Dream: Red Eye

7/26/23

When I woke up this morning I remembered that I had a dream but couldn’t remember anything about it no matter how hard I tried.

Around 1:30pm today, I was struck with a sudden flash of mental images as the dream began to seep into my mind ever so lightly. Even now, it is hard to remember much about it.

…

Let’s see. I remember for sure that there was a vampire. Was I the vampire? I am not sure. There are only a few scenes that come to mind.

…

Scene One. I am in a small rowboat, it looks like a small gondola. I’m paddling on water underground or in a building. I don’t think we’re very deep. I think we might be in a cave but it looks man-made. Something else strange and of note, there are several more people in the same type of boats. I could swear I saw the Time-themed Vtuber and the Civilization/Humanity-themed Vtuber in one of the boats. But it doesn’t make sense that they’d be in a dream because they’re not monsters or scary. I think I recall the ceiling caving-in. And that’s the last I remember.

Scene Two. I watch the perspective of a girl as she manufactures animated toys to save a group of tiny people. She starts by taking a stuffed animal, then hooking it up to her laptop, then programming a set of instructions. She goes through the process in mostly trial-and-error methodology. Copying and pasting her previous instructions, then changing the wording ever so slightly. Sometimes it’s just a single letter difference. I also recall her visiting the people in-person from time to time, but when she does so, they all seem normal sized.

Scene Three. I am with about five others that are of similar age to me. We are in an apartment building. We creep into a bathroom that is connected to another room by a narrow hallway. Graffiti marks the passageway. We are afraid. I can’t recall what we thought would happen. There are about five people in the other room. They are likewise of similar age to us. One of them comes down the narrow passageway to see us.

We threaten them and growl in raspy voices, swearing we will do terrible things to them. This scares him off. I don’t know why we did that. I just can’t seem to remember. And that is what I remember from that scene. We were scared and mean.

Scene Four. There is a dwarf. There are several people with me. A fast food restaurant can create ice cream shakes. I am not human. I know this because I tell the dwarf that mortals are not familiar with the vocabulary of the ageless and long-lived.

Scene Five. I am walking down the sidewalk of my neighborhood. As I pass by one of the neighbors' houses I pause. It stands out a bit. Instead of the normal midwestern homes you’d expect. This house is a tall black spire. It begins to rain. Downpour, really. I decide that I really need to get home. So I speed-walk down the sidewalk back towards my house. I meet a pair of people coming from the opposite direction. An old man and a little boy, probably a father or grandfather and his son or grandson. They are kind to me and offer to help me. I accept the offer… I think.  I can’t remember. That’s all I remember of that scene.

Scene Six. I am with a girl of similar age to me. There are about four other pairs of people of similar age to us. We are in the courtyard in front of a skyscraper. The courtyard is green with vegetation. It’s like a park. There are paved sidewalks weaving patterns through floral gardens. Surrounding all ends of my visions is an impenetrable wall of trees. Two ponds on opposite ends of this courtyard. There is a pavillion near the entrance to the skyscraper. The four pairs are scattered around the skyscraper.

My partner and I enter the skyscraper and go up an elevator. Our target is a glowing red gem that fits in the palm of your hand. On this upper story, probably the 2nd or 3rd story, the floor here is arranged much like the courtyard outside. Pathways lead between fountains and fake grass with wooden benches. There is a pavilion, where we see the red gem. There are four adult guards dressed like police officers patrolling the area. I turn to my partner and we discuss our plan to obtain the red gem. Then we hear the ding of the elevator. The four pairs that were lounging in the courtyard are here. They jog out into the open. One of the pairs heads towards the pavilion. I sprint after them but this pair–consisting of man and woman, each of them probably 2-5 years older than me. The man snatches the red gem and they duck away into a side-hall. I call out to my partner and we chase after them. We round the corner just in time to see a door slide shut.

