The world was near its end.
Darkness ruled the outer world. The sky was black. The air felt heavy.
I woke up all sweaty and hurried to the bathroom to see me in the mirror. My face was all red except the area of my eyes, nose and mouth. It felt really hot. I turned on the water and tried to cool my face down, but the water was warm. I switched it to cold, and it did feel cold to my hands, but in my face it still was warm water. I was horrified, fearing I had got a crazy plague.
My dad appeared and he went outside with me, into the terrifying darkness. We walked along a country road, then he took me into a house. In there I recognized some of my female classmates and friends, and I went over to greet them. In the dream I thought it was Jenny's house, but now I know it couldn't have possibly been. It looked rather like a pub.
My father suddenly disappeared, and I was standing outside again. The sheer blackness of the endless night gave me a shiver. I was alone. The building was gone.
At some point Constantin, another classmate, appeared and we went into some sort of shop. There was nobody inside. I don't recall exactly what we did then, but I know we ended up picking up coins which were lying around on the floor and on some of the products in the shelves. For some odd reason we cut some hull down from the coins, whereas the cut down part was worthless, and the rest was the actual coin and its respective value. Even more strange, the coins were pounds and pennies.
In the dream I thought we were stealing. The shopkeeper came in and started looking for something. We hid the coins in our hands behind our backs. Just as if it were a game, I knew something would happen that would cause us to be caught. I walked to the door. A small coin slipped through my fingers and dropped onto the floor, making a climpering sound. It was loud enough. From the corner of my eye I could still spot the shopkeeper turning around in my direction, then I silently slipped through the door and ran back the direction we had come from. Every couple of meters I put a hull of a coin (which ironically looked like caps from beer bottles), just to make sure Constantin would be able to follow me if he had managed to escape.
While all of this happened, I never noticed there had never been any people on the road. Really, there was nobody. It may have been totally dark, but there were light sources, the street lamps. They seemed like the only objects to break through the blackness.
After a while I crossed a small bridge and reached some kind of garden which belonged to a residence. There were a lot of 2-person benches and tables. Oddly enough every seat was occupied by children. Children that most probably were around ten years old. I walked around a bit and nearly became paranoid. What were all those children doing? Just sitting and staring at me. Scary.
When I looked around, I thought about the only little child in approximately that age I could think of. Right at that moment I spotted her. She was sitting at the left end of a bench at the table which was nearest to the bridge.
That little girl was Ivana. She is Constantin's 12-year-old sister who was glancing at me with the same sharp look she always has at school. Nevertheless she was really cute. I went up to her and took her with me.
We walked over the bridge, back into the direction the shop had been. I don't know if the coin hulls were still lying there, but after some time we spotted Constantin and the shopkeeper. She was dragging Constantin into the direction we were going. He did not see us. Ivana and me tried to catch up, but all of a sudden a huge gate appeared. It was coming closer. I noticed Constantin dropped the coins in his hand onto the side of the road. I went to pick them up, then followed them again.
A huge amount of people were lining up to get into the gate. At the end of the line guards were standing, controlling each person. At that moment it came to me that the gate was a kind of prison where people went to, most of them without being told to. I also knew that gate meant death. Eternal death.
Though Constantin didn't want to go in; he was forced by the shopkeeper. They were in the middle of the line-up when me and Ivana reached the gate. I left Ivana at the near corner of the gate and hurried to the guards. I got there just when Constantin was controlled. My face burnt. I asked the guards to let him go, I even tried to bribe them (I recall having had exactly 9 1-pound coins and some pennies), but they stayed stern. Stern, as the whole dream had already been. It scared me really hard.
Desperately I went back to his little sister and put my arm over her neck and shoulders. She seemed like she wanted to cry, but she didn't manage it. Together we watched Constantin pass through the gate. I was totally perplex about the line-up; did everybody really think salvation would expect them there?
I had some kind of church music in my ears (similar to Dante's Prayer and Falai Mina Amor), when I saw Jenny and her friends in the line-up. I remember shouting at them. It was something along the lines of "Jenny! NO!!". They wouldn't listen, of course...
It WAS a nightmare, after all. Sometime around then I woke up, wondering why and how I still lived.
