There was always this vivid dream, so dark filled with anger, sadness and curses more akin to a nightmare. And yet it was the most vivid dream for a certain man to wake up feeling refresh with a wide smile gracing his face and gleefully laughing at the world.

However vivid a dream it was, it always came out in bursts, in the same sequence.

A boy running away. An alleyway of blood. A weapon turned against him and the cool wind. Overturned places. Depressing echoes. An eerie and silent forest. Five other people. Running, hatred and darkness.

A man, himself, vowing vengeance. Rabid animals, a noose, an earthquake, a crashed car and finally… a gunshot, from a stranger the man knew he was controlling. How, he never knew but that was the point of a nonsensical dream, wasn’t it?

Every day he would wake up refreshed and every night, the dream repeats itself like a cycle. Eventually, the man would realize how abnormal a cycle like that was because there should be a limit on how recurring a dream can be, right? Questioning further, he realized that he was unaware of his waking hours. His only memories exist in a dream.

‘Why can’t I remember?’ the man thought now, still in a dream where the stranger that was actually him held a gun. He moved his hands around for the first time in the dream, gaining lucidity to change the course of this dream.

‘Why do I only remember the dream?’ the man thought, as he decided to pinch himself and forcibly wake up. He wondered if by doing that, he will awaken and finally remember his reality but his hand phased through his arm. He exchanged the gun to the other hand, grip still solid as ever but when it came to pinching himself, it was as if he was air.

He could walk on the floor, he could feel the cold lifeless body of the person, he could move and touch the walls, but he could not touch himself.

Why?

‘Who am I? What is happening? Why is this happening? Why… am I experiencing this?’

Of course, there would be no one to answer those thoughts. He was alone, and then… all too suddenly, the dream was folding in on itself, its edges blacking. The person fading, and the man realized he was going to ‘wake’ up.

The man did not understand anything. Once he awakened from the vivid dream, he ‘remembered’ the questions that he asked in his dreams. When going through the day, he tried to remember the waking days that he now realized that he had always, somehow, forgotten.

He could not remember. But he ‘remembered’ the questions that followed this discovery.

‘Why can’t I remember my friends’ and family’s faces? Why does everything blur?’

‘Why is this dream so vivid? Are these my memories? What happened to me?’

Remember, it all went down to remembering. He tried so hard…

Until one day, he had an epiphany when he realized what the dream was. His life to be told. A conclusion that he had never seen through at the very end, only to repeat.

‘What happened?’

So when the dream began once again, a pair of fresh eyes and sound mind could only journey through a story told, a story he has forgotten and tried remembering to piece his life back. He started talking it out, making it real as he recalled.

“My name is Mel Ashton, although I preferred Ash over the years. It just sounded cooler, you know?”

“Where had it all started? Ah… I see. Inside a car, running away once. Then… at a bloody alleyway, running away twice.”

“Unfortunately I could never manage to run far.”

Writer’s Notes

Very amateur book cover, made in Canva from public pictures found in the Internet, effect rendering and mish-mash of stuff. I think it would cover the synopsis of this book well though. The prologue for a supernatural horror ghost story in the ghost’s POV by the name of Mel ‘Ash’ Ashton. He would still be alive, surely, if he had not entangled with five people one fateful day leading to such consequences and a desire to return the favour, wanting to know what happened to him. The line ‘Who killed Cock Robin?’ fitted ‘Who killed Mel Ashton?’ here.

I conceived the idea in 2020 wondering whether I can write horror stories, wrote a Nanowrimo draft about 2 years later and re-edited the good scenes to about 20 - 40K words, lamenting on how to fill it all up without suspension of disbelief. Honestly, that is why I couldn’t finish any of my WIPs, and also ongoing time where I keep changing and the origins of the idea become something I cannot completely conceive with my changed viewpoints. Because horror stories face a lot of bad endings and worst case scenarios that I fear in my own life. Writing about their possibilities felt like mirroring those possibilites back into my real life but no one can do anything about growing up, changing points so I looked at my story again, feeling how solid it is and felt that with how I changed, it can change too. Now I write the story, understanding that bad endings and worst case scenarios exist but put simply without spoiling anything, that there’s really no such thing as worst that you cannot overcome. How it would affect my story would be what time would eventually tell me.