A/N: I changed a couple things since the last update. I'm not quite sure where I want this to go, so it might be a while.

This time, it is just as unpleasant. I find myself in a tiny, enclosed room, no furnishings to speak of, with shadows in the corners the ugly purple colour of bruises. The door is feet away, but I know without looking at it that it's locked. The windows are nonexistent, the walls an emotionless, unforgiving gray.

I struggle not to panic. I know something terrible is going to happen.

I feel as if I am choking on a sour combination of the stale dust in the air and my own tongue, the texture of sandpaper in my mouth. My palms sweat.

I force myself to be calm, as the inevitable footsteps sound outside my small room. My heart disobeys me, racing ahead to pound out the beats until the dream ends-

Because this is a dream.

This is a dream.

I hear keys clank together outside and a rough voice swears gravelly. Through a haze of blood red panic, I have a hysterical urge to laugh that is immediately suppressed.

This is a dream.

The doorknob turns.

This is a dream.

And the door creaks open, as if cringing at its own weight.

A dream.

I wake up gasping, bed sheets strangling me, pillow smothering me, sweat drenching my face and back. Even with the iciness of the sweat now beginning to cool, I cannot catch my breath. Despite this, I feel a strange trickle of relief sliding down my spine, like a slender fingertip. My dream was different. It was different.

When I was eight years old, I saw my parents die in front of me. And ever since, I've had nightmares. Terrible, appalling, disturbing parodies of their actual deaths. At first there were the same five or six, but they slowly dwindled until I was having the same nightmare every single night, over and over again, my parents dying again and again, myself helpless every time. I used to wake up screaming, crying, flailing. Eventually, I stopped. Now I wake up silently, in the middle of the night, the only noise in my own head, because the screaming and crying is contained into myself.