It began casually with me finding myself in a well-lit gallery of sorts, friends around, the usual smalltalk. And in an instant, they vanished into thin air. Not that I recall being a witness, or being concerned. When you are having a dream, things can progress in the most nonsensical fashion, and you won't feel anything abnormal around you; as it happened right then. I strolled around in the gallery that seemed endless. It stretched far, far; and tapered to a small dot on either ends - like a tube. Soft, yellow light filled up the gallery . Wooden walls; glazed, but empty panels.
Then appeared the little boy. I'll rewind a bit through the day, to acquaint him...
Football pulls many of us into attending college daily. We rarely attend to the classes, for they are few, compounded by the fact that our teachers are an uninspiring bunch. It was the same yesterday. A single lecture, and then we had the day all to ourselves. Oh yes, that means - Football. Just a small bunch of us friends, much of our official team tired and spent after a tournament - where we lost in the finals - just the previous week. A slovenly kid - must be no more than 8 - flanked the sidelines throughout our game, fetching our ball after it had gone out of play, no matter which direction. After the initial concerns of him running away with our ball were done with, we let him hang around. He was disruptive - though infrequently - which I reason to his eagerness to be a part of the game and was lightly scolded on such instances. After an hour of fractured football, we were packing. He stood far, watching us, smashing bricks into small pieces for no apparent reason. A couple of my friends were on their own high ridiculing each other's antics; and they pulled in (lewd) references to the boy midway. The sudden attention must've given him a rush. As of children...the best they can think of in such circumstances is doing something disruptive or violent, hence his actions intensified. Eventually, he was shooed away and ignored. He asked me for the football to play with, but we were about to leave, and I declined.
Back to the dream...The same boy was standing some distance away, a small green ball in his hands. He threw it in my general direction and the ball went past me, rolling along the endless tube. He made a run to fetch it; and at that instant I realised that I had a similar ball once that I had now lost. I realised that it might be that very ball. The kid must've stolen it. Within a few seconds, my ignorance to what he was or had been doing had turned into a confirmation of him being a thief against whom I had to jostle and recover my ball. I turned around, and made a run for the ball. I saw a moment of disbelief on the boy's face - he must've been surprised on how the realisation came so sudden. And the next thing I remember is the boy agressively tugging at the back of my shirt and my belt, his contorted face an evidence to the mammoth effort by his standards. My acceleration was broken, feet trying to keep balance against the load anchored to my waist, wlidly swinging to and fro.
Then I felt as if the boy's hands grew in size. Their grip tightened. My motion was completely halted. I could feel my rib cage being crushed, like a machine pressing you frm all the sides. The ball was not a concern anymore. I was struggling for breath. About to die, maybe.
suddenly I found myself in my own room, under a single blanket, breathing heavily. I was awake - or so I thought. "Whew, just a dream." I could still feel something tightening around my body. It was my blanket. "I'll just lie the same for a while. It always receds." But I found something different about my room. I looked around. The bed I was sleeping on was thrice its usual size. My other bed was missing. The room seemed larger. Then I glanced to my right, and there was a man at the far end of the bed, wrapped in the same blanket, close to falling off.
A bald, white man dressed in office formals; nothing too bright. Average height and build. His face was flat; the nose was small and appeared as if somebody had punched him hard a long time back. He was breathing heavily. Sweat dripped off his face, the beads glistening against the white light. It looked as if he had been through a rough time as well. But he didn't seem to notice me around.
I connected things to infer that he was somehow at the receiving end of my nightmares. Like my metaphysical clone. Experiencing the same things as me. Now I wasn't too sure if I was awake or not, but knew that I had control over things in my current world. And all I wanted was to see that man's suffering. Playing GOD. I wished that the blanket would twirl around his neck like a serpent, and it did. The man was shaking, gasping for breath. Then I let him go. Next I wished that the blanket would gag him, and eventually choke him to death. It did so. It was a pleasure seeing that. I knew what was to happen, hence the same didn't affect me - just felt a little heavy on the chest, that's all.
And soon I experienced being lifted to another state of consciousness. My room assumed its regular dimensions. Normal objects came into sight. The man was gone. I snapped back into the real(?) world, out of sleep.
Infer at your own mental expense.
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