June 15th 2022
The dream played out like a visual novel game.
I woke up on a dirt path, a small table with a laptop on it. On one side stretched out to eternity a field of tall grass and flowers. On the other side was a dark, endless forest.
I was dead, and I had to choose how to spend the afterlife. The laptop had a wallpaper with a book on the same small table and only one program. It asked me if I would like to check the files inside it, or choose between the field or the forest.
The files were memories, the worst and best moments of my life. I could choose to go through all of them, or leave after a few, or leave right away.
The field was beautiful, tall soft grass in shades of green and yellow and grey, dotted with countless daisies, bluebells, cornflowers, lilies, buttercups, wild roses. It was so soft against my skin and it made me so happy to walk into it. I started running and laughing and throwing myself down, rolling and giggling and stretching like a cat. I was so blissfully happy, I could roam that field forever.
The forest was dark and quiet and soothingly cold. The trees towered around me, dark green and dark blue and dark turquoise, covered in gentle soft moss. I felt so at ease in the forest as I walked through it, my eyelids closing on me, too lazy to open back up. I found a tree that looked comfortable and lay down at its base, letting the gentle shadow and gentle quiet surround me. I was so at peace, I could sleep forever.

September 13th 2022
I was walking around the street where my aunt and uncle live during a nuclear winter. It is a quiet street between buildings, with tall trees along the sidewalks.
The world was dark as it was always night, the only illumination coming from yellow streetlights, snowfall constantly falling around them. The ground was covered in thick, pristine blankets of snow, save for paths dug by people.
I walked over to the entrance to a building. Through the glass doors I could see it was full of snow on the inside too – a wall of white standing still when I opened them. I dug with my hands into it, trying to get through for whatever reason, and I found a dead body.

January 3rd 2023
I was a nameless young girl attending a funeral in the parking lot behind my house. Through the door to another apartment block, I discovered a portal to a pocket dimension. It was guarded by people in military suits, but I sneaked past them.
For the rest of the dream I explored the pocket dimension and gathered clues in order to figure out the lore. The pocket dimension housed a town with much strange architecture, with streets winding up and down hills, intricate brickwork and green river canals.
In some parts the town looked abandoned, while in others it was populated by equally strange people. I couldn’t recall them well by the time that I woke up – just that they were shaped wrong.
The first street I saw when I entered the dimension was named “January 3rd Street”. I later discovered that the person who created the pocket dimension, and the person who founded the town, created it because he had a dream that inspired it, on the same date as I dreamed about him dreaming it.

February 22nd 2023
I was a girl at a school for troubled witches. The white walls and stained windows with old, cracked window sills gave the view of tall mountains covered in morning mist. The principal of the school, the head witch, was the mist over the mountains, keeping everybody trapped in the form of a suffocating, impenetrable fog.
Another girl and I managed to escape and we ran down a mountain road, until we found a tourist trap shop, with costumes and stupid little trinkets, next to a bus stop. The shop owner inside was very nice and really funny.

March 18th 2023
I was working together with an archivist/a notary/a data entry clerk/maybe just some random dude, who was teaching me how to write records and organise them. We were in a dark room. I was sitting at a desk and he sat in front of me, a huge rectangular window behind him, giving a view of the entire city. Eventually we put those papers down and walked outside, through the window onto the rooftop.
It was night and the world was purple, yellow and orange lights coming from the windows below us, my neighbourhood much prettier than it actually is. We danced together on the rooftop, him spinning me around and my skirt spinning around my legs.

March 26th 2023
I was a girl going to attend a Hogwarts-esque magic school. It was an amazing place, labyrinthine, each room luxuriously decorated and with its own theme. One teacher was a giant serpent, with glasses on its nose and a graduation cap on its head, and the room it was in was decorated Versailles-esque, a gilded drawing room with murals of rose gardens and forests on the walls.
While on the train to the school, I met a boy and we really hit it off. When I arrived at the school, I found out that there was a serial killer lurking around. It was that very same boy, but I didn’t know it yet.
Nonetheless, I wanted to leave. I couldn’t leave for whatever reason, so the rest of the dream was my increasingly wild attempts to get myself expelled. It turned from a serial killer mystery to a wacky school comedy.

April 17th 2023
I was a little girl, waking up in a strange library, with endless corridors and infinite books to read. I met with a talking cat who showed me around.
Later on I met an attendant who revealed I was the illegitimate child of a god (who despite his infinite wisdom, just now realised I existed).
Like any child, I got in trouble around the library and caused a ruckus. Suddenly I was transported into the dark void of space, pitch-black all around me, and towering above me the gigantic features of a man’s face, illuminated blue. My father scolded me and sent me back to the library, unceremoniously letting me fall onto a chair.

June 17th 2023
I was visiting family in the countryside and their house looked completely different, morphing between Victorian manor, trailer park and traditional Japanese.
In a grey corridor there were drawings hung on the walls, allegedly drawn by one. The one I remember clearest was a portrait depicting a headless woman, with fair skin, wearing an elegant white and gold dress, on a dark green background. She was holding a white chicken to her chest. The chicken’s crest and the woman’s neck-stump were a very vivid shade of red.
I scolded my aunt for still keeping such an old thing.

…

A. R. Tivadar is a hobby writer from Romania and a graduate of the University of Oradea. She has been published in Alien Buddha Press, miniMAG, Motus Audax Press, Firework Stories and 9 other online literary magazines.
instagram: @a.r.tivadar
linktree: /ARTivadar