The solitary path was glowing under the light of the full moon while the rest of the place was bathed in darkness. Nervous footsteps and panting sounds created an eerie atmosphere in the otherwise silent night. One could only see the back of the person, a girl, as evidenced by her long dark hair which was left open, as she struggled to walk quickly but couldn’t due to her injured leg. A ball of light starts approaching from the other end of the road, sunken in darkness, at ferocious speed, but the girl does not stop, or maybe she cannot stop. Dana looks at the back of the girl and the approaching ball of light, which looks like it would consume the girl at any moment. She takes one step forward and screams, “STOP!” The girl stops in her tracks, and so does her panting. She slowly looks behind to face Dana, her face covered in solid blood. She mouths the word “Help” when the ball of light devours her.

Beep…Beep…Beep. The loud beeps of the alarm clock woke Dana up from her dream. She looked around for the alarm in her half-asleep state and tried to change the settings for a ten-minute snooze but either her hands refused to function properly or the clock was acting faulty, leaving Dana to wake up properly and get ready for the day. As she made her way to the bathroom, Dana took a glance at herself in the full body mirror in her room. She was wearing her white checkered pyjamas and her hair was all frizzy and dishevelled, but that wasn’t what made Dana look in the mirror. She had solidified blood above her lips and below her nose. Had her nose bled again in the middle of the night? Dana rushed to the bathroom and wiped her face off, checking her face in the mirror to see if there weren’t any injuries that she was not aware of. This had been happening for a few weeks now. Every week, Dana would wake up to find some part of her body bruised and bloody. At first, she had assumed that it was only her chronic nose bleeding which would occur because of the stress and the summer heat. But now, as Dana wiped her face on the towel, and looked at her reflection in the bathroom mirror, Dana realised that every time she dreamt of the bloody girl, she would find blood on her face the next day.

“Stop overthinking,” Dana reprimanded herself as she started getting ready for school, “It is not the first time I have had strange dreams. I mean I get weird dreams and nightmares everyday! I have probably just started scratching at my face again, I should cut my nails…” her voice trailed off as she looked at her nails which were perfectly cut the day before and were of an uninjured length. Dana shook her head and wore her sneakers as she headed out of her room.

“Hi mom,” Dana greeted her mother who was finishing up with her cereal breakfast, reading The Daily newspaper at the same time.

“Hey hon, had a good sleep?” her mother asked, only slightly raising her head to acknowledge her daughter’s presence as she went back to her breakfast and newspaper.

“Yeah, pretty good,” Dana lied as she sat down and poured herself some orange juice. She took a sip, and hesitated, before finally speaking up, “Hey mom, you don’t think dreams can mean something do you?”

“Well, yes and no. They are just our subconscious thoughts that we already are aware of, so they are not telling us anything new, but some people say…” And with that Dana’s mother, the PhD in Psychology, began telling a tirade of theories ranging from Freud and Lacan and their interpretations.

“Mom, stop. I don’t want to know all of that,” Dana stopped her mother.

“What do you want to know?”

“Can dreams be prophetic? Like they are telling you of what lies ahead in the future?”

“Prophetic?” Dana’s mother laughed, “Don’t be silly, dear. Dreams are only figments of imagination, with some truth attached to them. Did you know, I had a dream that I was pregnant the night before I conceived you? Who’d have thought…” Dana’s mother stopped and went back to her newspaper. Dana had reason enough to believe that the thought must have evoked memories of her father and she did not wish, any more than her mother, to prod at that painful memory, only to get an answer to her stupid question.

“I am leaving for school,” Dana rushed out of the door without waiting for her mother’s customary nod. As she walked the five-minute distance between her home and her school, Dana absorbed the warm rays of the California sun and tried to put the whole dream topic behind herself. At school, she got involved with the daily routine of her life, which although boring, did help in keeping her thoughts at bay which were in danger of being overused. During the lunch break, Dana decided to take her lunch and a novel outdoors so she could enjoy the sun while also avoiding the judgmental glances of her classmates, who treated her like an alien. The truth was that Dana had moved to California after the divorce of her parents. Her mother was American while her father was Indian, which also became the cause of unwanted stares and glances from her classmates. Dana could not find to make friends with anyone, but that did not bother her as long as she had books to read. She was on her way outdoors when someone slammed hard against her and she fell to the floor with her lunch tray and her book. Dana barely had time to register the shock and pain of falling, when she noticed that the apple juice box was dangerously close to staining her book. Dana tried to reach out for the book but a slender white hand had picked it up before the juice reached the opened pages. Dana looked up to see a girl, about the same age as her, flipping through her book. Something shifted in Dana’s thoughts as she found the face looking down on her fierce but familiar.

“Are you okay?” the girl asked Dana as she closed the book shut, and offered her hand to help Dana.

Dana stood up, her feet wobbly but not from the fall, for she had only just realised where she had seen the face of the girl standing before her. As she gazed into her eyes, trying not to reveal her shock to a total stranger, Dana realised that she was the bloody girl from her dreams, calling out for help