The Island

(This has nothing to do with ZFRP. It's just a piece of writing inspired by some of my past nightmares.)


It all started with the man in my dreams.

At first, he was just there. Whenever my dreams were close to ending, I would notice him in the background. He was never doing anything significant, but he was always out of place. It was strange, but I didn't think much of it, and the other three agreed. We were going to live on this tiny island for six months, and an odd dream or two a week into staying there wasn't a surprise.

It was when he started to wake me up that it turned bad.

I don't even know what the dream was about anymore, but I remember him approaching me. He grabbed me by the shoulders, and that was it. I snapped out of sleep in the early morning, and everything seemed normal. There wasn't anything different except in the dining room. There were four of us at breakfast, but we only had plates for three people. Nobody else noticed anything odd.

It was like clockwork. The man in my dreams would wake me up, a little earlier each morning, and something would be missing. Nobody else noticed. Even though everything that belonged to Flora was going missing, she simply acted as if it was normal. As if she was meant to sleep on the floor, with no pillows or blankets, as if she wasn't supposed to have a single piece of personal property.

About three weeks after the man first woke me up, I saw the bottom of his face. The rest was covered by his wide-brimmed hat. That morning, Flora was gone when I woke up. Jason and Thomas didn't recognize her name, or anything about her. As if she had never existed in the first place. No matter what I did, or how I tried to convince them, they were adamant that only the three of us had been on this island, from the very beginning.

Sometimes I still wonder which of us had the false memories. Maybe Flora was a hallucination after all.

The dreams stopped for a bit. I slept normally, but only for a week. Then he came back and woke me up again. That was the morning the second Jason showed up.

It was as confusing to both of them as it was to us. There were two of Jason that morning, both of whom climbed out of the same bed. As far as we could tell, there wasn't any way to tell which was the original. The Jasons spent the next couple days cooped up separately and trying to cope, while Thomas and I tried to strike a deal. Eventually, we agreed to treat them equally; at this point, maybe they both were Jason. I don't know anymore.

The next couple weeks passed by uneventfully, as we coped with having two of the same person around. It was strange, but we were able to get used to it surprisingly quickly. The only thing that scared me was the man in my dreams, who hadn't stopped waking me up. I could never sleep more than four hours a night by the end of it.

Then came the night that he woke me up, and I could see more of his face. He had tilted his hat back, letting me see his mouth and nose as well.

That morning, I woke up to blood covering the walls. While we were asleep, the two Jasons had stabbed each other to death.

We couldn't stay there any longer, so we began to fix up the boat. It had been damaged at some point, we never found out how. I choose to believe it was the man in my dreams, because of what happened. Every night that we worked on the boat, he woke me up sooner and sooner. By the end of it, I could barely sleep for an hour and a half.

The day we finished the boat, we planned to set out immediately, but it was dark and we were exhausted. Thomas went right to sleep, and so did I, but I knew what was coming. What I didn't expect was for the man in my dreams to have his hat pushed back again, and I finally saw the eyes that had been hidden behind it.

When I woke up, an hour after I went to sleep, I spent the wait trying to think of a way to talk Thomas out of it. When he woke up, I pleaded with him for hours. I knew what that man's face meant. Thomas understood my fears, but the island wasn't safe. There were only two of us left, and what would happened if we remained? He decided I would stay, and he would set out. Thomas was always the better sailor between us.

The second he shoved off from the water, the boat began to sink. I couldn't tell why the water was frothing around it, or why the boat went over, but when Thomas jumped overboard, I ran to the shore, ready to pull him out the second he surfaced.

Thomas never came up.

That was a week ago. I've barricaded myself in the bedroom, with supplies to last me the next five months, but I don't know what good it'll do. The man in my dreams feels more aggressive now, and nothing I do in the dream is any good.

Last night, as soon as I fell asleep, he was there. He didn't even give me a moment to sleep, or to dream.

I don't know what will happen when I fall asleep again.

I don't want to fall asleep.

I know that I'm going to fall asleep.