Not Just a Dream

I woke with a start. There were cold beads of sweat on my forehead. My heart was beating out of my chest. Cliché signs of a terrible, violent dream, but mine had been the opposite of that. It was not a meaningless dream. It was a truthful, ominous vision.

My alarm clock blinked at me from across the room. 05:57 said the bright red numbers; they stood out against the sage green of my walls. My head throbbed with the blinking of the clock.

Of course, it happened in my sleep, but it was no silly fear or a hallucination filled with monsters hidden beneath the bed. In dreams, vision blurred at the edges, moving feels like walking through a wall of mud, and voices sounded like they came from underwater.

I felt with a chilling uncertainty that it was going to happen and that it was a warning. I had to get out of here. 

I leaped out of my bed as the fogginess of sleep lifted and shot down the stairs past the corridor, past the kitchen, looking for my mother. She would know what to do. Mothers always did.

My head swivelled from left to right until I finally spotted her.

“Mother.” I nearly slipped as I stop before her, panting.

She looked up, dropping the magazine she was reading in her lap, eyebrows furrowed. The magazine’s cover stung my eyes, oversaturated and way too bright.

“What are you doing up this early, darling? It’s a weekend. Aren’t you sleeping in?”

I glanced at the living room clock. 06:00. The windows looking outside showed a sky barely even reaching sunrise. 

“Mother,” my voice trembled as my heart kept beating at its rapid pace, “We need to get out of here. It will be here soon.” I looked around me. A cup filled with tea, steaming. No lights on but a lamp. A deck of magazines just like the one she had been holding.

She took a sip from the tea and tilted her head, taking in my ragged state. I had no doubt my hair was a mess. “Are you alright? Did you have a nightmare?”

I tried to throw my hands up in the air, but it felt like my arms were not mine to command, “No! Mother, it wasn’t a nightmare! I saw it come!”

She stood from the couch and bent down to put her hands on my shoulders. They were warm from holding the tea.“Sweetheart, slow down. What happened?” 

She smelled like rosewater. 

I groaned. She didn’t believe me! I should just drag her to the car and make her drive us somewhere safe, but then she might think I was insane. I might be, but I was not going to take a risk.

I forced my voice to come out calm, despite the roaring in my ears and the wild beating of my heart, “I was asleep, but I am sure it was not a dream. I saw everything clear and crisp. In the vision, I woke up to someone screaming help. It was your voice. I couldn’t move. And then It, I don’t know who or what It is, but it crept into my room. My alarm clock started ringing, meaning it was seven in the morning. Mother, if we don’t leave this house right now, It will come and hunt us down. We have less than an hour.”

Mother sighed. Her green eyes took on a look that said, poor kid. “Sweetie, I think you’ve had a really awful nightmare. I know sometimes dreams seem quite realistic, but I promise you everything is alright.”

Was she wearing perfume at six in the morning? Why did she smell so strongly of rosewater? Didn’t she know I was allergic to roses? They made me sneeze like crazy.

What did I have to do to make her understand? It was a matter of life and death! We had to leave immediately!

I sank to the floor. Despair closed in. Urgency did, too.

“No! Mother!” Tears sprang into my eyes and my voice cracked. “Please! We have to leave and get somewhere safe! Just believe me! We need to leave!”

“I am afraid that won’t be possible.” The sympathy left her voice. She sounded empty as if it were a robot speaking through her. Her arms dropped to her sides. 

“What?” I lifted my head from my hands, the frustrated tears staining my face.

Suddenly, a thought hit me. My mother always smelled like jasmine. She hated tea and only ever drank coffee in the morning. She never read magazines. She had brown eyes.

Chills crept up my back.

The woman in front of me smiled. 

“You…” My voice trailed off. What question, could I ask, exactly? What did I want to know? Would she even say anything true? In this situation, she was the one in control. Was it even a she? Was it even human?

Something close to remorse crept into her eyes, though the saccharine smile did not slip, “I wanted to give you a happy last moment, you see, but I must not have gotten the details about her correct. I hoped you would be ignorant as you just woke up. I suppose humans really do have some type of supernatural sixth sense at times.”

My head felt like it was being deep-fried. What was going on? Where was my mother and who was this person pretending to be her?

I tried to run but my vision began to blur at the edges, I felt like I was moving through a wall of mud while getting nowhere at all, and her voice sounded like it came from underwater as she said, “You were right, sweetheart. I'm afraid so.” 

She ever-so-gently placed her hands over my eyes and everything went black.

I woke with a start. There were cold beads of sweat on my forehead. My heart was beating out of my chest. Cliché signs of a terrible, violent dream, but mine had been the opposite of that. It was not a meaningless dream. It was a truthful, ominous vision.