Reaching hands
I’m living in a dark and gloomy - and colorless - house with another woman my age, and a little girl of about six who is always holding a doll. Neither of them are anyone I know “in real life”, nor people I’ve seen on TV or in a movie. The woman and I share a room and sleep in the same bed - roommate style. Except that there are two dead people - a man and a woman - who occupy the bed as well. My roommate cuddles up to them at night, and I sleep on the other side of her. I keep reminding her that we need to get rid of the bodies - they’re starting to rot. I’m casual about this, like it’s a housekeeping task that we’ve been procrastinating about.
In the dream, it “feels” like we’ve been living that way for some time. But a suspicion is starting to grow within me that something’s wrong. The little girl, who used to play and move around, becomes progressively less animated, until she does nothing but sit in a chair and stare blankly ahead. The doll she holds goes from being fresh and clean, to smelling damp, to becoming moldy and rotten. I take up the practice of moving the little girl from room to room, sitting her in different chairs, and pretending that the little girl is normal.
I begin to wonder when the last time was that anyone went outside the house. I begin to realize that we can’t leave the house.
The scene changes, and I’m standing in the bedroom facing the woman. The corpses in the bed are severely deteriorated, now, and the woman has a wild and crazed look on her face. I yell at her, “You knew! You knew all along that we were dead and you didn’t tell me!” I realize that I’m holding the little girl’s doll, and as I look at it in my hands, it rots and disintegrates before my eyes.
I look up, and I see the woman reaching into the mouth of one of the corpses on the bed. She pulls away her flattened hand, covered with deep black and cloying gunk. She steps toward me, reaching that hand toward my face. I physically feel panic and I know I cried out or made some sort of noise as I woke up.
