Dreams of Reality

Chantel knew that she wanted to go with the search party, she was curious to see if the other town was also experiencing a similar phenomenon as them, but in her heart, she knew the answer; she didn’t want to tell anybody, in fear of getting ridiculed, but she had been having some vivid nightmares since the night of the thunderstorm and blackout.

Nightmares that one would typically brush off as an overactive imagination or even anxiety of the unknown, some type of psychobabble bullshit such as that, but Chantel knew better than that because she had an eerily similar dream, the day before the blackout, she wasn’t aware that day that it had significant meaning, but when the adults disappeared, she knew then that it was not an ordinary nightmare.

In her nightmare, she was at the Harrison Barge Mobile Offshore Drilling Unit, she started on the drilling platform and then slowly started floating towards the water’s surface and down into the depths of the ocean, she followed the riser to the blowout preventer, through the metal casings and into the well bore, where the oil wells were located. Chantel expected it to stop there but she continued moving downwards past the oil well and into the impermeable rock bed underneath, that is where things started getting weird, as she was drifting through the layers of earth, she felt a magnetic pull leading her further down into the earth, she followed, not being able to stop herself. As she went further down, she started feeling the presence of another being, the feeling she was getting was not a pleasant one, this feeling gave her goosebumps and made her want to run and hide in a dark corner where no one was able to find her, alas, she was unable to, and she continued to move towards the unsettling presence against her will.

When she finally stopped moving, she looked around to find that she was somehow back on the Barge, but it wasn’t the Barge she knew, there was something slightly off about it that she wasn’t able to put her finger on. The feeling was similar to when Richard and she started researching the Mandela Effect, they had both started to notice a slight difference in their memories concerning very specific things they grew up with, differences that others had also noticed but no one was able to give a clear-cut answer for; that feeling, you know which one - that feeling where you know something is drastically different, or something big is about to happen, you just don’t know what - you’ve experienced it before. Don’t lie.

As Chantel looks around the rig, she notices that they are very close to hitting the oil well and being able to start extracting the oil from the ocean bed below, as they begin the process, the warm summer air starts to turn heavy and humid, the wind starts to pick up and dark, ominous rain clouds start to form in the sky immediately above the Barge, causing the last few hours of daylight to be swallowed up by the clouds as it starts to drizzle; after around ten minutes, the drill cracks the oil reserve and simultaneously the rain picks up while deafening thunder echoes throughout the town and blinding lightning illuminate the now pitch black sky.

Chantel gets pulled back down into the ocean, where the oil reserve is located to witness it crack open and expel a small amount of oil before the engineers can place a top plug to cap the oil well, as the oil escaped, she notices what looks similar to that of a heat wave but underwater, also escape the caprock with the deposit of oil, it was then, that she realized that it seemed to have the same unsettling presence that she felt when she was initially pulled below the oceans floor, as the strange presence escaped the rock, it created a seismic event underwater, resulting in the entire town of Deloraine to experience a small tremor. Once again, she was pulled further under the impermeable rock bed and the different layers of the earth until she was once again situated on the platform of the Barge, by this point, the weather was even wilder, the rain was coming down in steady streams, and hail started to whip around in the now unforgiving wind, thunder created whiplike cracks while the lightning lite up the sky as if it were day, finally there was a final tremor that caused the entire town of Deloraine to be plunged into darkness.

That’s when Chantel woke up, confused, scared, and wondering if it all meant anything but inevitably pushing it to the back of her mind and continuing with her day; that happened the night before the football game which also happened to involve a storm and two small tremors, just to wake in the morning to find they were all alone. Chantel didn’t see it as a coincidence, especially since she had just had another weird dream this time about the search party just last night.

In her dream, Chantel, Josh Harrison, and three others she did not recognize had offered to go to their neighboring town of Winchester to investigate if they had also experienced a similar event where all the adults had disappeared. The walk to Winchester took around an hour, the five of them walked along in silence, they were following the road that led to the other town, and even though it was a road that was not used all that often, it came off more desolate and eery than it ever did before, causing the teens to feel uneasy.

Chantel was hovering above the group, watching herself, the others in the group and the events that were unfolding but not being able to interact with them in any way. As the group was walking, the road started to slowly become overgrown with moss, flowers, and other vegetation, as they continue walking, the asphalt becomes more and more overgrown until eventually the entire road disappears and meshes into the forest that surrounds most of the two towns, leaving the kids standing in what used to be the middle of a road but is now part of the adjoining forest.

The teens were confused, but decided to continue to Winchester anyway, as they continued, the group noticed that while they had been walking for a decent amount of time, maybe about half an hour, they had yet to see any type of wildlife, which, was odd. These forests were lucrative with animals, especially in the summer season, and yet nothing. They, however, were not able to see what Chantel was able to see from her position overhead of them, in the distance, a little closer towards Winchester, she once again saw a shimmer of what can only be described as waves of heat, only it wasn’t, it was something else, something… alive. Just as she thought this, the group below started talking about feelings of uneasiness and wanting to turn back, Josh and herself, the physical her, on the ground, convinced them to continue with their plan to the town.

As they continued to the town everything was silent and the dreaming Chantel once again started feeling uneasy, this time, there was the added feeling of someone watching her, observing her every move, and not just her every move on the ground, no, she also felt these ‘eyes’ on her while she was observing from above in her dream state, which made her feel exposed and very vulnerable. When the group got to Winchester, there wasn’t a single living soul in the town, as Chantel looked from above, it seemed like the place had been abandoned for years, the forest was taking over most of the town, the streets, buildings, and cars all covered in vegetation. The group split up, much to physical Chantel’s protesting, and dreaming Chantel was able to keep watch of them all from above, as they all went separate ways, Chantel noticed that each teenager in the group was being followed by the entity that she had seen twice now, and the more it followed them, the more they all seemed to get more paranoid, angry and suspicious of one another. It was at this point, dream Chantel was convinced that it was a being that had been released from under the ocean floor and was messing with the search party; she took it one step further with the thought of it somehow being responsible for the situation they currently found themselves in, however, she couldn’t be sure, not without going to the Barge, she didn’t know why, but there was an irrevocable feeling in her gut that it was where she needed to go to get the answers that she and the town required to figure out what was going on and return to their parents.

As the group finishes their investigation of the town, they meet each other in the town square, and head as a group out of Winchester and back in the direction of Deloraine. When they leave the town limits, the entity that dreaming Chantel kept seeing, followed them slowly from the town of Winchester, they had managed to shake off the negative feelings they had in town but now they were back, and with everyone in closer proximity to each other, the paranoia, anger, fear, and suspicion, slowly came creeping back into the five teens. They all argue the entire way back to Deloraine, not knowing why or what they were arguing about, yet the second they get back into the town perimeter, they stop arguing as if they had never started. It even seemed to the dreaming Chantel that they had completely forgotten the feelings of anger, fear, and paranoia that they were just experiencing since they all continued to the town hall like nothing ever happened.