"You're Awake."

I opened my eyes, though the realm of my dream hadn’t closed quite yet. The rims of my vision were blurred, and the air around me seemed to hum in my ears, the vibrancy of the noise almost glowing in my view. 

The buzzing was the only sound I could hear, not even my breathing was audible in the pitch-black room. I could see the very outline of my door, the edges of my toes underneath my blankets reflected on by the light of the small bulb in the hallway. It was always on, a nightlight, my sister called it. I remember her saying it was to help make sure she doesn’t trip over her own feet. 

My parents and I always shared a small smile when she adamantly swore that it wasn’t because she was afraid of the dark. We all knew she just wanted to sound older than she was. 

The buzzing stopped suddenly, the silence of the room echoing in my ears. I could feel the pressure of the quiet, so harsh it hurt my skull. I tried to pull my head up and away from my bed, tried to hum to stop the sound, my body wasn’t listening. 

I must have been dreaming, I couldn’t even hear my breathing in the silence of the room. The quiet began to push harder and harder until my head felt like it was about to burst into a million pieces, a white-hot light shining in front of my eyes as if proving that the pain I felt really meant I was going to die. 

I began to breathe sharply, I could feel it speeding up, but not a sound was heard. I couldn’t hear my breathing, even as it became so aggressive that I was sure my lungs were going to pop. 

Still no sound. 

Right across the hallway, directly outside my door was the closed door of my sister’s room. She was probably sleeping soundly, not a worry in her mind. Or maybe she wasn’t here if this was such a horrible dream after all; would she be in her room?

I tried to scream for help, but not a sound came out. There was truly no surprise there, no sound had come before, why would it now?

As if the reality that this was a dream was trying to prove itself to me, a loud thump echoed from the part of the hallway I couldn’t see. A gentle cough came soon after, the deep gruff cough of a man. 

My mind was trying very hard to make me wake up screaming this time around. My absolute biggest fear was to have my home broken into, for either myself or someone in my family to be murdered. And here I was, stuck in bed without being able to do a thing for myself, hearing the sounds of someone outside, down the hallway. 

A light flashed from that general area, the shadow of a person shining down into the hallway jerked me from mild panic and realization this was a dream to absolute overcoming panic. 

I could feel my chest heaving, each individual rib pushing into my lungs. I could feel how inflamed my lungs were because of the bone pressing into it, the crawling burn of each violent smash. Yet I couldn’t hear a sound, not the cracking of my bones, not the shuttering breaths I was taking. Nothing at all. 

This may have been a nightmare, but I wanted to wake up and soon before I was either killed by my own body or by whoever was in the house. I tried to move once more, my muscles refused to listen. All I could think to do was panic, wait for the inevitable death that was to come and welcome me into the land of the conscious. 

Footsteps sounded from the hallway, loud enough to hurt my eardrums and ring in my skull. I tried to close my eyes to avoid seeing whoever it was that would be coming to get me, and I quickly found that my limbs weren’t the only ones to stop working. The realization that I couldn’t close my eyes brought me to wonder why they weren’t burning without having blinked whatsoever. That was when they began to burn, more than they ever had before. So much I wondered if they were actually on fire. 

The footsteps became louder and louder until the feeling of liquid coming out of my ears began, though it didn’t feel real. It felt like a phantom touching my ear and neck like one would get if they began to fear that bugs were on them. It wasn’t real, my eardrums hadn’t burst. I could still hear the footsteps. 

Yet they became louder still, becoming my heartbeat. 

Then a light turned on, practically blinding me. My chest still heaved, my lungs seizing, and my eyes continued to burn; a white-hot pain that I never saw an end to. 

Then I saw her, my sister. She was much too short to be making so much noise with her footsteps, and she couldn’t have made such a gruff cough. It must have been the nature of the dream. Everything seemed so real but fake. 

She looked my way, her tired expression lighting up into worry. She rushed into my room and pulled my blankets off of me, pulling me into her arms and holding me close to her chest. 

“Hey, hey, it’s okay,” she whispered softly into my hair, rocking me back and forth. “You’re stuck in the In-Between. Just remember that this is real life, what you’re seeing right now is what’s real, not everything that hurts.”

I tried to move once more, failing. The In-Between, a place where two realms were pulled together into one. Where you couldn’t do what you wanted to and saw what you wish you hadn’t. 

Your mind became trapped in the idea that moving wasn’t necessary, yet your brain knew you were conscious and awake. 

I whimpered softly, the first sound I’d heard from myself since I’d opened my eyes. I was crying now, sobbing into my sister’s sleep shirt, tears burning streams down my cheeks. “I’m awake,” I mumbled, drawing in a shaking breath. 

She nodded, trailing her fingers down my spine as if to promise me that I was okay. “Yes, you’re awake.”