I let out a shriek that permeated through my dreams. I awoke, startled and shaken from the intensity of my sleep. As my senses began to adjust to my surroundings, the smell of the ocean morphed into the soft fragrance of vanilla cotton that my room was known for. The sand's grainy feeling became my bedsheets satin material. Seconds before, my ears could hear the waves crash against the shore, but even that sound was transformed into the lullabies I often fell asleep to during the night.
I sat up in bed, trying to wipe the sweat away. But this only brought more discomfort to my uneasy body. I felt odd being in my own skin because of the rapid change from seaside to bedside, happiness to confusion.
I reached to the left of my bed, where my dream diary rested on my nightstand. I immediately opened to page five, where my first account with him was recorded.
“I couldn't get over his emerald eyes. They followed me around everywhere I went. One would normally think this was creepy, but in my reverie, I secretly loved being in his eyes. His skin was a beautiful color, not too white, but he wasn't remarkably tan either. It was almost as if someone took the two shades and blended them together, leaving him perfectly balanced. His body was nicely chiseled, this boy had no flab. To top off his flawless physique, he was a dark brunette. Mystery boy's aura pulled me in and I was deemed a hopeless case after that. He had me without a hello.”
Dreams would come and go as they please, as I've learned in my life. This lesson was uncovered back in second grade, when I awoke with a start and ran crying into my parent's room for comfort. I had a bad nightmare (I don't recall what it was about, it was too long ago to remember) and I wanted to climb into bed with my parents. They always made all the nightmares go away. But that night when I went to my parents room and awoke them, my mother decided I was too old to be sleeping in their bed.
“Darling,” She said, pushing back my bangs and kissing my forehead, “Nightmares aren't real. All the silly monsters that tease you in your dreams is just your mind playing tricks on you,”
My mother saw that I still wasn't at ease with the idea of me going back into my own bed, but nevertheless she took my hand and we began to walk down the hall to my bedroom.
“When I was little, my mother taught me a trick to scare all the bad dreams away,” She said, while tucking me into bed.
“What's that Momma?”
“Think of all the good things in your life before you go to bed. Everything you love, like your daddy and I. We will scare away all the mean creatures in your nightmares. I promise,”
In my opinion, that was the most useful advice my mother was ever going to give me. It was the key to my unconscious mind, the ritual that would help me control my dreams. From that night on I would always think of everything I loved right before I went to bed.
But two years ago, I broke my tradition of thinking about everything I adore before bed. That's because two years ago, a boy had shattered my heart and ran away laughing at my demise. So in honor of another heartbreak, I thought about the one thing I hated: my love life. So I sat in bed and wallowed in my affliction. I cried so hard that I eventually crashed due to my exhaustion. That night, my daily dreams turned into something meaningful, something worth sleeping for.
My mysterious dream boy.
He had appeared in nine of my dreams since the very first those two years ago. I had so many questions to ask him, I still had no idea what his name could be or if he was even a real person. So I laid in my bed, thinking about the mysterious dream boy and his unknown ways.
And I would awake the next morning pondering the same thing.
