I'm doing a quick survey: who would read on after this page?
Dreams only
make as much sense as your state of mind.
What did it
mean, then, for me to keep returning to that same dream for a month and
counting?
The one
where the annoying woman kept asking me to help them. The question of who they were aside, how was I supposed to
do anything? I was the crazy girl people whispered and pointed at in school. I
couldn’t even help myself.
Then there
was the carnival. It was always night-time in that carnival. It had no name
that I knew of, but it was ablaze with lights that never stopped dancing, alive
with music that never stopped playing.
In that
dream, I saw only the boy. People milled about, but they were only faceless
figures. So was the boy, in fact, but his features were only slightly clearer.
I had never
even met him before, but every time I saw him in my dream he was perched on the
edge of one of the Ferris wheel’s capsules. He stood there for barely two
seconds, a sea of carnival lights blinking beneath him, before he threw out his
arms and dived off the Ferris wheel.
Always, I
was too late. Too late to stop him, too late to even call out for him. Don’t! I wanted to say. But the word
would die in my throat as I watched him plummet through the cold night air and
finally crashed to the ground.
And then the
lights go out totally. The music stops.
That’s when
I’d feel the hands reaching out for me. Cold and clammy, tugging, wanting,
needing – what, I didn’t know. A glance down and I’d see a mass of bodies lying
at my feet, turning blue with each horrible second.
I would
still be able to feel those hands on my skin, my ankles, my neck, even when I
sit up in bed and discover that I was being straitjacketed by my sheets.
It was
always that same dream. It had been that dream for a month. I didn’t know where
I came up with a dream like that. A dream that didn’t sleep, that roosted there
right in the middle of my head long after I’d woken up.
A dream
where it was always midnight in a carnival of monsters.
This, by the way, is the first page of my first ever complete urban fantasy novel, THE DREAMCATCHERS. Thoughts?
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