We note the layout of the doors and determine that the door to the right of the door that closed is a door to a room that’s connected. So we figure we can sneak in through the adjacent room, since they would only expect us to come from the door to the hall. We pop in. It’s a bathroom. A long bathtub with a shower takes up a 10-foot long portion of the room, from wall to wall. But I can see that past the curtains, the room continues behind the bathtub-shower. And there I find a narrow hallway on the left wall. The passageway is coated in flaky plaster over rotten wood. Spray paint graffiti marks the walls. I gesture for my partner to watch the door to the hall in the bathroom, while I sneak through the passageway to snatch the red gem.

I step as lightly as I can over creaking wooden planks. However, I needn’t have worried. When I arrive in the dark room, only a small desk lamp the size of a candle is the only source of illumination other than the glowing red gem. As for the pair, this room appears to be a classroom of sorts. A chalkboard on one wall with desks and chairs lined up facing it. The pair has moved aside several chairs and desks to clear out an area in the center of the room where they are making out on the ground.

Perfect. They’re distracted. I quickly slip to the desk by the door where the glowing red gem is sitting, and pocket it. Then I return through the narrow passage where the bathroom is. I part the curtains and step past the bathtub to the door to the hall that my partner is watching. “I’ve got it.” I whisper to her. She smiles and nods. We slip out into the hall. We stride towards the elevators as nonchalantly as we can.

The world around me tints red. We nod to the pairs and the guards as we pass. My insides churn with anxiety. I feel like everyone is staring at me, though they don’t pay us any particular attention. I cross my arms around my chest, squeezing them tight and grab my own shoulders. My partner frowns. “Are you okay?” She asks. I nod and smile reassuringly. We step into the elevator. As the elevator doors begin to close, a guard reaches his arm in the way, causing the doors to reopen. He steps into the chamber. He looks at the glowing button for the ground floor and nods. He’s headed the same place we are.

The fear is overwhelming. The world grows darker red and tilts. The right edge of my view is taller than the left edge of my vision. I hear my partner chatting jovially with the guard. “Yeah, I’ve been here since before dawn.” The guard says, “I’m gonna make sure the next shift is ready and punched in, then I’m gonna head home and take a nap.” I can’t comprehend what they’re saying. I hear the words. I know what they mean. But in my mind, I can’t connect the dots. I’m trembling, edging on panic.

The elevator dings and the doors begin to open. The guard steps forward to leave. I press on the “close door” button before he can escape. The guard and my partner turn to me in confusion. “Wha–?” The guard begins to say. I press the button for the top floor and bare my fangs. My partner puts her hands over her mouth in shock. I pounce upon the guard in blue, pushing him to the floor. Blinding red light obscures my vision. I can’t see anything. The elevator dings. My vision clears. Not all the way clear, my vision is still stained red, and everything is just a little off-kilter. Like, if you placed a ball on the floor, it would roll to the right. Strange. Before, it had tilted upwards on the right and downwards on the left, now it’s opposite.

I feel drained and limp. Hands grabbing arms grabbing me from behind, gripping my torso near my armpits. Someone drags me backwards, away from the motionless body on the ground. The elevator doors begin to open. There are screams from several pairs staring into the elevator. My partner presses the “close door” button and sends us back towards the ground floor. “What’s wrong with you?” She asks me angrily, “What were you thinking?” I crawl towards the back of the elevator where I can use the wall as support to push myself up to my feet.

“I… I don’t know. I was scared. I thought he knew we had this.” I say, pulling the glowing gem out of my pocket. Is it me, or does it glow brighter than it did before? I swear I can see something swirling inside. “Put that thing away before someone sees it!” My partner hisses, “First, we need to get away from here. But we will talk about your behavior. What you’ve done is not okay.”

The elevator dings and the doors begin to open. A guard holds a walkie-talkie or whatever their law-enforcement communication device is called, to his mouth. “Roger that, I see them. They’re coming out of the elevator as we speak.” The guard says softly, gesturing for the other guards to help him. My partner groans in annoyance. She presses her hands to her temples, closes her eyes, and sighs in frustration. She turns to me and looks me in the eyes. I see red light reflect off her eyes. “Don’t do anything.” She says, “I will handle this.” She waves to the guards.

