The Hidden Truth

Chapter 6

He sped off after the blonde boy, leaving Anastasia behind stricken with confusion. Her eyes lingered on Mike as he ran, but she quickly turned toward the boy with the top hat who was a bit slower than the others. She took off running after him, catching up to him fast. However, he was clever and turned around a tree. Anastasia followed, turning around the tree fast. He ran further into the woods as she tried to catch up, her feet seeming to get heavier with each step. He darted around another tree and she followed. Without any warning, she turned and slammed straight into a tree. With the immense inertia, she fell backward and crashed to the ground.

She blinked a few times as a beeping sound was heard a few feet away from her. When she had fully opened her eyes, she was met with the dark security room in the abandoned Freddy's. No more woods. No more laughter. She was knocked out of her daze when her name was called. She looked up and saw as Mike scrambled up from the floor to help her.

"Are you alright?" He asked her in alarm. She looked around herself, patting herself down. She was lying on the floor next to the door. She must've run into it. By sleepwalking? She never sleptwalk. She paused and nodded to him.

"Yeah. I'm alright." He pulled her up and helped her gain her footing as her head spun.

Mike sat her in the chair before sitting back in his own chair beside her. He leaned back and breathed out.

"So-" He began, staring at the ceiling. "You really are in my dreams."

Anastasia looked at him. "Have I been in your dreams before?" She inquired.

He sat up and shook his head. "No, only that first time. When we first met. And now there's these kids. I don't even know if that's possible. This book doesn't mention anything about figments of people we've never seen before." He pulled out a small book. It read Dream Theory on the cover. Anastasia tilted her head and took it from him, flipping through the pages. There were side notes and dog-eared pages that covered the majority of the book.

"Why is this book so important?" She asked of him, her curiosity striking her as she handed the book back to him.

"It's about how you can dream actively. Lucid dreaming. Sometimes you can go back to certain memories through similar sounds and feelings and pictures. I don't know how this was possible though. Nothing was familiar to me. Only you." He looked up at her, his eyes wide. "Why are you in my dreams? And I in yours? We haven't met before today, have we?"

She shook her head. "No. I don't think we've even seen each other before."

Mike stood up and began to pace around the small security office. "Have you had a series of nightmares that repeat the same memory over and over again?"

"Yes." She answered, watching him keenly.

"Is that memory something traumatic?"

She put her head down. "Yes."

He returned to the chair across from her and looked at her with curious eyes. "Maybe the reason why we met in our dreams was because we have something in common."

"But why? Out of the millions of other people in the world who have trauma, why is it us?" Anastasia exclaimed, pointing her finger to her chest.

Mike sat back and huffed. "I don't know."

Silence fell over them as they pondered what it was that had brought them together. Curiosity filled both of them, wondering what this traumatic experience was that they both had in common. They could both speculate the common sense of it. Someone important to them had been taken from them in their past. But how could that connect to their dream bridges? It made no sense to both of them. Both had been employed for two completely different reasons, or at least in Anastasia's perspective it seemed so. She was commissioned by her father to investigate the disappearance of her sister, while Mike seemed to just be there for the job. Based on his disheveled appearance, he seemed to be struggling with money and stress was eating him away. She didn't know everything and she was sure there was more to him than his tired eyes and unkempt facial hair, but she remained puzzled as to how something so impossible could become possible for two strangers that had no connections between them. Or as it would seem in the foreground.