Maybe it was just after sunset, the evening air thick with the scent of marsh, the crickets chirring loudly in my ears. My skin was tacky with the humidity. My T-shirt clung to my back as I crossed onto the wooden planks.
A bang crashed through the brush like the crack of a bat against a tree.
I thought of that old metaphor: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear, does it make a sound?
There was a shadowy presence, a foreboding, engulfing me. I could sense it in the misty air. It pressed heavily from all around. I had to keep moving. I didn’t run, but I knew I was being chased.
I’m suddenly in the center of a pier. It stretched out far over a marshy lake. Graffiti decorated the dock in bright, neon spray-paint ahead of me. As I walked closer, I realized it wasn’t graffiti.
Fresh slashes of red streaked the darkened, rotted wood.
Blood.
Then I sensed the person nearing. They had found me…
According to dream interpretation, there’s a significance to a faceless or unseen entity in a dream. It can signify that the dreamer is searching for their own identity.
Despite my regard for psychoanalysis, I’m not entirely certain I believe this theory (sorry, Freud), or if dream interpretation can quantify on the same level as psychology in general. But during that point in my life, I wasn’t knowledgeable on the subject. All I knew was that, amid the dream, the presence terrified me.
This entity was an ominous threat. A tailored demon to haunt my waking world as well as my dreams. Like a dark, sordid truth we keep buried in our psyche, this malevolence wanted to be realized. It wanted to be known, to be made flesh.
Look… The disembodied voice intoned.
The daylight was gone; the night dense with absolute blackness. The sounds of insects so loud I covered my ears. I looked down into the murky water surrounding the pier.
The white water lilies stood stock-still in the water. No breeze to disturb their petals.
Every lotus pond and lake I’ve ever seen has always been monochromatic. Either white, or yellow, or pink. But never a mix of colors. So the one lone yellow lotus I glimpsed floating amid the others…
A chill slithered down my back at the sight. It was a lock of blond hair draped over the flower. The same color of her hair.
Chelsea.
I reached down to clear the flowers aside, and a face appeared. Her pale skin looked porcelain against the murky water. Her eyes were open and opaque, colorless, staring at the night sky. Her light-blue shirt was torn at the neckline, revealing jagged scrapes and cuts along her chest and neck. A dark-red wound slashed her breast.
Then the sun peeked. The crisp sunlight played over the white petals, casting splinters of gold around her dead body like a halo. Only, as I continued to stare—just as quickly as a sequence changes within a dream—it was no longer Chelsea in the water, buried in a floating halo of lotuses.
It was a trick of the light, a trick of my mind. After a few months, I even started to believe I mig
ht have embellished this part; my creative mind layering details around the memory of the dream.
I was looking at my own face.
Dread encapsulated me, stealing my breath. My chest caved. And then I felt every wound slash my body at once. The pain overwhelmed my senses. Everywhere I touched…my hands were covered in red. My clothes soaked with blood and grimy lake water.
I fought my legs to stand, then looked down the dock, the way I’d come. I was unnervingly calm.
I saw her nearing then. Her golden tan, blond hair white as angel’s breath. Her belly was swollen. A slight baby bump denoting her pregnancy.
I’m pregnant.
Chelsea terrified me. My wounds…my imminent death… I accepted. But the beautiful, confident girl holding her belly protectively ripped through my mind like a twister, decimating and cruel.
I’d never felt so alone like I did when I came out of the dream. Each and every time. Over the course of those two weeks leading up to spring break, I was scared to sleep. Scared to lose Drew. Scared of being alone.
Up until Chelsea showed up at Drew’s doorstep, I didn’t truly believe in premonitions. Technically, I still don’t. I understand the laws of physics and the mind too well. I know that our memories are unreliable—that trauma can alter the way we recall those memories. I know that fear and loss and despondency can manufacture lucid dreams that feel like premonitions in themselves but…
Then there is the man.