The Dreamer's Metamorphosis

A dream in which words have the power to compel the body or hurt it and the dreamer is a small girl. It hinges on the realm of fantasy while portraying the ever apparent reality of the power of words.

She lay very still. Her eyes were closed as if a surreal scene being played on her eyelids captivated her. The grass cushioned her softly and she laid spread out like a cross.

 

The wind that had been still, creaked to life in small, lazy gusts that made her eyelashes flutter. Her eyes opened slowly, almost reluctantly, only to open wide in amazement at what they were beholding. A sky spread above her in dazzling pinks and purples with green wisps of clouds that moved around brightly sparkling spots of flashing colors. It stretched to meet the earth. The sky, some thing that she had always known to stay above and out of reach, touched the ground all around. It was like the largest cathedral dome and she was its only visitor.

 

She smiled and a giggle of delight escaped her small body as the clouds above her swirled into odd shapes, creating images and stories in a matter of seconds only to disappear just as she began to grasp the meaning.

 

A noise came from her left. The soft swoosh of fabric rustled against the grass and a sweet, smooth melody reached her ears. She sat up, scattering the flower petals that had covered her white cotton dress. Coming out of a blindingly bright opening in the domed sky, far, far to her left, were hundreds of girls. Girls as young as she was with gap-toothed smiles, and girls near adulthood with the body of women but smiles that matched her own ever-increasing one. As the last of them entered, the opening closed slowly until it was gone and she couldn’t find where it had been or come from.

 

They walked elegantly towards her, clad in soft colored cotton dresses much like her own. They swayed as the breeze picked up and tossed their dresses around them. On each of there lips was a word being hummed that she heard as if each girl were next to her. Each word and meaning was different, but the same feeling emanated gently from each of them. The feeling of the hummed words wafted around the smiling girl, blown toward her by the lazy wind.

 

She felt the words echo inside her as a new wave of wind brought more syllables. They touched her bare skin and worked their way into her. Some seeping gently like a liquid, others climbing to her mouth and rolling around till they found their way to the back of her throat and plunge downward. Once inside they moved around making her body shake with all the sensations. Some wafted in her lungs, others clinked like marbles in her brain, more still seemed to crawl on millions of little legs in her veins. There were even those that found it fun to bleed out of her eyes only to sneak their way back into her through her nose and ears.

 

She sneezed and laughed and cried all at once while her nerves dealt with the new feelings. By the time she noticed what was going on outside of her instead of inside, the walking girls had surrounded her. Their humming, that had been loud before, hit her in powerful waves that knocked her over gently only to turn around and pick her back up like soft playful waves.

 

The girls smiled and picked flowers around her as she stood in wonder at what was going on. The ground, which till then, had gone unnoticed to her, was blanketed in hundreds and thousands of wildflowers that created a continuous field that stretched all the way to where the sky met the ground.

 

She laughed, as the flowers seemed to battle with the wind and words. The words would push one way and the flowers would push back, shaking their petal-covered heads. Some that had been bent over would pop back up as the breeze had drifted to a different area.

 

A girl came towards her and broke the flowers captivation on her. The girl was much taller then her. She wore a faded blue cotton dress and had a newly fashioned wreath in her long black hair. She lifted a milk white hand and handed the little girl a pink flower. When the flower was not taken immediately the girl in blue smiled and unleashed the word on her lips.

 

“Come”

 

It washed over the little girl in a flood and her body resounded and shook with the syllable. She was filled with hope, despair, longing, and indifference, willingness, and stubbornness all at the same time, all pulling her towards the flower. Her hand shot out in a blur and grasped the flower from the older girl’s hand.

 

The word faded away after a moment and she was left with just the feeling of the hummed words inside her. Suddenly all the girls turned towards her, each offering a different flower. She took every one of them for fear of a new word being unleashed on her. The girls smiled and nodded. There were so many… Yet her hands seemed to fit every flower given to her. As the last girl gave her a new flower, she looked down at her load. All the flowers in her other hand had been fashioned into a crown-like wreath. She held the last flower near it and gasped when it wriggled out of her hand and joined the others.

 

For a moment all the girls looked at her as if waiting for some thing. She stared back at them. Two stepped forward and looked towards each other. They shook their heads, smiling at her, and joined hands.

 

“Wear”

 

“It”

 

Each word hit her, the first covering her like a blanket, the second hitting the wreath she held with a soft “thunk”. Again she was bombarded with contradicting feelings that moved her arms above her then slowly back down, placing the wreath on her head.

 

Despite the number of flowers the wreath felt like air around her head and she had to touch it to make sure it was actually there.

