Lucid Dreams
Scott Melrose

I am thirty-five years old, I am Daniel, I have died one hundred and four times. In my sleep, in these crazy dreams. I’ve been beheaded, shot, stabbed, drowned and eaten alive, each time I wake up disappointed. I’m starting to struggle between what is reality and what is a dream. Everything to me is a dream, things feel floaty, here in my gloomy wee flat, unpapered, uncleaned. It’s revolting, but I can see things. This one bedroom flat is the setting for all these nightmares I have. I wake up in my dreams, then go back to sleep, sometimes a few times in one dream, so I’m having a dream, within a dream, within a dream, within a nightmare. So as you may have guessed, waking up in the morning, is really frightening, disorientating and confusing.
Before I cut off all ties from friends and family, they insisted I see a ‘Specialist’ but I don’t like the idea of telling someone that I dreamt I was visiting my friend in hospital and a midget in a mini skirt showed up and shot me in the face. I don’t see how anyone could put that into perspective for me.

I wake up and sleep again in my dreams, a lot, just a dream within a dream, so when I do wake up for what I think is for real I’m incredibly afraid. You wake up and go to the fridge for a glass of milk, inside the fridge is a madman with a butcher’s knife, stabbing you to death. You get awoken by a knock a the door, open it, and 6 guys rush in with baseball bats, and begin beating you to death. You wake up next to a woman, naked, she cuddles close to you, then digs her nails into each side of your head, and tears you face right the fuck off!

So after a while, I just refused to go near the door, not knowing what was waiting for me, not knowing if this was real, or a dream. The thing about these dreams is, I always wake up just at the moment of death, just when the bullet bursts through your face and you feel the bones in your nose and mouth shattering, splintering off like a battering ram to a wooden door, I wake up. Just as the axe slices down into the back of my neck and I feel the blade slide through my neck bone like a hot knife to butter, I wake up. Just as i feel the water filling my lungs, and I start to lose consciousness, I wake up.

I stopped speaking to my family after my father visited me, turned into a giant Alsatian dog and chewed my right hand off. I woke up with my hand still intact of course… but it was too close a call. My younger brother was doing drugs, and stabbed me in the left eye with a used needle, so I stopped speaking to him, I awoke of course, with no damage done to my eye, my brother had been in France that night, but I still managed to go get a HIV test. My whole family is incredibly worried, they show up at the door, but I’m too afraid to answer, I just sit in my bed, curled up under the covers. Shivering. Hoping whoever is at the door doesn’t come in with some form of weapon to murder me with.  

I am now committed to a mental institution, where they monitor my dreams. I like it here, because at least I know I’m awake for real. The machine tells me so. To stop me becoming to familiar to my room here at the hospital, they move me around constantly. So I can never wake up in the same room in a dream, as the one I really wake up in. I have been questioned about the murder so many times, replaying it all. I woke to what I thought was morning, to what I thought was real life. There was a knock at the door, I decided I could take anymore of this, if someone was going to kill me, I’d get them first. I grabbed a knife from the kitchen and hide to the side of the door, and unlocked it, as the door slowly creaked open, I attacked. Stabbing away at this possible assailant. Turns out it was my mother. I stabbed her to death at my front door. Now I’m here, safe. Some people want me to be punished properly for my crime. I don’t even know if this is real. I might wake up at any moment. I might as well plead guilty, say I hated the bitch, and I killed her. Just so that when they strapped me to that chair, and I felt the heat rise, the electricity shoot through my entire body, and I begin to fry, to shake uncontrollably, I might just wake up.