Excerpt: Somnium Mundi (Dream World)

There are a couple very short sections here that are from the Collector. Scenes like these will be woven in between the groups of dreams throughout the book. Then, I have a couple of the many dream sequences that will make up the core of the novel. Read whichever interest you. It's a bit long.
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I am the Collector. I will be your guide, if you will, on a tour through many places you may only see in your Dreams. Yes, that's right. These are Dreams I have collected. Special Dreams, whether loved or hated, that I cherish and keep. You may find one of yours here. Congratulations! You are a Dreamer. One of a few from each world that have been outside your own realm. You may have lived some of these. In that case, you've had the special privilege of being a part of someone else's dream, someone else's adventure.
Dreamer or non, awake or asleep . . . welcome aboard.
- - - - - - - - - -
Well, our next journey may not be so pleasant. Of all the realms I wander, there is one place that I may not enter. That is the Land of Nightmares, where fear and despair rule over hope and freedom. I feel sorry for those who get lost here, though . . . it happens a lot more than I like to admit. It is on the verge of many of the worlds I watch over, and it is very easy for someone to simply . . . wander the wrong way.
I do have here . . . somewhere . . . records of some of the many Nightmares that have passed me by. Now let me see if I can find them . . . These are very hard to obtain, by the way, since they're . . . technically . . . outside of my territory. But . . . we won't get into that. Let's just say . . . I'm more proud of having them than I am of the methods it took to get them.
Ha! I found them! So, here we go. Hold on tight.
- - - - - - - - - -
I was sitting on a hill, I think, and I could feel a nice cool breeze on my face. It was a little chilly, like early morning, and the grass was damp from dew. It was getting my pants wet. I could feel it through the seat of my jeans. Even though I was wearing long sleeves, I could feel the cold settling into my skin. The birds were just waking up. Beside me sat a girl I had been crushing on for almost two years now. She reached out and took my hand. I knew immediately it was her, from her smell, from the touch of her hand, but most importantly, from the sound of her voice as she sang softly of the morning sunrise. I smiled. I had always wished that someone could tell me what a sunrise looked like. All anyone could ever tell me about was the colours. Something I couldn't understand, because I'd never seen them. But this... this was a true sunrise. And I could feel it in my heart, I knew she was singing for me.
- - - - - - - - - -
I was in art class. For some reason, I was alone, except for one other person. I sat in front of an empty canvas with a paintbrush in my hand. Apparently, I was supposed to paint the other person, because we were facing each other. It was a young woman, too old to be a student but too young for a teacher. Only . . . she had no face. Where there should have been eyes, a nose, a mouth, there was only blank skin. Honestly, it kinda freaked me out. But for some reason, I didn't notice. I just started painting. I always start with the eyes, but since she had none, I just started panting skin. Somehow, the skin started to take shape on the canvas. I started painting in shadows I hadn't noticed before. I kept trying to move on to the hair, but I always noticed something else I'd missed. A shadow here, that bit of colour in the eye . . . wait, eye? I looked at the portrait and realized I had already filled in the mouth and nose and most of the eyes. But how? The woman's face was still blank. But my brush kept painting, and my hand followed, and soon the eyes I had painted shined with a life that hardly seemed to be able to stay on the canvas. Suddenly, the woman was standing before me and shaking my hand - and smiling. The mouth I had painted thanked me, and the eyes I had created sparkled at me out of the woman's face.
When I turned back to the canvas, it held only a blank face.
- - - - - - - - - -
It was the worst case of deja vu ever, as if I'd been here before, done this before, everything. I woke up in a house with a few other people. There were at least three guys, and two other girls. Everyone else had been awake for a while.
They all had drinks, slushies of some kind. One of the guys handed me one and I started drinking it, realizing I was parched. They were coming up with a plan to get out of the house. I was starting to realize I was the only one who felt they had been here before. I wandered around the house and saw that it was exactly the same as last time . . . whenever that was. So finally we left the house, or at least I did, and when I realized the others hadn't followed, I turned back to the house and found it full of what looked like cobwebs, but that I knew weren't sticky. I knew because I'd done this before. I was trying to remember if I should go back into the house. Were the cobwebs a bad thing? Oh well, I had to get back to the group, they were calling me. So I made my way through the stringy cobwebs.
From then on, every time we left the house it was as if we were entering a different world. There were creatures or enemies in every world that we had to fight, and we had to defeat one ultimate monster (or sometimes it was a person) before we could get back to the door. Then we'd do it all over again. Once it was ninjas. We had a pile of ninjas that one guy had found, and he offered them to me first. I pulled out two things that looked like thin solid poles, but were rubbery and movable like whips. I used those to tear up anything in my path, beating at the monsters who came at me. I think we were in the middle of fighting the "boss" of that world when the others seemed to be trying to get back to the door. I tried to tell them that if they did we'd have to fight all the monsters in this world over again, but they weren't listening. And since the "boss" of this world was actually a hundred different little black creatures, I had my hands full.
- - - - - - - - - -
A memory. Dinnertime, in a nice family restaurant. Low lighting. Soft music. A tall, black-haired woman named Angelina and a shorter redhead sit talking quietly. They're old friends.
"Look what you've done to me," the red-headed friend says. A quick flash of her face melting, body contorted, and back to the now, her hair done up, her sparkling dress perfect. The other woman is confused.

The memory ended and the taller woman was back in a dark, abandoned house with a different woman - apparently the one who had brought forth the memory. "See?" she asked. Angelina shook her head. Whatever the witch was trying to do by bringing the memory up, she wouldn't allow it. Somehow, the woman convinced her that the way out of this nightmare was through her mind. She placed a hand on her forehead, and at first, nothing seemed to change. Then came a pounding headache. Angelina found some sewing pins with coloured balls at the ends. She picked one up and slowly put the tip to her temple. Somehow, she knew it wouldn't hurt. Not here. She pushed it into her temple, all the way up to the little red ball, picked up another, and did the same on the other side. The headache vanished, but the pins wouldn't stay in. It was as if there was nothing past her skin to hold them there. As if she was empty.
She was wandering a dark hallway that seemed familiar, but from a much less frightening place. She opened a door and saw a scene that seemed familiar also, and brought up a memory from some long-forgotten place - a wide empty field of green grass and blue sky, with empty white window panes hanging parallel onto nothing. Suddenly a brown horse jumped out of one pane and through the other in a smooth arc. Then two came, then four, and then a whole herd of horses arced through the windows and disappeared, as if the panes were doors, or portals, not windows. She shut the door tight and continued on.
She found a dark bedroom, in which a woman who appeared to be her red-headed friend from before lay on the bed. But as she drew closer, she saw the girl was mangled and deformed. Suddenly, there was a man in the doorway, a man she knew but who shouldn't have been there. "Don't you get it?" he asked, frustrated. "She's playing with you! You're not supposed to be here."
She turned back to the woman on the bed, and suddenly she looked menacing, even frightening.
"Look what you've done to me!" she shrieked. It echoed through the room and the hall outside, and through Angelina's mind. 'But if I was in my mind,' she thought, 'how could it...' "That's it! She's trying to trap me here!" She threw one of the pins at the girl, but it wouldn't hit her. She looked for the man, but he had disappeared. She ran out the door and it slammed closed after her. Thought she tried to push one of the pins through, she realized suddenly that it was double-tipped; the coloured ball was gone. She knew the woman had done it on purpose to try and make her hurt herself. Somehow, she pushed it through the door anyway, avoiding injury, and ran back to the living room where the witch had been, but she wasn't there. Angelina knew she had to wake up from her mind soon, or--