The Gift I Never Wanted

Ihave always had very vivid dreams. Everything in them is bright, in color, detailed, and I even smell and feel things in them. When I was a child I had about three dreams that came true after I had dreamt them. I immediately chalked up the dreams to coincidence, or I told myself that I had somehow known what was going to happen in my subconscious. Maybe I'm just very creative, I told myself. I guess the long and short of it was I wasn't prepared to deal with the unknown. I am from a family of cynics- strong, logical people who are highly scientific.

When I grew to adolescence, I began to run with a rough crowd. I was involved in gang activity, drank heavily, and experimented with drugs. My new found friends were immoral creatures who grew up on the wrong side of town. When I was fifteen, they started dying. One of my closest friends was a kid named Tyson (name changed). He killed himself when he was sixteen by jumping in front of a semi-trailer on the highway which passed our city. Although I was drinking a lot of alcohol that night, I will always remember seeing what was left of his body on the highway. If I had been there only a few minutes earlier, I could have prevented his death. His blood still stains the highway to this day. In less than a year, one of my friends hung himself. In the year after that, another suffered a heart attack at the age of eighteen. Another froze to death. Yet another was murdered. Another somehow managed to get locked up in Mexico after a wild crime spree.

After high school I sobered up. I think I went through my entire adolescence in one level of intoxication or another. I think the alcohol prevented me from using my 'gift' because not long after I quit drinking, I had another dream. I had married my high school sweetheart. We ran in the same crowd through our teen years. In this dream, I was walking through my old high school. People were crying- wailing in grief. All of my dead friends, along with their grieving families, were lined up on chairs in the main hallway, along the walls. They were all crying. My husband was sitting on the very end. Suddenly one of my dead friends (the one who had a heart attack) was standing in front of me. He looked like a corpse, and he was wearing one of the outfits he always wore when he was alive. He laughed and pointed at my husband. I feared for my husband. I ran away from my dead friend and ran to the Women's bathroom. I was crying. I looked in the bathroom mirror and noticed I was wearing the pyjamas I had gone to sleep in. Behind me, a black figure appeared. I was very afraid. I was paralyzed with fear (remember this is all in my dream). I realized that this figure was Tyson, and that he was angry with me. I could have prevented his death, he seemed to be telling me telepathically. He wanted to take my husband. He was next in line. I ran out to where my husband was sitting, and I hugged him. I pleaded for his life. I asked to be taken instead, but my dead friends wouldn't hear of it. I knew I wouldn't let him go. Then suddenly in a flash of light I could see a twisted red car lying on top of a boy- he was killed. I could smell the blood. The brain matter. The asphalt under foot. It was on the highway where Tyson had been killed. I had this dream for three nights in a row. I woke up crying hysterically. I told my husband about the dream, and he insisted it was just a bad nightmare. 'Maybe you are working too hard', he would say.

Then on the fourth night, I had another dream. My husband's little brother and his friends were sitting around visiting at their parent's house. They were smoking cigarettes, talking, and laughing. I looked around the room, (although in my dream I wasn't actually there) and where one of them should be, there was just a black void. One of them was gone. I woke up screaming. That same morning one of my old friends came to see us. Tyson's younger brother had been run over by a RED car (he was sixteen also when he died) only a matter of yards from where Tyson was killed, three years earlier. On the same highway. He was dead. My husband's younger brother was crushed because Tyson's younger brother had been one of his closest friends. My husband seems to blame me. But I can't help but wonder, did Tyson's younger brother go in my husband's place? How could I have known my dreams would be true? I wish I could talk to someone about this. I worry my dreams will be the death of me.