“Hurry! Get over here!” She says, “He’s bleeding out! We’ve got to get him to an ambulance.” The guards jump into motion, rushing into the elevator, putting pressure on his wounds, and holding him, so he lies flat on their arms. I slowly leave the elevator, unsure what my partner is trying to do. She has a worried expression. It’s not faked, but it is exaggerated. “His neck! His neck!” She says, pressing the “Close doors” and “top floor” buttons, “You’ve got to support his neck. Stop moving so much, you’ll break his spine. No, no. You’ve got to have his head higher than his legs!”

One of the guards puts his palm out towards her. “Step back, Miss. We’re professionals.” He says, “Just let us do our job. The doors begin to close. One of the guards inside the elevator notices. “Hey, get the door!” He calls out. My partner jumps into action: “I’ve got it!” She says, pushing the group towards the back of the elevator to give her room to move, then she leaps out between the closing doors. It shuts behind her. I hear the whirring of the pulley and muffled shouts grow distant. My partner turns to me. “And I didn’t so much as leave a scratch.” She huffs, angrily, “If you can’t control yourself, you can’t be my partner.” She heads for the door. The few people that are still down here are confused as to the situation but don’t stop us. As far as they know, we didn’t do anything wrong. I follow my partner out into the courtyard.

I cross the threshold to the outside. It’s so hot outside. Too hot. Too bright. Painful. What’s the UV rating? I mean, I can actually feel my skin beginning to sunburn. I rush to the shade of the pavilion. My partner looks over her shoulder at me and shrugs her arms in exasperation. She gestures widely, her mouth forms an “o” as though asking a question. But she doesn’t say anything. Instead, she stares. Her face wrinkles as she furrows her eyebrows, squints her eyes. Her gaze searching, penetrating past my erratic behavior and down to the core. She gasps, epiphany. “Your eyes…” She says, though I don’t understand what she’s getting at. Her face scrunches into worry. “You can still hear me, right?” She asks, “Tell me, what did you see when you got it?”

“It? You mean this?” I ask, reaching into my pocket. She makes a cutting gesture on her neck, so I pull my hand away and don’t take out the gem. “I saw that pair that took the ‘item of interest’, making-out on the floor in a dark classroom. They were really at it, it was kind of violent.”

“The man was the one who took the item.” She says, “Did you see his eyes? Tell me about his eyes.” I frown in confusion. I can’t see how such a detail would be important. “No, I didn’t see his face at all. He was on top of his partner, looking down.” I say, not really wanting to recall the scene, “Why does this matter?”

“Red Eye.” My partner says. I blink. I ask, “What?” She simply repeats the same name. I don’t understand. “You’re a Red Eye.” She says, “And that man from the pair was a Red Eye. They weren’t making-out, he was doing to her what you did to the guard.”

My face goes pale. “I know I… well… made the guard bite the dust, but I don’t remember how.” I say, “What did I do to the guard, precisely?” My partner rolls her eyes. I hear the soft sound of the elevator ding behind me inside the skyscraper. I turn to watch through the window to see the elevator doors open. They open. No one comes out. After about ten seconds, the doors close again. I find it odd. It’s concerning.

Behind me I hear hurried footsteps. A guard is jogging towards the entrance of the skyscraper. Once inside, he goes through a security door to punch in. My partner shakes her head. I look down at my hands, my bloody hands. “I have to fix this.” I say quietly to myself, then I look up towards my partner. “I’m gonna fix this. I’m going back in.”

“What? No, you can’t! You’re not in your right mind.” She says, “You’re as dangerous as he is. You’ll only make things worse.” She runs to stop me as I walk towards the entrance doors. I look over my shoulder at her, and she stop and flinches back, fist balled and ready. I shake my head. If I’m a Red Eye, I’m the only one that can stop the other Red Eye. I know what I’m doing. I can control myself. I can… the ground begins to tremble. Some windows near the top of the building shatter and glass rains down. A blaring alarm bleeps from inside.

