Ever heard about the Boogey-Man? The Sand Man? Freddy Kruger? Ever heard about how dreams can sometimes predict the future? However, have you ever thought that dreams could alter someone’s reality?
The story begins in the suburbs of Colombo. There lives a young lad who was always curious about the unknown. Do Gods really exist? If there is a God then there should be spirits too right? These are the questions this lad always had. Side Note- The kid showed a full bravado in front of his friends and was actually curious about the unknown. However, even he knew that you should be afraid of the dark.
Few months went by and the Kid started to see a weird dream. A dream that was connected to his childhood home where he was told to go to a separate place. There he had to enter a shop which had a spiral staircase inside and two middle aged men were talking with each other and were completely ignoring the lad. Next to the men was a door which led to the place that this lad wanted to go in his dreams. The dream was fun with mellow colors and summer music. It was like a throwback to his childhood for his dreams usually consisted of food, celebrities and that occasional crush!
The dreams didn’t make the lad tired in the morning and this dream kept coming in a weekly basis. What puzzled the lad now was the fact that the color of his dream started to change from mellow to grim. The summer music changed into the sounds he heard during a Mass at church and what bugged him the most was the fact that the two men who ignored him were then slowly turning around to pay him some attention. The dream which was once his favorite, now started to scare him. The frequency changed from weekly to daily, from nightmares to day dreams seen during an afternoon nap, the surroundings started to get darker, the music grimmer until finally it happened- he woke up screaming, with sweat covering his entire torso. His favorite dream has now turned into an omen of his death and what was the worst part of it all? He couldn’t remember how his dream had ended.
Always being considered the weird one among his friends, the lad had only a few little people to confide with about the dreams he had and from the little, a handful of people who would actually tell him what it might have meant. His friends told him that may be it was a sign of things to come or maybe he has personal issues within his life that were projected into his dreams. The fact that this might have been an omen, concerned the destiny-believing lad a lot.
And then it happened again- the dream returned. The whole dream was dark and this time he was running straight out of the shop where the two men were. The sound of small bells ringing was deafening his ears. The lad checked his arms- they were bleeding. He stopped for a minute only to see a figure of a man appearing. It was his best friend with a grim face who just said one word- RUN. Looking back, he screamed. The two men were coming at him, knives in hand, grinning at their next victim. His legs had stopped working, his eyes were getting blurry. He wanted to cry, he wanted to wake up but the men were getting closer and his best friend was not helping him and then suddenly he fell into his bedroom. The lad thought that the nightmare was over, but boy he was wrong- in front of him, in the dark were the two men, grinning with a knife on their hand. The lad wanted to scream but his voice did not come out. He prayed he was dreaming; he wanted to touch his arm and wake up but he couldn’t move his arm. One of the men finally said, “He tried to warn you about us no? Well, we’ll handle him later”. Was this real? Was he still dreaming? All he saw was the two men approaching him and then his world went black, for good.
President: Rtr. Rivi Wijeratne
