Lucy’s Diary

I'm taking a few minutes to write this down before the check-out rush starts. I had one of those dreams again—the lucid ones that Mina told me were called "false awakening" dreams. She sent me a whole bunch of links and articles (don't tell her but I just looked it up on Wikipedia, which let's be honest, she probably just sent the articles to get me to go to Wikipedia in the first place—sneaky gf is sneaky) about it, and I forget how unsettling they are until I have one again.

It was early this morning like they always are, and while it felt like hours and hours, I know it's a matter of minutes in reality. It bothers me how…easy my perception of time is tricked by my own brain. How I can experience something concrete—like time—and have it be my brain lying to me.

I dreamed I woke up in my bed (alone, sigh, Mina had gone home) and got up to get ready for work. My closet door was on the opposite side of the room from where it usually is, and there weren't any windows. I opened the door, and there was nothing but dirt inside the closet. Then I got that feeling, the unfurling of nerves in my dream-self that rattles through me until my brain sluggishly tries to tell me that I'm asleep. It's such a strange sensation and not one I ever feel when I'm awake—this sick blossoming of knowledge that things are wrong, that I'm aware when I shouldn't be, like a patient waking up during anesthesia.

I know what it means when it happens, and I tried to wake myself up. I remember the usual physical sensations that come along with false awakenings—the heavy limbs, the sensation that I can't move. Now, instead of my waking brain telling me I'm asleep, my sleeping brain holds me hostage and paralyzed. I fell back into the loop and was back in my house, in the kitchen this time, and the boy was there. The one that looks like Harker when he was a kid. The one that has no mouth. Ugh.

I went over to the side door and looked out to see my neighbor's house. As usual in these dreams, everything looked the same as it always does with only a few minor changes.

In this case, my neighbors had coffins set up in their yard. The boy from the kitchen was standing on one of them and waving to me.

Sometimes, when I have lucid dreams like this—the ones that are scary, not just mundane—I fly. I didn't fly this time. I just stood there and watched the boy wave, and prayed I would wake up.

I guess I should tell you a little bit about myself, first, or whatever. I’m nineteen and I live in Treme, in New Orleans. I’ve always lived here. Two nights ago, my dad and my older brother sent me to the corner store a few blocks away to get beer when they got home from work. Joe at the bodega knows my dad, so he lets me.

It was dusk and the sky was the smoggy purple-gray of any New Orleans summer evening. But there was something in the air—the atmosphere felt wrong. Supercharged, or vibrating. It made my ears pop. As I was walking, my sneaker skidded in some gravel and the spray scared the crows on the telephone line. They burst into the air in a shock of feathers and caws, and it scared the shit out of me. When I turned to look at them, I got the sudden, creeping sensation that I was being watched. It had gotten darker as I walked, dusk dimming into night, and I couldn’t see too well. One thing I’ll tell you, for sure: if the city council had seen what I saw next, they would earmark funds for more streetlights in Treme right quick.

I turned around slowly, suddenly afraid, I’m not ashamed to admit it. The porches on the block were empty, and all I could hear was the buzz of static, like one of the old heads fell asleep listening to the radio and the station broke. When I turned around, nothing was there, and I kinda laughed at myself for being an effing wuss.

Then, a…a figure swooped from around the broken-down house on the corner. It was a shadow-thing, like one a person would cast, but it had a substance to it. And it moved on its own. It moved fucking fast, y’all, I swear to God. It was darkness against darkness and then…from somewhere within the darkness, where its face should be, there was just MOUTH. Just a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth, like the thing was made to CONSUME. I swear, I’ve never been so scared in my life! I thought that thing was going to rip me to pieces.

It paused for a moment, like it was…deciding what it was going to do to me. I wanted to run but it was like I was stuck to the ground, like my soles had melted into the gravel and I couldn’t move. Then it started to move again. It came toward me in the dark, but it was a different kind of darkness. More solid. More…something. Then it started to move faster. It was coming right at me, and all I felt was DARK DARK DARKNESS EVERYWHERE. The air felt like it had disappeared around me, and I gagged. Then it was on me! I thought it would tear me apart, or make me part of the darkness.

But just as it came at me, a car tore around the corner from Ursulines, and the headlights cut through the darkness. The thing recoiled like holy water thrown at the devil, and I could move again. The fear drained out of me and I could finally breathe. The thing—whatever it was—was gone.

Of course, the car almost plowed into me, because I was standing there, totally freaked out. I ran all the way home and when my dad bitched about having no beer I told him there was no way in hell I was going outside again.

I don’t know what it was, but I swear on all I hold dear, the shadow was real. The TEETH were real. This thing…this thing was real.