The guard comes out just as I’m about to open the door to the skyscraper. “Evacuate the area, the building is on-fire!” He says, hands out, palms facing me, gesturing for me to stay back. I nod and turn around to walk away from the building. “Thanks for warning me.” I say. The sky is tinted red in my vision, tilting from the top left to the bottom right. Fear overtakes me. I burst into action. A surge of energy. I spin as I walk, turning to face the building. The glass double-doors are closed, and the guard blocks the way. I push my heels into the grass behind me, uprooting the vegetation. I straighten my legs, leaping forwards. I can hardly feel my feet. I’m a blur whipping past the guard. I pass through the door before it’s fully opened, leaving shards of glass in my wake. I press the button to call the elevator. The bleeping alarm is muffled by my swirling concoction of emotions.

I am too impatient to use the elevator. I wrench the doors open and I look up into the shaft. A blazing fire roars up above, unsteady orange light brightly splayed from what looks to be the 3rd or 4th floor. The elevator, it seems, is beneath me. I don’t even know how it got there. But it’s not moving. I jump across the shaft, catching hold of the wall with my hands. My hands are metal claws with almost no palm. About twice as wide as my hand normally is with fingers four to five times as long. The serrated blades for digits, dig into the stone. I crawl my way upwards, towards the flames.

I bounce into a burning room. It’s the same floor I had visited earlier to retrieve the gemstone. But no one lounges in this mock park and no guards patrol. However, there are also no corpses. There are more flames than there should be given how fire-resistant much of the material is. I mean, there are fountains here. I’d think this place wouldn’t be on fire. My first goal is to find the Red Eye. I keep my distance from the inferno and turn the corner down the hall towards the doors to the room where the pair had hidden. However, I find a crowd of people all trying to fit in a single room. This is odd. There are several rooms. It doesn’t seems like very few them are on fire. Why this room in particular?

I come closer and recognize the room. This is the bathroom where my partner and I snuck to the steal the gemstone. I’m not sure why people would hide in a bathroom in the case of a fire. If they were hoping the giant bathtub shower would save them, then they’re forgetting that water doesn’t protect you from choking on smoke or being crushed when the building becomes too weak to support its own weight.

I push my way into the bathroom to address the people and discuss their issues. They say that half of them went to the connected room because they heard someone in there, but no one who has gone into the connected room have returned, and they’re worried. I explain the situation more fully. In the connected room is a Red Eye, and dangerous person who probably was the one to start the fire. It’s preferable for their friends to not return. For if they’re friends return, then that means their friends are Red Eyes too.

Then I discussed a plan. We needed to escape. The building was burning and the elevator was not an option. However, they’re in a bathroom. The water that’s pumped into shower, sink, and toilet came from outside. So we simply need to follow the water. The group expressed doubts, but I explained that it was easy enough. If we remove the toilet, sink, or bathtub, there will be a hole where plumbing is connected. We can then break open the hole so we can fit through it.

However, as I discuss the plan, someone comes from the narrow passageway that connects to the room where I got the gemstone. “Hey, so. We found out what’s going on.” The man says, “There is someone in this other room, and he–” We don’t let him continue. I hiss at him, and try to scare him off. I tell him I will… wait a second. Isn’t this Scene 3? So that’s where I remembered this from. Anyway, I whispered to the others that we have to scare this guy off. He’s a Red Eye. We can’t survive an encounter with one. I threaten him in graphic detail. I’m sure I don’t need to say how I described knocking his skull against the wall and skewering his eyes. It is sufficient to say that we scared him off with violent threats.

“What’s wrong with you? Did the smoke poison your brains?” He says, “I’m just gonna leave you guys alone. Don’t come any closer.” I congratulate the five or so people with me on their success in scaring away the Red Eye. We get to work. We push the bathtub to the side, and kick the drain hole to break away so we can escape. And it works. The hole grows large enough for us to climb down into the darkness.

We land in wooden boats. Small rowboats. Actually, they look sort of like gondolas. We’re in the sewers. Wait a second… this is Scene 1. We paddle down the sewers. The walls are shaking and dust falls from the ceilings. Cracks in the ceiling let down sunlight. Blood red words appear on the walls, discouraging me. My fear intensifies. The world grows more red. Then … [It’s getting late, this’ll just have to be good enough. I need to go to sleep]