I had a dream last night. Well, I have a dream every night, vivid ones, but there was something especially disturbing about this one. So I’m going to write it down so my mind can process it, especially because I don’t want to relive the same images while I’m awake.

It started out the same as many of the dreams I’ve been having in these weeks leading up to the _____________ ceremony. I was in the auditorium presenting my painting skill, when something bad happened. Usually it’s something mundane, like my teeth fall out or I realise I’m not wearing any clothes, but this time I looked up as an old woman stood out from the crowd.

“Witch,” she called, “demon!”

The crowd began to hiss and geer. They began throwing things at me. At first they looked like old fruit and moldy cheese, but as they left the spectators hands, they turned into black balls of burning fire. The incendiary projectiles hit me and knocked me to the ground.

I was suffocating. The fire burned on me and stole the air from my lungs. I whrithed and tried to pull the fire off, but it did not work. The sounds of the crowd and the sandy smell of the auditorium faded until the were only memories.

Suddenly, I felt a man’s hand grab my forearm and pull me into a dark maze of red brick. He started running and gestured that I should follow. I was still out of breath and struggling to catch up as the man darted around corner after corner until I no longer had any sense of where it was we had started. As soon as realised I was totally, completely lost, the man turned one final corner, grinning as he did. I followed him and ran straight into a dead end in the maze. The walls of the maze started to crackle and split. I screamed and rolled myself into a ball in an attempt to protect myself from brick upon brick of rubble as it crashed down over my head and shoulders.

I woke up with a dull headache and shaking hands. But a dream is a dream, and even as I finished writing it down, I could not remember the face of the man who led me through the maze, only his sneering grin as he left me to die.

Next Chapter: Jet 2