rinwriting

[rinwriting]

12/5/22

My family and I are in a city together. It looks French. I’m dressed like a pirate and so is my sister. We don’t really mention it.

I have a skirt on (it hides weapons well is everyone’s reasoning). A knot on it gets loose and I fumble with it for a bit, feeling the texture.

We finally get to the place my dad wanted us to see.

All of us go down a set of spiral stairs. They look abandoned, candles lined the walls and I remember thinking someone had to have been here a short while ago. Dad is leading the descend and I’m right behind him. We get to the bottom first, with my sister close behind and my mom with my other siblings still going down.

There is a dead body on the stairs. It’s positioned like it fell from the top but it couldn’t have fallen through the floor so someone had to drag it there.

Dad looked like he wanted to continue, he was really determined to show us what we came for. We don’t exactly agree with this approach and convince him to go back. My sister and I had already seen the rotting body but our younger siblings haven’t so we run back, cover their eyes, just to be sure, and lead them back up.

[rinwriting]

6/5/22

Ancient Rome. Everyone spoke Latin but it registered as English in my head. A voice seemed to follow me everywhere, a documentary voice of someone studying this as an event in history 2000 years later. That voice was in Czech so it really felt like I was lost in languages.

I watched Rome burn. The documentary voice said Nero cause it but I can tell you that I really wasn’t wondering who did what when I was choking on smoke.

[rinwriting]

30/4/22

A movie trilogy I lived through out of order. The main character referenced something that had already happened to him but I haven’t seen yet. I kept jumping through time, sometimes seeing two storylines at once.

To sum up the plot: main character travels and some weird things always happen to him. It doesn’t really matter because the point is, he’s going to die. I know this because it was the first thing I saw. Bombs will fall on a little village he was visiting and he’s going to burn (the weird use of tenses is the only way of accuarately describing how weird the time jumps felt). I saw it in slow motion.

The beginning of his last day is pretty innocent. I/him got a piggyback ride from a friend. He took me/him to some other people and we all started talking. Then I realized I’ve seen this before and started panicking.

“Oh, it’s you people again.”

“Wait, I’ve had dreams here before. You’re not real. You’re nothing, you’re nothing, you don’t exist.”

They all started chanting that they’re nothing and I’m in the middle of lucid dreaming screaming at them to stop. I woke up with sleep paralysis.

[rinwriting]

30/4/22

Going up a gorgeous staircase when my vision swam and I got hit with the realization I’m dreaming. Thinking about staying in the dream I gained more control over my body but then I got so scared I woke myself up right into the hands of sleep paralysis.

[rinwriting]

15/4/22

My friend and I are characters in a book, acting according to script. We can take short breaks or say different things when the reader closes the book.

We were having a conversation when someone opened the book.

“I don’t want to stop you, but we don’t have time”

“Oh, right.”

[rinwriting]

13/4/22

My classmates and I were coming back from a trip and the bus had to go up a steep hill. It was too steep, and the bus started tilting back, I could feel the movement everywhere in my body and then a strong pull down. My stomach dropped when we started to fall. The fall itself would have been nice if it weren’t for everyone screaming. The crash is harsh, and my spine is on fire and my stomach did so many flips it feels like it’s going to explode. I get out of the bus and realize I know the names of the people who died without looking for them. I think these names were in my brain since I was a child. I looked up at the mountain knowing we would try to drive up again. I have more bones to break.

[rinwriting]

20/3/22

Two dreams colliding, same thing happening in two cities at once (Paris and Berlin) A friend of mine was there with me but before I realized it’s a dream, she said she wanted to talk to someone and ran away.

A square in Berlin looked more like a street in my hometown and I remember thinking how stupid it is of me to imagine it like this. That made me realize I’m dreaming and I woke myself up.

[rinwriting]

10/3/22

I’m sitting behind my school desk thinking about how much I’d rather be back on a trip I went to a week earlier. Woke up to still being on that trip.

[rinwriting]

10/3/22

I'm looking for my grandpa. I don't know if he's even alive and I keep thinking about how much I don't want to find his body.

I found him, somehow both dead and alive, on the stairs. It's weird because normally I cannot see his face in my dreams but right now it's crystal clear.

My grandpa is explaining to my grandma that he got replaced, somebody replaced him, why can't we see that?

