Visited by the Dreams

Chapter 1 - A Nightmare

Susan Cooper had always been plagued with particularly vivid, sensory rich dreams. Some were quite pleasant, but far more often her dreams were the stuff of nightmares. Like the one she was having now … if it was a dream. It felt like she was drowning, lost at sea during a horrific storm. The wind howled around her. Waves the size of mountains crashed over the top of her head, making it pound. Every breath she took felt like a struggle, just to survive.

Susan did what she usually did during nightmares: she tried to wake up. Like the one she’d had the night before. That one was a doozy. It involved a fire storm and burning to death. Taking control mentally in the situation presented by the dream was usually the most reliable means of escape. It worked the night before, and so based on that thinking, Susan tried it now. She tried to focus on the sensations beyond the water and the waves.

It was dark. Now that she was aware of it, she realized it was probably night … the middle of the night from the looks of it. The water was rough, but warm. She still coughed and sputtered as she struggled to breathe, but taking the initiative for how to get out of the dream she pressed on.

“Think,” she said to herself. “What other things are my senses telling that will help me disengage from this dream … something that will convince my subconscious this isn’t real.”

Another wave crashed over her head and Susan felt herself getting sucked down. Unexpected brightness flashed in the middle of the night, temporarily blinding her with the light. Pain lanced through her head, and no amount of persuasion was going to convince her that wasn’t real.

“So I have a headache. I need to wake up to take something,” Susan told herself sternly.

But the water just wasn’t going way. There was no comforting bed beneath her, and her struggle to breathe felt absolutely really. Then the thought occurred to her,

“What if this isn’t a dream?”

            Susan extended her senses as far as she could, gasping again as the darkness was sudden overcome by brilliant, stabbing light. Lightning flashed overhead, bringing both clarity and pain to her current situation. This was obviously real. The pain wasn’t waking her up, and if she didn’t do something fast, the situation she’d found herself in could easily be fatal. She couldn’t immediately remember why or how she came to be here, but here she was, lost during a storm on the open sea. She was struggling just to stay afloat. The weight of her wet clothes threatened to drag her down. Straps and cords danced around her head, tangling themselves in her hair, pulling painfully at her head. She was slowly drowning in the midst of the storm. What was more, she felt like she was about to pass out from the pain in her head, and she didn’t really think a person could do that if they were already asleep in bed.

 “Oh my God … I am going to drown,” Susan gasped, blinking at the sudden onset of another flash of light. She stretched up as far as she could, trying to lift her head out of the water in a vain attempt to get her mouth, or at least her nose high enough above the surface of the water for a breath of air. “I have to do something. There must be something I can do to keep myself from sinking any more.”

And immediately her instinct to take charge of any given situation and make the best of it re-exerted itself again. She may not be able to control her subconscious enough to convince herself this was a dream, if it turned out it wasn’t, there must be something she could do to improve her odds. Susan found herself using her senses another way, trying to assess whether or not there might be resources around her she could use. As she did, she realized the straps and cords getting tangled in her hair belonged a loose piece of canvas around her neck … a life vest?