new color: gray = tired

I can’t sleep. There is not much to be said about today, more than that. Weird dreams kept me up, I ended up tossing and turning more than sleeping. I’m exhausted and I barely remember what happened today, thanks to that.

In my dream, I was rooted to the spot again, unable to move. Watching the world around me. Today however, instead of that weird teen, my dreams were haunted by the dead. Literally.

I’m not sure how I know the characters in my dreams were supposed to be ghosts, other than just dream logic. At the beginning they looked like normal people - modern clothes, a crowd walking in hurry. Passing strangers in the street, stopping to look at the TV screens in the shop windows. Hurry, hurry hurry.

But the faster they moved, the less they looked like people, and more like just shimmering streaks of light. As if someone left a camera set to long exposure on a busy street corner. Some of them seemed more self aware than others. Every time any of those slower, more… sentient looking ones touched me, I woke up. Not like before, with a jolt. This time it felt like I never fell asleep in the first place. Like the images I saw were a tape played on the back of my eyelids.

Weirdly enough, as the dream, or dreams, since I woke up a lot, progressed, time seemed to go backwards. Clothes of people passing me by, buildings around me, slowly, it all seemed to be moving back, to the times I have no chance of remembering. And the farther back in time I went, the ghosts seemed to be more… vague ideas of humans, rather than anything else. They seemed to dissolve in the air, mixing, losing any sense of self they might have had left. Pure leftover energy, aura, polluting the air.

Once the city around me turned into a town, and then the town into a village, ghosts around me did not slow down, but something else happened - from between the moving will-’o-wisps of former humans, on the other side of the village square, there was a girl. Or, well. Something that once was a girl. I could, at the same time, see her the same way I saw everyone else, but also as a normal human.

Maybe calling her normal is a bit of an overstatement.

Her hands were blackened, as if she smeared tar all over them. I could see, the same blackness slowly creeping into the side of her neck. Her torn, dirty rag of a dress let me see most of her legs - one of them had the blackness spread from around mid-thigh, going into all directions.

She was disheveled, dirty, shackled. And yet when she looked up, her eyes showed no fear. The memories of this part are fading and so, I’m unable to say whether it was determination, or hate I saw in her eyes but… whatever it was, it burned.

I did not see anything of that kind in the earlier part of the dream, and yet, when she smiled and me, and brought her dirty, blackened finger to her lips, I knew -

She would soon burn too.