 

The girls around her smiled and clapped, each wearing a unique wreath of their own. Some stopped before others, going back to picking flowers, while others clapped for what seemed an hour. When the last girl, a short, thin, Indian colored girl with almond eyes and long braided black hair, stopped clapping a sudden ear splitting crack shook the domed field and the seemingly substance-less sky cracked directly above the group of girls. The light that glowed from the sky diminished, fading away leaving the sky a dark black with gray clouds that danced in a fevered and frantic way. At the center lay a glowing, ruby red spider web of fractures.

 

The initial mark showered them with popping and screeching sounds as veins crept through sky distorting the picture-clouds until the first crack worked its way to the ground far to the right of them.

 

It shattered in a cacophony of sounds that left behind a jagged and dark gaping mouth. Laughter filled the toothy opening. Loud, booming laughter that shook the shattered sky and field that they stood on. Then it stopped.

 

In the moment of silence the girl looked around her, the flowers stood still and lifeless, the wind had stopped. The wind and the noise, the white noise that had thrived in the isolated field stopped leaving the little girl with an empty, incomplete feeling.

 

The girls around her caught her eye. Each stood with eyes wide and mouths opened in silent screams. They clawed at their faces, threw their heads back and shrieked soundlessly. In one mass movement they all huddled closely around the little girl in white. Bodies surrounded her, hands held onto to her groping for help, while protecting her at the same time. She shook her head and felt like screaming herself. The silence that dominated everything around her seemed to erase any sound she had ever heard plunging her into momentary deafness.

 

Then it, the crunch of boots and the clink of metal against dry, dead leaves broke the silence. Through the gaps of the girl’s body she caught a few glimpses of what was happening to the world around her. Boys swarmed into the field from the crack in the sky. Each was clothed in ripped torn articles from every culture and time. They carried spoons, forks, knives, bows and arrows, swords, spears, axes, hoes, clubs, branches, whips, guns, bombs, and many others. An array of weapons that stretched from prehistoric to a time period the girl had never seen before scattered the field in the hands of boys that marched out of the crack. They ranged from ages as young as her to as old as the black haired girl who had given her the first flower.

 

The boys stomped and shook with ignorant smiles upon their faces. Their smiles opened wide and out erupted words, horrible words that sent violent tremors through the ground and split it into a broken mass of dirt.

 

With each wave of syllables the flowers wilted, and the trees bent over. Some of the words the girl recognized. Some were the same as words being hummed and said softly by the girls huddled around her. The same words… but different.

 

Suddenly a boy, young and awkward in size, spotted the shaking girl in the mass of the others. His eyes opened wide and his smile twisted. He laughed and ran forward towards the group of girls. When he was about five feet away he stopped momentarily and leaped into the air and shouted something the little girl couldn’t understand.

 

The girls around her did though.

 

They through themselves on top of the little girl as the force of the word hit them. They shielded her and she felt the pressure but she did not share the pain that their shrieks spoke of.

 

She lay pressed to the ground, unaware of what was going on exactly, except for the shouting and the shrieking she heard. Suddenly, all the bodies that had been pressed against her were blown away. Girls flew through the air, screaming and reaching for her, only to land with sickening thuds.

 

All around her the color was lost from the beautiful field. The ground was a dry shade of brown that darkened around the edges to match the black sky. The red fractures above provided the only light, glowing eerily and casting shadows out of thin air.

 

She felt exposed and scared as she looked across the ground and saw most of the girls that had been protecting her lying still. The boys from the crack stood spread out in a circle around them. Their faces were dark and their features became undistinguishable but the different feelings and words that sat on the tip of each of their tongues made them unique. She shuddered.

 

Behind her she heard movement. Her heart raced and she held her breath as she turned around. The dark skinned girl that had been the last to stop clapping was struggling to sit up. Her face was bloody and her braided hair hung loose, and limply around her face.

 

The little girl felt a pain stab her stomach and work its way to her chest. Tears welled up inside her but she didn’t want them to fall. The dark skinned girl was moving with such a look of pain that showing weakness in her presence was disgraceful.

 

The dark skinned girl crawled towards her. The little girl stood up and went over to help her as the boys around them watched silently as if waiting to see what was going to happen. When she bent down to help the dark skinned girl up, she was resisted. The girl with tea colored skin shook at her offer of help and merely stuck out a hand and grabbed a flower off the wreath at the top of the little girl’s head. Confused, shocked, and scared the little girl in the white dress fell to her knees and cried over the dark skinned girl, who shook her head and patted the little girl on the cheek. With her other hand she brought the flower, a beautiful red and white one, to her lips and whispered, very softly, into its petals. The flower nodded its head and the dark skinned girl held the flower up to the little girl’s ear.

 

Through her silent tears the little girl wondered what was going on. Not just about the flower by her ear, but about everything that had happened. Waking up in this strange place… The girls who came out of the sky that touched the ground… The words that hurt and tickled… The boys… And as she thought, the flower whispered softly into her ear.

