Aislinn O'Shea

Another nightmare came and went. That is the life that I have been living with now for the past year. I crawl into bed every night wanting to have a good night’s sleep after a long day, only it has never been that restful; instead nightmares. Nightmares that I am realizing are some sort of prophetic dreaming of things that are going to happen in or around my life. But this one just took a turn from the others; this one was extremely dark and bloody.

Breathing deeply with a sigh of relief that is was finally morning I swiped the back of my hand across my brow to wipe the beads of sweat that had formed as a result of the nightmare. My hand was shaking as I reached over the side of my bed to grab the journal I kept on the floor. It was full of notes and drawings of previous dreams and nightmares in my personal attempt to keep some sort of hold on sanity in my life. The dreams would never stay in my mind long after I woke up.  The nagging feeling that there was something I should be remembering from them was constantly gnawing at my conscious. I found that if I could write down or draw some of what I dreamt, instead of letting the images completely slip away, the biting feeling would not dig so deep at me during the day, and I could have a normal day.

I quickly jotted down clue words that would carry a sharp image, but not quite a complete story line. I would use these words later to help recognize a situation and hopefully get some sort of déjà vu to make myself aware that I was heading into what I dreamt about. It didn’t always work, but having that little bit of information, always seemed to put my mind more at ease.

I switched from keywords to sketching. I drew the one part of my dream that seemed to be the most intense and visible. It looked like room, though it only showed one wall, with what looked like rough stone walls or a very bad paint job. The windows were very high, small, and rectangular. Everything was in shadow, so nothing was distinctly clear in my drawing. I tried to show bright light pouring down from above somewhere and water forming puddles on what looked like a stone floor. 

In my dreams I don’t witness myself as an outsider. I am a participant.  My view of the room seemed to be coming from that wet floor. I remembered seeing my hand laying palm up, in another puddle, yet this one was darker than the others. I began to feel a distinct chill crawling from the base of my neck out across my shoulders as the realization hit me. No, not darker, it was red and thick; blood. 

Since most of my dreams were in black and white, to see a color shocked me to say the least. I tried to pull more about the image into colors, but they were not there, just the puddle underneath my hand. 

I rubbed the eraser of the pencil into my right temple as my head began to ache from the strain. There was only one more thing that I could remember, and it wasn’t something I could see and draw. It was a feeling; a feeling of complete heartbreak. With my head in my hand, I finished sketching away on the paper.

The dream faded too quickly. I knew there was something more there, but I could not remember. I rubbed at my temples deep with my fingers, willing myself to hold on to that last fleeting part of the dream, but I couldn’t. It was lost.

I leaned back into my headboard and with a hazy gaze I looked at the image I had drawn. My head was truly hurting now. Closing my eyes I gently massaged just over my brow trying to relieve the pressure. “Please,” I moaned, “don’t let this become another migraine.”

Opening my eyes, I focused now on the drawing. It was rough, as I am no Victoria Frances when it comes to drawing, but I could get a pretty good idea of what I was trying to draw on the page. It looked like some sort of medieval room with the stone walls and floor. I couldn’t think of anywhere I would find this type of room around here. There were no medieval or gothic type homes or buildings that I knew of. I was hoping this meant that it was really just a dream, something Anne Rice may have spurred since I was reading one of her books last night. Yet, I couldn’t get rid of that nagging feeling that it wasn’t, and that I needed to figure out what this room was. As small as it seemed, I knew I definitely didn’t want to be caught in it. I am claustrophobic.

I shook off the butterflies dancing in the bottom of my stomach and padded off to the hall bathroom, my bare feet slapping out a cadence on the hardwood floors as I go. As I quickly took care of my morning routine, I tried to find some piece of memory from the dream that was now completely faded out of my mind but sighed when I accepted that it was gone now. I grabbed a couple Tylenol out of the medicine cabinet and took them with a handful of water from the faucet to wash them down. Another lovely side affect of trying to remember my dreams was always a headache as well, if not migraines. Those I could definitely live without.

When I got back to my bedroom, I dressed quickly in my usual school fare of a black polo shirt, khaki skirt, knee high socks, and Mary Janes. Thank god for mandatory uniforms. No brain waves needed for that task. I quickly brushed my mane of dark auburn hair just enough to smooth it out, glancing into the wall of mirrors at the image. 

My bedroom was one of the larger ones in the house, with a bay window filling it with the bright morning light, and on the first floor. I think it was originally supposed to be a den, but it was converted to a bedroom for me due to the openness of it. My foster parents’ master bedroom was upstairs, which offered them more privacy, along with two other bedrooms that were being used as an office and craft room. My bedroom had none of the fancy interior design traits to it that most of the house held. Brenda, my foster mom, was a subscriber to House Beautiful and dreamed of someday having shots of her interiors flaunted within its pages. But my room was plain; just the basic dirty white, or ecru as they like to call it, and basic twin bed, one dresser, and a computer desk. Upon discovering my fear of small enclosed places, my foster parents added the wall of mirrors which gave the room more of an impression of space. One of the few efforts they put into showing they may actually care. 

In the mirrors, I saw the skinny, freckled, bushy haired freak almost everyone at school tried their best to avoid.   My amber eyes almost glowing in contrast to the dark auburn of my hair and pale cheeks.  I haven’t been and will most likely never be a heartbreaker. Long gangly legs and little if any chest, made me look more like a stretched out twelve year old than the sixteen year old about to go on seventeen that I was. I never saw much in that mirror I liked at all.

After growling at myself for lack of some sort of teenage beauty, I picked up a hair tie from my dresser and bunched the mane that is my hair back into a high ponytail. That’s when I noticed what seemed to be the remnants of a nasty scrape on my left wrist. It didn’t hurt, and it looked to have been there a few days, as it wasn’t scabbed over, but pink like it was well on its way to being healed. I brushed my fingers along it, trying to get some sense of memory as to when I could have done it, but nothing came to me.  God don’t tell me my dreams are becoming physical now as well.

I caught the time on my alarm clock out of the corner of my eye. “Shit, I’m going to be late.” I grabbed my backpack with my school books from the wobbly chair at my computer desk, pausing only briefly to pick up the journal from my bed and stuffing it into the pack. I hurried out the front door to catch the bus which had already stopped at the street corner two houses down.