#OpeningSnippet: Weaver of Dreams

The following is the opening to the story, Weaver of Dreams. It is a story about beings who visit humans in their dreams to feed off their emotions. I hope you enjoy it.

Chapter 1

Maggie awoke to the sound of her strangled scream, her heart pounding a furious rhythm in her chest. Her lungs strained with the effort to take in air as she wiped the sweat from her brow. Tiny pinpricks danced along her skin thanks to the adrenaline racing through her blood. She cleared her throat, swallowing the cry which threatened to escape again.

She hated the nightmares that plagued her since her childhood. Doctors, and there had been many, called them night terrors, sleep terrors, incubus attacks, parasomnia, or pavor nocturnus. One specialist after another treated her, each calling the bad dreams by a different name, but as the saying went, ‘a rose by any other name’—was still a nightmare.

One doctor in particular taught her how to take control of her dreams, shape them, change them from negative to positive. He called it conscious dreaming, and Maggie embraced the idea, practicing his techniques faithfully. But while she found the technique easy to apply during pleasant dreams, it was much more difficult to do with her nightmares. Laying there in the darkness, memories of her nightmare pushed in on her.

Blood-red eyes emerged from the shadows. Maggie turned on her heels, willing her legs to carry her as fast as they could away from those terrifying eyes. Her feet pounded on the squishy, moss-covered ground. Wet slime squished between her toes as she pushed through the thick underbrush of the forest. A howl echoed in the night, and Maggie turned to look over her shoulder as a shiver raced down her spine.

Her balance, thrown off by the turn of her head, Maggie went down. The soft moss provided little padding when she bounced on the hard ground. She rolled over and discovered sets of eyes surrounded her. Those chilling, petrifying, red eyes. Six mouths all bared their large, pointed fangs and growled in unison. Saliva dripped from huge teeth. They closed in around her in one cohesive unit, slowly, as if they were of one mind, wanting to savor the kill.

The stinging bite of claws digging into her flesh raced up her leg to lodge deep in her brain. She attempted a scream, but no sound emerged from her open mouth. Pain wound around her ankle, taking her thoughts away from the peculiarity.

Maggie reached down and rubbed her ankle, still feeling the sharp sting of the claws that filleted her flesh in the dream. She rolled over and turned on the lamp beside her bed, then threw back the covers and stared at her leg. Nothing. Not a mark, nor a scratch. But it seemed so real, the scoring of her flesh, the pain still throbbing in the nonexistent furrows down her leg.

That was the way of her dreams. Her body seemed to have a memory of the physical sensations she experienced in her nightmares, causing her to continue to feel the agony after she woke.

Maggie reached back down, and rubbed her leg as the ache finally began to ebb. She let out a heavy sigh. This time the agony lasted longer than usual, as though something enjoyed her torture, made it last longer after each session. The majority of the specialists assured her parents she would outgrow the nightmares. They couldn’t have been more wrong.