The Shadow Dreams

3 OPHELIA CLARK

3 OPHELIA CLARK

September 8

When I was little, I used to have strange dreams. Not all the time, but often enough to make bedtime a terrifying experience for me. One evening, I dreamed my grandma was dying. In the dream, it was the middle of the night and she was in her bed. The moonlight entering the window cast a soft white glow across her linens. I stood by her side and watched as she drew in ragged breaths. Her eyes fluttered a bit, and then she noticed me. She used all of her strength to raise her bone-thin arm; her withered hand trembling as she reached out toward me. I froze, terrified. As she got closer, I noticed there was something wrong with her eyes. They were wide open, but completely colorless. She stared out with white, glossy orbs. Her mouth drooped down into a frown, and her knitted eyebrows forced her forehead into a mess of wrinkles. Grandma looked weak and sad, and as her hand reached for me, I tried to scream, but my voice caught in my throat. I winced as I waited for her gnarled fingers to grip my nightshirt and yank me toward her, but she didn’t touch me. Instead, she pointed her index finger to the back of the room. She hadn’t been looking at me at all. Grandma was looking at someone or something behind me. As I turned, I noticed a person’s shadow out of the corner of my eye.

I woke up screaming, and though I knew I was safe in my bed, the mysterious figure stuck in my mind. When my parents came to check on me, I told them what I saw. Of course, they tried to comfort me by explaining that it was only a dream. I wanted them to call Grandma so I could talk to her and make sure she was OK. They said that it was much too late at night and that I could call her in the morning. When morning came, Mom and I left Grandma a voice message. Mom said that Grandma was probably out at church, as she attended service every day, and that we could talk to her when I got home from school. But I would never hear Grandma’s voice again. After 2 days of unanswered phone calls, Mom got really worried. She drove down to her house in Hawkinsville and found Grandma’s lifeless body. She had passed away with her arm dangling off the side of the bed, her eyes open and rolled back so only the whites were showing.

They didn’t let me go to the funeral. Mom and Dad thought six was too young an age for a kid to see a dead person, so they left me at home with my babysitter, Eloise. I liked Eloise a lot. She was young and fun and always let me eat ice cream. But as much as she tried to play with me and make me smile that day, I couldn’t stop sobbing. She sat down on the couch next to me and rubbed my back with one gentle hand as she dabbed at my tears with a tissue in the other.

“Did Grandma die because I dreamed it?” I asked her.

“Oh, sweetheart, no. Of course not. What would make you think that?” Eloise lifted my chin with her index finger and looked into my puffy, red eyes.

I told her about my dream and the creepy shadow lurking in the corner of my grandma’s bedroom.

“Ophelia, honey. Don’t you pay that shadow dream any attention. Let me tell you something. You can’t change the future any more than you can change the past. Everything happens for a reason, even if we can’t understand it.” She pulled me into a tight hug, my tears staining her sweater.

It wasn’t too long before I had a similar type of dream. In it, it was dark outside, and Mom’s car was on the side of a road. The windshield was smashed, and the hood was crumpled up like a cardboard juice box. Everything was silent and still except for a shadowy figure that crept along the side of the car. It made its way from the back to front, where it stopped and turned toward me. The shadow looked like a person, and though it had no nose, or lips, or eyes, I knew it could see me. Once again, I was too afraid to move, and all I could do was stare back at it. The last thing I remember was watching the shadow slowly dissolve into the air like a fine mist in the wind.

When I woke up, I told Mom about the dream and begged her to stay home from work. I heard her tell my dad that I was going through a “clingy phase”, and she headed to her job at the Monroe County Clerk’s office. I was a nervous wreck the whole day. After what happened with Grandma, I was positive Mom was going to die.

When the bus brought me home from school, Dad was standing in the driveway instead of Mom. I knew something was wrong, and I rushed toward him, terror crushing the air from my lungs.

“Where’s Mom?” I cried, wrapping my arms around Dad’s neck as he knelt down to pick me up.

“Well, I’m glad to see you too,” Dad joked, though I didn’t find any humor in the situation. “She’s going to be late tonight. Someone hit her parked car in front of the office. She wasn’t in it, but whoever hit her drove away and she had to stay to file a police report,” he explained as he carried me into the house. I was never so happy to see her as when she got home that day.

That year, the “shadow dreams”, as Eloise called them, kept coming. They were dark and showed me things that were about to happen. I would wake up in a panic, and Dad would try to calm me down. He’d remind me that dreams weren’t real, but I knew that sometimes they were, and I could tell the difference. Whenever the shadow figure appeared, as terrified as I was, I knew that what I was seeing was something that would become true. At one point, my parents concluded I was seeing scary things in my dreams because I was watching too much TV. They banned all of my cartoons and enrolled me in a bunch of after-school activities to keep

me busy. It took a few years, but as I got older, the shadow dreams happened less and less. I was so occupied with swimming lessons, piano lessons, and karate classes that when I went to bed, my head barely touched the pillow before I was out and dead to the world. I couldn’t remember my dreams when I woke up anymore - even when I tried. By the time I was ten, the shadow dreams had stopped, and I never thought about them again. Until now.