[rinwriting]

26/2/22

An old Japanese shrine with only a few rooms restored enough to live in (which, I have no idea why we would live in a shrine in the first place). All the statues around the property look terrifying at night.

There are so many bugs in one room. Someone called them by a specific name. It looked like something between a beetle and a cicada. I have to go through the room and some of the bugs stick to my clothes and it feels like they’re crawling under my skin. I go outside to shake them off. I see dozens of bugs fall onto the snow. When I finally get rid of them I realize there’s a white fox staring right at me.

[rinwriting]

17/2/22

A classmate and I are at school, doing crosswords in art history. We’re sitting right in front of the board and the teacher gives us the answers one at a time; we can see them clearly, they’re right in front of us.

“Hey, what’s the answer to this one?” my classmate asks.

I’m a little confused. “It’s literally right in front of you.”

“Yeah, but what is it?”

“It’s literally right here.”

“And? You’re supposed to help me.”

“I’m supposed to do my own work.” I can’t hear her response to that and after a few seconds I cannot hear anything at all. My vision starts getting blurry and soon I can’t see my hands I’m waving in front of my face. Something is sitting on my chest as I’m waking up.

[rinwriting]

17/2/22

A woman is staying at a hotel with her newborn son. Her dad is here to help her take care of him. I, as a narrator, know that he pissed off the wrong kind of people and will get punished for it.

The woman wakes up to an empty bed, begins to panic, and starts running around, asking anyone in her way if they had seen her baby. Her dad is close behind her. They both stumble into the reception. There are huge windows that make the space feel bigger and brighter. They could see the whole street from here. As well as the baby they had been looking for.

He had been cut into pieces and hanged outside on a wire. The dream changes to animation and the little pieces get more grotesque. His head grows tiny arms, his legs grow bigger and longer. All while laughing and waving at his mother. He keeps laughing, choking on his own blood, it sounds haunted with the music playing. He doesn't stop laughing as his mother stands there, in too much shock to move a single muscle.

 The music playing is a mix of The caretaker - Misplaced in time (Leyland James Kirby), Lacrimosa (Mozart), and Nocturne Op. 48 No. 1 (Chopin).

[rinwriting]

12/2/22

A friend and I snuck into a prestigious school. No one noticed the sudden increase in students. And if they did, they let it go. A teacher was being unreasonable, giving out zero points to people who so much as stuttered. He yelled a lot and used religion to justify everything he was doing.

We decided we'd had enough and started preparing to run away. We were almost out. I’m not sure what possessed us to turn around and go back but we did.

We went up to the teacher and told him he was being a prick; he screamed and we screamed right back. He got violent and I got violent right back. We had a sword fight while my friend and all the students watched.

“You have to be sure, you always have to be sure and you always have to know the answer right away. If you don’t know it right away, what are you even good for?” the teacher said.

I think both my friend and I answered: “Did Moses have the answer right away? While he waited for God to show up? Didn’t Jesus have to wait to die?”

[rinwriting]

27/1/22

I'm going home at night but see an exhibition that looks interesting enough and decide to check it out. At the end of the corridor is another exposition, a room full of animals both living and dead. The air there feels heavy and I soon begin to feel light-headed.

A voice sounds in my head: "A few minutes, that's all it took." I begin to panic. "The poisonous gas was strong enough to kill everyone in the room." I run out of the room straight into the arms of a guard. He tries to drag me back in and I try to fight back which gets me a knife in one arm and an injection in the other. By the time I can't move and collapse to the floor I'm a bloody mess. I get thrown out of my body and see myself, a 30 year old man, laying in a pool of my own blood.

[rinwriting]

30/1/22

My family and I live in a mansion in the mountains. It looks a bit like Italy and the mansion has a renaissance feel to it. I am not me, I'm a different character even though my/his family is my real-life family. He was a bit older than I am. The POV kept changing between my own and a camera view of the whole scene.

People are walking around our house and we greet some of them, I'm standing right next to the building, in the shade, coming out of the cellar.

I hear a gunshot and the person standing next to me falls to the ground. This of course makes everyone panic and run to try and get to safety. We soon realize that everyone who's under sunlight gets killed, we don't know why or how.

