“Now imagine there’s a door.
Just look at it, you don’t have to open it.
Behind that door, there might be a world you used to visit in your dreams, every night.
The people you knew might be there too.”
Elara let the suggestion settle into her subconscious.
Her body went still.
Her hand no longer reached for the wooden door in front of her.
She let the distance of a few steps become the boundary between herself and the dream she wanted to leave behind.
“Maybe that door holds the answers to everything you’ve been asking yourself.
Why did the dreams stop?
When will I dream again?
When will I go back?”
Dr.
Karen’s voice took hold of her mind again, giving Elara no room to resist the suggestion being planted in this session.
“But right now, you don’t need to demand those answers.
You can keep that dream world the way you’d keep a story that’s stayed with you since childhood.
Not forget it, just let it rest.
All you need to tell yourself is…”
Dr.
Karen paused before finishing, “Tonight, I can sleep without waiting for that dream to come back.”
In her subconscious, Elara took a step back from the door, still closed.
There was sadness in her chest, but she’d already decided.
She wasn’t going to spend one more night waiting for dreams of a world she didn’t know to return.
“Now let all of that settle, quietly, without trying to hold onto it.
Elara, in a moment we’ll come all the way back to this room.
When I count from one to five, you’ll start to notice the sounds around you again.”
“One…”
Elara waited for the next number, calm now, no longer paying the door–already far behind her–any mind.
Once this session was over, she was done with Dr.
Karen.
She wanted to live like a normal teenager.
Hang out with old friends, meet new people, maybe even date someone, the way everyone else did.
Ordinary things.
That was what she’d do after this–a life that had felt impossibly far away only because most of her mind spent the last year waiting on something she could never even prove was real.
“Two…”
This time, she’d really do it–gather every fragment of that dream and seal it in a box.
The world she’d never asked to know.
The parents she’d never actually had.
The little house that was always warm.
The land around it that never failed to leave her in awe.
The forest full of towering trees in colors she’d never once seen in the real world.
The castle her father called the finest school there was.
Under all of it, at the very bottom of the box, she’d bury the last nightmare.
The one that had haunted her before nearly a year passed without a single dream.
She was going to throw all of it away.
That senseless, aching grief.
She still didn’t understand how the death of a man she’d never actually met could carve a wound that deep into her.
How could she feel that kind of loss looking at that body–a man she called Father–lying stiff and lifeless in a dream, when her real Dad, who’d walked out on her and her mom when she was a kid, hadn’t earned so much as a single tear?
“Why does it have to hurt this much?” She’d asked herself that a hundred times and never once gotten an answer.
In her subconscious, she searched for the pieces of her father’s face.
What she found instead was the nightmare again.
No matter how hard she tried to find any other face, only that one kept surfacing–pale, rigid, eyes shut, the color drained clean out of the skin, cold under her fingertips.
Then the voice came back.
The one she never recognized.
“Don’t let them find you, Elara.”
She held her breath.
It echoed through the whole room like it was coming from everywhere and nowhere at once, and she had no idea what it meant.
But every time that voice showed up, a wave of fear would wash over her, as if her body had recognized something her mind could not.
“Three…”
One last time, she reached for that final fragment.
Her father’s face–the last time she’d seen it, laid out stiff on a bed, like he was caught in some sleep that would never end.
“Father?” Her voice cracked as his body stayed frozen.
The tears came before she could stop them.
“I have to go now,” she managed, her voice breaking apart with every word.
Then, before she could even blink, his head snapped towards her.
His eyes flew open.
His pale lips trembled.
His hand shot up into the air, straining to reach hers, barely out of arm’s length.
“Go!” The voice tore through the room.
“Don’t let them find you!”
The body that shouldn’t have been able to speak anymore was staring at her now, eyes wide, fury written across every inch of that pale face–the same face that had haunted her for months, brought back to life just to deliver the same warning one more time.
Elara’s eyes snapped open.
“Karen?” she called out.
She was gasping.
Her chest heaved as her eyes darted around, searching for the woman who’d spent nearly a year helping her survive dreams she never made sense of.
But there was no answer.
No hum of the air conditioner.
No apartment noise at all.
Everything had gone completely silent–even the faint traffic sounds that always drifted through the window were gone.
She blinked hard, trying to clear the blur from her eyes, trying to shake off whatever was still clinging to her from the session.
“I failed again,” she muttered, breathless.
She took a slow breath, forcing herself to steady it before she went on.
“The face came back.
Same words, but this time it was like he was screaming them at me.
I’m so tired of this.”
The silence was starting to feel wrong.
“Karen?”
She reached out, feeling for the edge of Dr.
Karen’s desk, which should’ve been right there beside her.
Instead, pain shot through her body so sharp it tore a groan out of her.
“Ugh…”
This wasn’t the usual soreness that came after a session.
Her whole body felt like it had just run for hours straight without a single second of rest.
Her shoulders were dead weight, her back ached down to the bone, and even her fingers felt stiff as she tried to grip the blanket over her.
Then a voice spoke from beside her–from right where Dr.
Karen’s desk should have been.
“Pathetic.
This is exactly why humans like you never last here.”
Elara turned towards it.
Her head throbbed as she forced herself to look.
Her vision was still hazy, but slowly a shape came into focus–a man, sitting in a chair beside the bed.
Someone she had never seen before.
Not once.
Not awake, not in any dream.
“Now that you’re finally awake, get back to combat training.
I’ve already lost three days waiting around for you.
What a waste of time.”
Every word out of his mouth came dry, clipped, as he could barely be bothered to say it.
Elara just stared at him.
Three days?
Combat training?
Humans?
Meaning, he wasn’t one?
She was still trying to catch up with what was happening.
Half an hour ago, she’d been in Dr.
Karen’s office, going through another round of hypnotherapy, same as always.
She should be hearing the last count right about now, opening her eyes back in that familiar room.
Instead, she was somewhere she’d never seen in her life.
She blinked, and each blink sent a stab of pain through her left eye sharp enough to make her shut them again.
When she finally forced them open, her vision started to clear.
A massive crystal chandelier hung directly overhead.
The walls were covered in gothic detailing that looked completely out of place for anything belonging to a city psychologist’s apartment.
Long drapes covered a tall window on one side of the room, and the bed beneath her was easily twice the size of her own.
She swallowed.
This wasn’t Dr.
Karen’s office.
It wasn’t her room either.
She tried to sit up.
Her body fought her on it.
The pain ripped through her back and shoulders again, and she sank back down.
“What, does everything hurt?” the man asked, mocking, eyes flicking over her with open disdain.
He got up from his chair and crossed to the bed, sitting on the edge of it, leaning in close enough that his next words landed right against her ear.
“A human like you won’t survive here, not with werewolves and vampires around.
You can still pack up and go home.
Before it’s too late.”
Elara froze.
The words made no sense, and yet they felt like something she already knew, something she’d heard a hundred times before, in a place she’d only ever known as a dream.
She looked around the room again, slower this time.
There was something off about it.
Not just that it was unfamiliar–but that underneath all the strange, gilded excess of it, something in her recognized this place.
For the first time in months of trying to claw her way back to something normal, it hit her.
Maybe the session with Dr.
Karen hadn’t failed at all.
Maybe the suggestion had done exactly what it was never supposed to do–pulled her straight back into the place she’d spent a year trying to leave for good.
Elara didn’t need long to reach the only conclusion that made any sense.
She was dreaming again.
This story has been living in my head for a while, and I’m so excited to finally share it with you.
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