Prompt: From the Parable of the Sower, since it takes the form of Lauren's (the protagonist's) journal, there are many missing entries where she often reflects and speculates about the future. Here is my "missing entry" from her journal where my purpose in it is to emphasize the importance of dreams and the power of how one interprets them. By writing about the various dreams Lauren has, it gives the reader a change to delve into the dreamer's inner thoughts, specifically in this case, about what Lauren thinks surrounding her future and the people around influencing those emotions. A main theme in her dreams, as seen in this entry is that of fire, and its negative effects of being the cause of being separated from her father and family/friends.
Wednesday, February 4th, 2027
It has been over a month since I've written. Everyone is still tense about the December break-ins, and my father is still missing. There are moments when even a soft noise from the rustling papers on the dining table startles me. There's no such thing as sleeping peacefully anymore when your thoughts won't constantly stop harassing you to stay awake in fear of being robbed. Once I sleep, though, at times, I still can't escape my thoughts, as they constantly present themselves in my dreams, embodying a person or event. Last night I had a dream that came in 2 parts that I could explicitly and vividly remember. They are the kinds of dreams that deceive you into thinking that they are your reality, and you can't escape it until someone wakes you up or, by some miracle, you break free of the shackles of this trickery.
In the first one, I was at the church. My father was preaching about the book of Numbers, the sacred history of the Israelites, and as I looked around, everything looked normal. The people around didn't have faces, but somehow it wasn't a problem that I couldn't recognize them all, so I just went with it. I turned back to face the old, eroded lectern and my father, suddenly, was a blurry silhouette with a muffled voice that I couldn't understand anymore. As time went by, he got more unrecognizable and harder to understand. An orange-yellow light in my peripheral caught my attention, and as I looked around, I saw the growing fire quickly creeping along the walls of the back door and enveloping everything in its path. I turned back to what I thought looked like my dad, who was engulfed in flames, and I tried to yell at him to run, but he didn't move. I couldn't move any part of me, as if an unbeatable force was gluing me down to the pew. I was stuck and couldn't fly away. It was too hot to breathe as tears fell down my eyes. This was the end, in the church where I was baptized, where my father spent most of his days. This marks the end of the change I never enacted upon my community. Then, a distant ringing bell startled me awake and out of my temporary paralysis. Triggered by the sound, thinking our house had gotten broken into again, I shot up, but when I looked around, there were no thieves, just the paranoia of a sound I'd created in my head taking over, so, in attempting to forget what had just happened, I forced myself back to sleep.
The next dream was short yet, in a way, a part of the last. It was dark outside, and I was running away from a fire. I felt the heat from behind, and as I looked around, there was just the road stretched ahead of me. The smoke and fire had covered up the stars in the night sky. I remember thinking then and there: no starlight, no hope. Then, finally, I came to a fork in the road. Curtis, Cory, and my brothers were on the road to the left, yelling at me to hurry up, but on the right, there was no one, only what looked like the carving of a mountain in the distance. It appeared lit up in the dark of night. Before deciding which path to take, the fire consumed me instantly, and I woke up again from feeling excessive warmth, lying there, trying to understand what had just happened. I was too late. Did everyone else survive? A layer of crust was around my eyes from the tears shed during the first dream, as if a part of the dream had come into real life and was still traceable enough to interpret and acknowledge its presence on me. Fire. Human-made and robust sufficient to incinerate anything in its path. Why did it appear so strongly in my dreams? I don't know. I just wish I knew where my dad was.
One time, an old, unknown lady randomly approached me and said: "We are such stuff as dreams are made on." Shakespeare, she remarked and left me with that quote. I never saw her again, but it made me realize how life can be very fleeting at times, just like my father being suddenly gone. Do I accept it as is? Is all of this an illusion? Is life just a dream, and if so, then what's the true meaning of our sleeping dreams? Do they even have significance?
- ND