A group of panicking people keep going up the stairs and then up more stairs, there are windows everywhere and we're trying to get to a room without them (not sure why we didn't go down instead of up). We end up in the attic, a relatively dark space except for a few small windows. I can hear the sound of 50 people panting and panicking, someone is crying.

Now there's a time skip of five years, we're still inside the house but there are around 16 people left. Now, I don't know why we didn't go out at night but for the sake of the plot let's say moonlight would kill us too.

We got used to living in the attic but sometimes we go around the whole house, our fault if we die in the process. All the windows have pieces of wood or at least some fabric stapled onto them. We grow our own food, watering it all in the shade and then hoping it catches sunlight throughout the day. It works.

I'm having food in the kitchen with my dad and sister. I'm still nervous about sunlight but they don't seem to care anymore.

My POV switches then and I can see a bear trying to get in the house, specifically to the room I'm currently in. Somehow, the character (that is me) also knows this and so we start running. I lose my dad and sister while sprinting away, I don't want to think about it much but I'm sure they died.

I run up the stairs to get to the attic, it's behind many doors and I know I'll be safe there. I found some people on the way and tried to warn them, which only caused more people to panic and I was reminded of the day we got here.

A little boy stumbles on the stairs and tears down a fabric covering a window. He's right behind me and I can see his face when he realizes what's going to happen to him. He gets shot before I can react and his blood splatters all over me.

My ankle is in the sun, I know I'm next. I can't move.

Someone breaks the window down; from the outside. I think I'm in too much shock to realize I am covered in shards of glass.

The man who broke the window gets inside, looks at me, and then at the dead boy. He helps me up and then takes the boy into his arms and walks away.

Everyone is too stunned to move, even when the stranger comes back, no one does anything about it for fear of being killed. I figured it's as good as time as any to thank him, he nods.

It's time to go to sleep and the man is still here. I know something is wrong; I mean, why would the man still be here if something wasn't wrong. Maybe we should have killed each other faster, it's been five years after all. Maybe the bear was sent by the person sleeping next to me. Or maybe it was just a bear. Either way, I'm too tired to move and so I hide under a blanket.

I awaken to light. I can see it's too light outside, even from under the blanket. I crawl around until I'm in the dark and then have a look around. Every piece of clothing covering the windows, every piece of wood that has been nailed onto them, all of it is gone. And so are most people here. Their bodies are still here but they're gone and there is so much blood.

The sun shifts and keeps shifting. All four of us, just four, try to hide and run from it. Two shots ring through the space. Two people left. Both of us try to hide in a little crook on the roof made of stone, it looks like the sun won't get there but neither of us is sure. I can hear her panicked breaths next to me.

The man appears again, it didn't work, the sun is burning us through. I'm okay with this. I have had enough.

"You're both in the sun and this part has ended without a clear winner, come with me." Neither of us moves.

"You can go out, walk under the sun, it's over."

It burns. The sun burns. It's so warm, too warm, it burns so bad and I cannot see. We get fed and given new clothes, we're drinking wine with people who seem to know what's going on while giving us no information at all. I mostly stayed in the shade.

In the evening, we all walk to a lake. The man from before is still by our side.

"I'm sorry," he says.

"Why?"

"That you have to do this." Do what?

The lake appears in front of us, too late to ask questions now.

Instead, he tells us to give him our shoes and get in the water. The woman next to me that I don't even know the name of, did as told. We both saw the guns everyone here has, we both know what would happen if we didn't do what they wanted. I take my shoes off and jump into the lake.

Someone who I haven't heard before yells at us: "Now fight, drown the other!" The woman and I just look at each other. It was at this point that I realized I am going to die here. I know she wants to live and I don't know why I'm doing this in the first place. I have nothing to prove, to myself or anyone else. I'm okay with this.

The dream ended here, leaving the ending ambiguous.

[rinwriting]

9/11/21

The kind of dream that only appears when you've been asleep for but a few minutes and leaves you gasping for air and dazed in confusion. Like a thick blanket, the fog doesn't leave but keeps you warm.

[rinwriting]

19/11/21

A priest talking to the heavens and realizing it’s not fair for him to have to conform to its teachings just because he was chosen. The dreams layout corresponded with my rooms layout and thinking back, I might have been sleepwalking.