Dreams That Bleed Into Reality
On the fringe of sleep, Mara learned that her dreams did not end when the alarm rang. They bled through the seam between night and day, dragging the scent of rust and rain into the kitchen where she brewed coffee that tasted metal-soft.
She kept a journal, a thin notebook that absorbed every echo: the way the hallway stretched longer than its own walls, the whisper of an unseen crowd, a door that appeared in the bathroom mirror, inviting her to step through. Colors ran too far—reds dulling, then brightening, as if the world were repainting itself around her sleep.
“The bed remembered my footsteps, and every dream left a trace on the waking street,” she wrote the night it began to bleed.
The First Sign
The first sign was tactile. A drop of warmth on the wrist, a smear of cinnamon and iron where no cut existed. Then came the room that smelled of rain even when the windows were closed. A red thread leaked from the drapes, pooling on the floor and forming a map of places she’d never visited, yet felt certain were destined to be found by her feet.
- Objects moved a fraction of an inch when she wasn’t looking, leaving crimson fingerprints on clean surfaces.
- She would wake with her name whispered by the softest ceiling crack, as if the house itself learned to talk in the shorthand of fear.
- Morning sunlight revealed a thin line of color that wasn’t there before—the color of dried blood on the edge of the frame.
The Thread Tightens
Night after night, the bleed intensified. The dreams grew longer, more insistent, like wires snapping one by one inside the brain. Mara began to see the city’s skyline bending into a closed circle, as if sleep had folded the world in half and decided to keep it. In the circle’s center stood a figure she recognized only as “the Gatekeeper,” a silhouette that wore her own fear like a cloak.
“If you walk through, remember: the door never closes behind you; it drips behind you in memory.”
To Decide What Remains in the Night
One final night she confronted the hinge between dream and waking. The bed sank as if swallowing a secret, and the floor beneath the rug bled a shallow pool that reflected not her face but a room she had never seen—an infirmary of sleep where people slept with their eyes open and watched themselves dream.
- She chose not to seal the bleed with ritual or fear but to listen until sleep spoke plainly: keep the dream, or let it walk away with her peace.
- She learned that some dreams don’t end; they migrate into life, wearing different clothes and asking for a different kind of mercy.
When dawn finally broke, Mara found herself standing at the kitchen table with ink-dark coffee cooling in the mug and a promise that the next night would be different—or exactly the same, only with new doors to walk through.