It started with a summer costume party as I got ready to go. I was in a dorm of sorts, a hybrid between Sophia's parents' house and a campground. Phoebe was there, some other friends from our childhood whose faces we have now forgotten.
I was dressed to go to this party and I had to pass through the woods to get to the fairgrounds. I was in some get up reminiscent of princess Peach, but as I traversed through the cool and dark wood, I suddenly felt... An incredible sense of danger. I began to run, not knowing why I needed to run without turning around. I heard a woosh of someone trying to grab me, but I dodged into a hole in a log covered by overgrowth and crawled forward. When I emerged I was in the fairgrounds and the sense of danger passed.
I sighed in relief and proceeded to have fun. The middle of the dream consisted of trying to hit baseballs, and three successful hits meant I could spin a wheel of prizes. As I cajoled with my friends and the crowd, I noticed someone in a dark knight costume join us.
He tilted his helmet visor back and I realized it was Emyr. His crimson eyes were evident and determined as he grabbed a bat. He won so many in succession that I went up to him to praise him. As he gave me a once-over... He smiled the wicked way he normally does, leaned down, and flirted with me.
The dream progressed. Our parents did a full renovation of their house in this dream, so even as I wandered the unfamiliar house, it felt like home. Emyr joined me in my suite, which like a townhouse had a different entrance than to the main house. There was a communal air with everyone living together, but there was also a sense of danger, as a girl from a few dorms down was murdered mysteriously.
Rumours erupted about the murder. They said that footage of the girl last being seen included her walking towards the woods to take the famous shortcut to the fairgrounds. Then... She was followed by a doppelganger of herself, dressed the same way. And at the fairgrounds, footage showed either her or her doppelganger showing up alone.
While this was happening, in this dream, it broke out of my POV to third person camera. I'm going to swap narration to match this change.
Emyr and Colleen were living together in that dorm and they were dating, in love. However, the next critical part of the dream involved conflict between them. It was a subtle change - Emyr teased her frequently because he enjoyed seeing her flustered, but he never realized she was taking the teasing to heart. Some of the things he teased her was for being a crybaby - and other little things that began to accumulate and snowball in Leen's mind. Not once did she fight back, or set boundaries, or even tell him her feelings were hurt. She merely smiled through it and, over time, their relationship grew strained.
At some point, Emyr's teasing became grim criticism. He was trying to help her in his own, erroneous way - saw that she was often trampled on, often spoken over, often withdrawing when she had every right to fight. Don't get Emyr wrong - he came to her defense often, but he was also worried because he felt Colleen needed to learn how to defend herself. Frustration and concern grew. There were behaviours of Colleen's that he could tell weren't healthy. One of her mysterious insistences, which he took as a kink, was that she wore opera length gloves and thigh highs during sex. He never complained - it was incredibly sexy, and he loved the way it complimented her body - but she was otherwise unwilling to be fully naked around him. She was flinching, and he could feel in his gut something was wrong.
Colleen, meanwhile, was anxious beyond words. Emyr had grown a shade meaner than she could explain; and frankly, in this world, she had no one else but him. A global review of the dream revealed that, despite being around friends and family, Leen was often on the sidelines, observing. That most activities and situations did not involve her. She walked into the main house to find Phoebe and some of those friends playing board games together in the living room, and she smiled and passed by as no one acknowledged her. There would be pleasant smiles and hellos but no invitations.
It was a vicious circle. Colleen being pleasant and guarded seemed to others that she wad disinterested in being a part of group activities. Since she did not show her vulnerabilities to anyone, she also failed to attain the closeness she wanted. Only Emyr stuck by her, intuiting her discomforts, and shielding her from things by stepping in. She was so madly in love with him that his criticisms began to wound her.
It cumulated into a fight. It was barely a fight - Emyr watched Colleen once again squirrel away (from something, either being genuinely bullied/mocked or from being a part of group festivities) but this time he caught her. He asked her why she didn't just do the thing she wanted to do, why she would retreat from something that she so clearly wanted. When she stared at him blankly, hurt and at a loss, in frustration he said he needed to leave and cool down. So he went.
There was a quiet moment where Colleen was alone for the dream. She went to shower. She saw a bunch of girls in the living room communal space having dragged mattresses into a row and having a giggly sleepover. She went back in her suite and wrote some letters, and decided, in her misery, that she needed to get out and get some fresh air.
She never returned.
Emyr came home to an empty suite, and he assumed she would be back. He passed the night alone, and in the morning, tried to call her. No answer. The frustration and deliberation he'd been doing the past few days, trying to make his thoughts productive and craft a game plan moving forward, all suddenly evaporated into a chilling sense of danger.
When Colleen was reported missing, they combed the area for her. Days later, someone stumbled across her corpse in a hole in a log, the one from the beginning of the dream.
Emyr was hysterical. He went from disbelief to horror to vomiting to tears. He was asked to identify her body and, lo and behold, there was his little dove lying cold on the coroner's table. On her naked corpse, he was bewildered to see a mess of cross crossing self harm scars up and down her arms and legs. Two long, fresh, vertical cuts ran the length of her arms, and the coroner sighed sadly, ruling it a suicide.
The rest of the dream passed in a haze. The house was in mourning, and preparing funeral rites. Emyr wandered like a ghost through their shared home, dissociated and at times forgetting she was dead, only to remember the visceral violence of her ending, and weeping anew. Then, he stumbled across her three letters. One was to him, one was to Phoebe, and the other was to a friend who we can't recall (may have been one of the ones where our relationship soured, where we have a lot of regrets).
When he realized these must've been suicide notes, Emyr found it unbearable. It took him a few weeks before he could open it and read it. And when he read its tearstained contents, his dread and horror transformed. Her letter was decidedly not a suicide note. It was apologizing to him for what had happened, but it was also explaining, pleading with him, that she knew she needed to grow a spine, but that he was hurting her. She loved him and wanted to be treated gentler, and that she acknowledged there were dark things in her past she was still struggling with, but that she wanted his help to grow stronger.
The end of the letter said "If you can forgive me for disappointing you, please come talk to me." And Emyr scrambled to ask the contents of the other two letters. Apparently similar - they weren't suicide notes, but a gathering of thoughts, and a plea to the recepient to help her improve.
Emyr's Intuition was off the charts. He demanded to find security footage of the woods, and also the fairgrounds, needing to confirm a dreadful hunch. And he was right. The footage showed Colleen slowly walking into the woods, and then many minutes later, someone dressed like her walking in as well. And on the side of the fairgrounds, only one emerged.
The last of the dream was a blur before we awoke. Emyr pursued this as a murder, and while the officials did not help him quick enough as Colleen was already buried, he went vigilante on his own. There was a final revealing flashback of the start of the dream - of the murderer, and their modus operandi. They mimicked the dress of their victims, killed them in the woods, and came out to do activities for a day or two dressed as the victim to give themselves an alibi. Colleen got away... But not the second time. In her final moments, she sensed the same danger as the first time, and tried to go through the hole. But she was caught. Like the first victim, she was strangled to death - but the killer noticed her self harm scars, and decided to slash her arms to further cover this incident.
We woke up right after this little mournful flashback, seeing through Colleen's rapidly darkening vision the distant glow of the suburbs from which she'd come, like a warmth she could never reach.
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