Boy Of The Forest [Malum]

        Since I was about 5 years old, I've been having the same dream at least once every week. Really I wouldn't say once, because from the night that I have it, throughout the day, just closing my eyes for a second, my dream will flash over my eye lids; until the next night as I start falling asleep. I have to wait for the next week to have my dream again.

        When I turned 12 my dream changed, I started to see more, before it ended as a crazy cliffhanger that books would normally leave you with; it still ended with a crazy ending, but there was somehow always a little bit more. I soon realized that where my dream took place in the forest behind my house. I never thought of it before -at least not until my father took me out there to help him get firewood. I was able to discover places that I had been in my dream. I never said a thing to my father because I knew he'd call me crazy, and scold me, saying that I went out in the woods without him. 

        I didn't go back out into the woods again other then the time when I was 15 and my dog Ollie ran off chasing something. I was lucky that my father hadn't been home because it took my over 5 hours to find the dang dog. But what he discovered when he ran off, looked like a small house type thing that someone could have been easily been living. I knew that I had seen it before, I just didn't want to believe it. I was believing my father's words about me being crazy, even though I was still having my weekly dream. 

        At the age of 16 I started having the dream more freqently. I'd have it almost every night, it was starting to scare me. Why? Because it would play off of the night before. It felt as if I was living two lives, a dream world, that was perfection; then the real world that was a living hell. My dream world scared me because it seemed so real, making me almost prefure the real world, that mistreated me. 

        Around 18 my dreams stopped for a year. I felt lost without having my two worlds coliding all of the time. I missed my time in the forest, my dreams that reaplased the ones I had come a custom to, weren't as nice as my beloved ones. Most my nights didn't have dreams, I felt as if I was awake the whole night, waiting for my dream world to come back to me.

        Now at the age of 19, I felt foolish for falling in love with this insane series of dreams. When they came back not long after my nineteenth birthday, I was shocked at how much they had changed. They weren't the sweet little dreams that I had looked forward to before; they were now nightmares that I couldn't excape from. 

        Today I sit in my room looking out of my two large double doors that lead out into the back yard. A straight view of the forest, a perfect line to just walk out into them, hoping for there to be no regrets. Did I really want to risk my father's rath just to go out into some stupid body of tree filled land, just to see if my dreams could be real?

        Could my dreams of the forest, the boy that lived in them, the times I had spent in them, could all of those dreams be real? Could a boy that I have only seen in my dreams, but never fully seen, could he be real? 

        I never explained the boy did I? This boy, I have seen in my dreams, when they first showed up, he was the first thing I seen every night. His shadowed out face. I heard his voice, I watched him grow up, he seemed the same age as me, it's like we had grown up up together, became best friends. I didn't know a name, I had always just called him the Boy Of The Forest. 

        If this boy was real. Would he know who I was? What if the Boy Of The Forest is real? There was only one way to find out. Go out into the forest. And that's what I'm going to do.