 

“Speak”

 

In a moment the word was inside her. It wracked around in her skull, exploded in her lungs, threw itself against the walls of her voice box. Her throat was on fire as the word blazed up inside her and erupted out of her mouth in the form of tens and thousand of words, sentences, phrases, and stories. The words came in a flood that forced her head back and stole voices that didn’t belong to her. Her tears ceased long before the words stopped.

 

For a while she thought they’d never stop. They just came and came, filling up the field and pressing against the sky. She felt them against her skin and watched them fly against the bodies around her and knock them over. The boys had stopped staring and ran towards the crack. They were not fast enough.

 

The sky, reaching the limit on how much it could hold, shattered into a million pieces around them, crushing some, and missing others. And still the words did not stop.

 

The girl’s throat burned, her lungs ached. She felt as if her body would collapse and die, but the words did not stop.

 

Out and out they came, flying into the abyss that surrounded field now that the sky was gone. The girl had been struggling to stop, figuring out how to stop the words from coming, but she gave up, and let them continue.

 

Eventually they did stopped. How long she had been on her knees with her head thrown back and words coming from her mouth she did not know. All she did know was that if she ever spoke again it would be to soon and it would never be unique. She looked around.

 

The world was gray. Everything that had once been distinct and separated now was blurred and ran together. Edges did not exist and things flowed into the next. Except for the bodies that lay scattered around her. The still, motionless bodies of boys lay side by side next to the girls. Faces were blank, skin was pale, and the girl began to feel more alone then she had ever been in her life. Some of the bodies were bleeding. Some had spilt their lifeblood on the gray ground; others had spilt none but were bruised and bent in unnatural ways.

 

The little girl’s dress was soaked at the bottom with blood. She looked to see where it had come from, if she herself was bleeding, but instead found the dark skinned girl, still at her side, her body was covered in small lacerations and bruises. The little girl was still. The world was still.

 

And then she began to change. Her body grew. The legs that had been tucked underneath her became longer while her torso grew upwards. Slowly her body began to change. She gained weight in gradual, slow, lazy blinks, only to loose weight then put more back on. Her body developed and her facial features became more defined. Suddenly, as slowly as it had started her body stopped changing. The girl, once little and adolescent, stat nearly woman, while her hair changed on her head. Long brown hair grew back into her head and morphed around, while its color changed, streaks of blonde, then red. She developed fringe around her face that would shorten and lengthen after a moment or two. Finally she sat a girl of sixteen with short dark brown hair with a silver streak in the front.

 

Her eyes were blank and her arms, which had been resting at her sides, moved stiffly. She had meant to brush away her fringe from her eyes, but had stopped when she noticed that she was holding something in each hand. In her right hand there was a pen, in her left, a blank sheet of paper with three words written on it:

 

“By Maria Metamorphosis”

Author's Note

Here, dear reader, is the reoccurring dream/nightmare that has plague my sleep since I was four years old. The last time I had it I was sixteen and my hair was nearly black with a silver streak. I haven't had it since then but sometimes, in the middle of the day words become distorted and blown into grotesque proportions in my mind. I suddenly become fearful of them. That is the effect of this dream that still lingers today. I felt I should write it. I am very aware that it is a terribly descriptive piece.

It is a rough draft. I have combed it over a few times but my eyes don't catch everything. Please help and give your thoughts.

Reviews

[Aarontastic]

I love it whenever I remember my dreams, because they always provide the best material to write about. When I'm starting on a story from scratch, I always struggle to work out a good plot, but when I'm working with a dream it's like all that work has been done for me ^^

Even though you have your dream as a starting point, I think you still had two very challenging things to do: firstly, you had to get the reader engaged inside of this illusory dream-world, and secondly you had to convey the power of words in an abstract way. You were able to keep your mind on the narrative even when you were dealing with such a whimsical subject, so you accomplished the first thing, and thanks to the imagery you used in describing words, you accomplished the second thing as well.

The story isn't grammatically perfect, but the mistakes you made were mostly just missing a few commas here and there, and using "through" instead of "threw" in some paragraph near the beginning, but it doesn't harm the story much...still, you might want to fix that.

All in all I liked it a lot; it was an ambitious thing to write about and you pulled it off well.

[Mary Evans]

Wow, it gets really freaky at some point. Nice writing and story. (do make a font a big bigger though)

Anyways, you have quite a bit repetitions but that's ok for a first draft, I didn't see any major problems or mistakes.

The story reminds me of something though, cant really remember but will think about it. Was it a book, or a story or a movie... I'm not sure...

[J.M]

Intriguing - oddly this piece was both disturbing and beautiful at the same time. Very well written and nicely structured, well done.