There comes a point when one cannot distinguish dreams from reality. That in itself is problematic. How will you know which fantasies you conjured, and which ones really happened? When you are lost in another world, you become unable to live your life. But even that is more of a burden than a problem.

No, the problems start when your dreams become nightmares.

The day my father died was the runner-up for the worst day of my life. He was a young man. Probably had a good fifty, sixty years left in him. But all it took was a moment of brake failure to steal those fifty years in an instant. One instant of misfortune.
Years and years of pain.

I was only fourteen when it happened. I had been struggling already, fighting off depression and bad grades and bullies. High school was hard. But it took the unthinkable to put my pain into perspective.

I thought I had been living at the bottom. Now I knew I hadn’t. Because whatever I had been feeling was nothing compared to the confining, limiting, everlasting fact that my father was dead.

Dead. Dead. Dead. I repeated it to myself a hundred times a day. So many times that two weeks after his death, the day after his funeral, the word had lost all meaning. His body was rotting underground, never to surface again, and yet how I longed to switch places with him. To escape the unbearable pain that had become my reality.

My nightmare.

I had gone both deaf and mute the moment I knew he was really gone. I was alerted during school, called from my classroom, to hear the bad news. At the time, I was only breathless and dizzy. It was only when I went to the scene, saw his lifeless, broken body that the fact hit me, and I knew it was true. My own scream was the last thing I said or heard.

It was after my father’s funeral when I started having time to spend. I was deemed unfit for school, given my “lack of focus” and “disturbing habit of staring at walls”. There was an old, deserted house at the end of the street. It was exactly like the ones in the movies. Dark. Broken. Empty. Haunted. Wind blew through it at night, all adding to the rumors that had blossomed since the day a girl went missing twenty years ago. They had found her body. The place was not really haunted. That isn’t the point of the story.

I spent every waking hour at that place. The empty, peaceful place was just what I needed. But it was there that I realized the full extent of my sadness.

I wandered around the empty corridors. It was my therapy. Every step brought me farther from my sadness. Step step step. Dead dead dead.

I turned a corner and saw someone at the end of the hall. I looked at them. They looked at me.

Then we ran to each other.

It was my father! He wasn’t dead after all. We stopped feet from each other, surveying the other. Those were my father’s eyes, glistening with love for me. That was my father’s smile, clear and proud and sad, but ever so happy to see me again. Those were my father’s hands, strong and big and gentle and warm.

But that was not my father.

If I squinted, I could see through him. I could see the emptiness of the hall. He was not there. The hall was empty. But I could see him.

I reached out to him, and he held out one of those strong, firm hands. I guided mine to his, and I gripped his hand like my life depended on it.

It was cold. It was hard. It was death. I was touching a dead man.

I jerked my hand away, my mouth open in a scream that never escaped my mute throat. My eyes opened -- I had never realized I had shut them in the first place -- and he was gone. There was nothing, not a whisper of his presence.

It wasn’t real.

I stumbled down the hall and into a bedroom, shaken. It was then I heard the voice. My father’s voice. Calling me. Begging me to save him.

I sprinted from the room, trying to follow the sound of the voice. I was hopelessly lost by the time I realized the voice was in my head. I could not hear my father. I could not hear anything, in fact.

But there was my father’s voice, calling out to me in my mind. Begging me to save him. I began to cry, and sunk to the floor, shouting back to him in my head that I was coming, that I was trying. But the screams subsided, and I knew he was lost.
But he was already lost. What was it that I kept hearing in my mind?

I stayed in that house for five days in a row, slowly losing my mind. I saw my father everywhere. Nothing was real. Nothing was a dream. They had joined in some in-between world which was neither of the two.

On the fifth day, my mother found me. She came to me, crying that she had been looking for me for days. I was so happy to see her, for the company. I had not realized how much I had missing human interaction.

So I was just as surprised as she when I produced a knife and plunged it into her stomach.

I watched in horror as I twisted the knife within her, watched the light leave her eyes. I heard her scream. I heard it, and I wished with all my heart that I could have been deaf just a little longer to avoid hearing that. Of course, the universe doesn’t always give you what you want.

Then I heard my scream, and then I heard the screams of others when they came in and saw my mother dead on the floor. Me, my hands slick with her blood.

I woke up several days later in a clear white room. I saw my father and mother, one on each side of me. They looked at me, and I saw my love for them reflected in their eyes. And all of a sudden, I didn’t care if this was a dream or not.

It was all that I needed to be happy.