was right there, with everything far too real including me and the entire situation that I found myself in.

I lost hope, I was simultaneously in denial and scared of this situation and had started to sweat a lot and had fainted. I thought either way that was it - if it is a dream I'll finally wake up and if it isn't then at least I'll finally lay in peace instead of the spook-show that I was in. Alas, that wasn't the case - I was neither dying nor waking up, I was fallen on the floor whilst feeling everything that was going around and just then I heard someone knock at the door. That was my sister and she had asked me to open the door. I got up from the floor and told her that I was stuck and I needed her to open the door from the outside but again all she heard was nothing as not a single sound wave got through to her and that's when it hit me that I still have my phone and charger with me.  I decided to call her up and ask her to open the door. As I took my phone and went to the table over which I had kept the charger I saw that the charger was tangled in the other chargers that I have. I started untangling it and after a while removed a charger but it turned out it was the wrong one so I decided to pick the other charger left on the table but there was a slight problem - There wasn't a charger on the table anymore.

At that very moment I knew this was all not real and it had to be a dream but what was actually horrifying was that my own subconscious is playing mind games on me while I'm asleep. It had already played a cheap joke of giving me a ray of hope and then taking it away in an instant. I knew that the subconscious was powerful but what it did to me was something out of the blue which made me tremble with fear. I knew what I had to do, I had to wake up but had no idea how. Literally nothing was working in my favour - I was already weak, my voice had no sound and my phone had no charge. I was down and out and had nothing left up my sleeve. That was it, this was the end I felt as I fought myself in my mind in an effort to get out of this "dream"

I tried my best to get out of this but nothing seemed to work anymore and a serious panic attack struck me. This time, however, I didn't faint but was down on the cold floor, lying down with my eyes wide open as I could feel the time pass by around me while I laid there still. I had given up on waking up and had accepted my fate but couldn't comprehend why was this happening at all. Isn't my own mind supposed to be helping me out instead of trying to paralyze me? If I could think myself into a situation like this why couldn't I come out of it? There were many questions lingering in my mind but at that point I didn't want any answers, I wanted peace, I wanted to be alive in reality again.

I lay there quietly, my eyes staring wide into nothingness while I was getting semi paralyzed all this while questioning my subconscious. I was a lost cause, I was a disaster spelt in capital letters and to make matters worse I started having thoughts about everything that went wrong in my life, all my regrets flashed by me and all I could do was relive them on a loop wishing that it would kill me because death seemed better than lying inside my own mind forever. This was neither a dream nor a nightmare this was something else altogether and it was freakishly too real to be true. I was left for the dead inside my own mind by me.

Every single bad moment in my life kept going on in my mind and all I could do was stare at them. I had become so weak that I couldn't even shed tears any longer. I was becoming emotionally what I was already physically - lifeless. I was past my breaking point and was falling apart in every sphere I could. I desperately needed a miracle, I needed to live my life, I had so much to offer to the world, I had a family who I love and adored, I have friends who are always by my side and I have a girl, who I love the most in this world right now. I wanted to come back to life if not for me but for them. I decided to fight myself and mustered in all the faith I had left in me and concentrated on waking up with all my heart and soul. I fought every memory that was haunting me and I constantly kept reminding myself that I still had a life to live and this is not how I should go down. I fought and I fought until I saw the light and to my own surprise I did eventually wake up. I woke up and saw the setting around me, it was familiar like that of my dream but it was real this time I could feel it around me.

I woke up but there was something unusual about it. I would've expected myself to wake up panting and running for breaths but it was the complete opposite of that - I woke up just like I would any other day. It was as though everything that I went through was only in my mind and a figment of my own imagination with the help of my subconscious. It is hard to come to terms to the fact that I tried to harm myself without having the slightest idea about it. I wanted to die but my masochism stood up proud and decided to let me suffer through it all than ending me with death which would be fitting but would be played out and anticlimactic. I wasn't in a fight against something external, I was literally inside my own head fighting with myself and hurting me to an extent where I felt death was better.

All this proves that nobody is safe in this world, we are all in danger - especially from ourselves.