Starry Wonders: Dreams of the Past

001

"Is it the nightmares that keep you awake?" asked my psychiatrist, Vidya Khan, while sweeping her shiny brunette hair behind her ear. Narrow, beaded eyes that shone with a glimmer, and full bottom lips marked with maroon. She was a soft-spoken woman with a poker face that betrayed no emotion.

I had been going to her for about three weeks - an hour once a week - and, although I found her kind and patient, I found it uncomfortable to open up so easily after switching therapists. My last one, who I'd been going to for three years, moved to Boston. There was no one in the world who knew my deepest insecurities and fears like she did.

"No," I responded, moving a few curls out of my face. "I don't have dreams anymore. What bothers me is what I see when I close my eyes. The intrusive thoughts at night. They come all at once. I try to ignore them, but when I do that, they get worse. I don't know how to get rid of them."

She wrote her notes. I stared at my black wedges, picking the lint off my slacks. I'd gone over them relentlessly with the lint roller that morning, to no avail.

"And what do you see?"

"I - I see-" Screaming faces. Shriveled skin on sobbing infants. A shadow with icy eyes watching me from afar. "Shadows," I managed, swallowing. Badly I wanted to rub my clammy hands on my pants, but resisted. Instead I pushed my sore shoulders back and crossed my ankles. "I see people being haunted, screaming in pain and fear. Sometimes they scream for help. Sometimes they blame me and tell me I should be suffering with 'em. But I can't respond. I'm just a bystander. Watching."

"These people." She stopped writing and looked at me. "Do you know any of them?"

Blood spilled from a skinny, grey arm. It belonged to a male, his afro and skinny frame vaguely familiar. Once his image was clear to me, but over time it grew less and less comprehensible. His color had left; the shape of his curls, his physique - it grew less clear, blurred almost. But I remembered that arm, cut open and spilling blood. How his tendons accentuated and his hand clenched from the pain. The moonlight enveloped him, as he looked at me over his shoulder, pixels obscuring his face from view.

All I could make out were empty orifices peering back. His eyes were gone.

I rested my arm on the chair's, hand on my cheek. "Sometimes. But mostly I see people I don't know. Strangers. I imagine I must've seen 'em somewhere but I'm not sure."

She paused her writing. "You referred to these people as haunted. What makes you believe that?"

"Because there's nothing else to describe it." I crossed my leg over the other. "These people are haunted by darkness. They're stuck in it, and there's no way out for them." Solemn was my frown. "It's too late for them to escape. They're lost... in Hell or Purgatory or whatever comes after death."

But you were the one who got out, a taunting voice crept into my thoughts. What makes you so special?

I was on a mystical car ride, staring out a window in a world that made no sense. Logic said it was a dream, but what explained the flashbacks? The memories of events that happened before I was born? That wasn't fake. No, no, I'd experienced it. I did.

Quit with that, another fought. Those are the delusions talking. Put your head up and don't spiral again. Stay rooted in the present. You know how easy you get caught up in your theories. 

Doctor Khan leaned forward. "You mentioned before you feel a need to help others to make up for wasted time. Do you think this may be a reason you see strangers struggling and in pain? You feel a need to save them?"

"I don't..." I found a stain on the rug, where faded red blended into brown, just barely appearing over the mustard. Stained sheets, bloody knives and sigils on wooden floorboards. Defeated, I dropped my head and stared at my lap. "I'm not sure, honestly. I guess I would want to save them, but... when I'm seeing 'em, I don't think of it much, if I'm being honest. They're just thoughts, not real people. They don't have that deep an effect on me." Anymore.