I lay on the wooden floorboards, facing directly upwards. My hands were numb, and my feet were cold. I could feel my face—my cheeks, my chin and my forehead all coated in sweat, along with the tears that slowly crept down my cheeks. I felt excruciating pain at some areas, and nothing at others. There was one thing that was constant in my entire body, however.

I couldn't move anything.

I was clueless as to whether the paralysis was just of my own imagining, or if the fall had truly damaged my nervous system. All I knew was that the pain coming from those random areas were distracting enough to pull me away from going deep into what was happening to me. It also stopped me from moving, as if I had or could have done so, it would have been unbearably uncomfortable.

As the pain began to swallow my consciousness whole, my eyelids started to relax at the same time. Gravity pulled them directly downwards onto my corneas but couldn't drag them across the surface of my eyes to cover them. Despite my rather widely opened eyes, I couldn't endure the drowsiness. I just wanted to go to sleep and put all of the pain in my body behind me. It was just too hard to resist the temptation of going unconscious.

But someone stopped me.

A face hovered over my view, capturing my attention instantaneously. My blurred vision obstructed me from getting a proper glimpse of what was happening, but I could see a familiar pair of lips moving. My ears quickly caught on, picking up the noise from the person who was making them. And I immediately recognised who it was.

My father.

My brain wasn't able to process anything that he was saying, but I could tell from his tone of voice that he was panicking, distressed over my situation. I wanted to just speak a few words to give him reassurance, but all I could do was barely move my lips and make incoherent noises. I could tell that he had become even more distraught, as he brought up something from his pocket and put it to his ear.

He was calling someone.

As I continued staring up blankly at the ceiling, and often at my father went watched over me, I contemplated my previous choices. I wondered why I had even been so careless to have a fall like I did. A fall that caused me to nearly experience blackouts and go unconscious. I pondered deeply about it.

I tried to recall why I had even fallen in the first place. I then remembered running towards the door at the sound of the doorbell. I did that because my father had ordered pizza. However, as I focused on the very thing that I was excited about and had caused me to fall while running towards it, I found something odd that didn't make sense.

I hated pizza. There was no reason for me to have been jubilantly rushing over at the sound of the pizza man's arrival. The fact that I completely fallen over and injured myself so badly showed the level of enthusiasm there was in me. It just didn't make sense. Thus, I found another way to look at the issue at hand: I thought about why I even hated pizza in the first place.

And as I recollected the reason why, a shock came rushing towards me.

It wasn't just your usual "Eureka" moment that you would experience when figuring something out. No, this ain't nothing like that. It was more of a jolt, a mind-opener, where I could see more things now. I could see what was happening.

I'm 27, and I swore decades ago that I would never take a slice of pizza again. My father died from a heart attack after I was sent to juvie and my mother got fatally knocked down in a car accident.

Yet in this world, I had the mind of a child, the passion for enjoying pizza and alive parents.

I began panicking, shaking violently in anxiety as if I was experiencing a seizure. Tears were forced out of my eyes quicker than ever, as I had a complete breakdown. I realised that it was going to be just like every other night in the past 20 years. I was going to have to relive my trauma for the millionth time.

Another nightmare of my mother's death.

As I finally realised what was happening, that all of this wasn't real, my senses came back to me. I regained control of my movement, my hearing and my vision. I could still feel some numbness here and there, still stopping me from moving much, but the pain was all gone.

"Shanice! Where are you?" my father yelled in the background as I watched him speak right into the microphone on his phone.

As he wasn't on speaker, I couldn't hear my mother on the other end of the line. Even so, I could already tell that she was also bothered by what was happening to me, seeing how my father was supposedly responding to her. I wanted to just get up and comfort the both of them once my mother had arrived back home, but I knew I couldn't do that anymore. They were both dead, and this was just a dream. I knew it well.

In spite of my excessive awareness of what was going on in my lucid dream, I still felt uneasy. It had always been so real to me—the trauma that I relived every night when I slept. I could tell myself over and over again that ain't nothing was real, but it wouldn't work. It just made me even more emotional and all.

After much deep thinking, I watched as my father ran over towards the main door. He swung it open rapidly with much force, looking outside for my mother. He then went down to the porch, before spotting her across the street. She had parked her car on the opposite side due to road works on our side of the road.

As my father began waiting for her, she got out of her car, slamming her car door shut and locking it. Even from far, I could see the anguish in her eyes, as she rushed over desperately to see me. She ran across the street hurriedly, running towards me as she saw me on the ground in the house.

However, I began wailing even more, mentally shaking my head in fear. My limbs went number than ever, as a chill ran down my spine and drove me out of my wits. I attempted to bring up my hand and wave it at my mother, signalling at her to stop, but it moved too slowly. She couldn't see it from that far either way and wouldn't even have been able to tell what I was trying to say.

Realising that it was all fruitless, my hand dropped back down before it had completed its action. A final tear rolled down my cheeks as I reflected on my failed attempt to save my mother. I watched emotionlessly as my mother was ran over by a drunk driver for the millionth time.

The moment she was hit by the hood of the car, time seemed to slow immensely. Only my actions seemed to be going at normal speed. Everything else—the movement of the car, the reaction of my father, and the flying birds in the background—slowed, as my whole world went into slow motion.

I watched in horror as my mother slowly floated upwards from the impact, flying towards the sky. Her eyes remained open, her consciousness still around. As she continued moving through the air and forward gradually, she stretched her arms forward towards me, as if she were reaching out to me.

She muttered two words that I had already expected to hear, seeing how she would always say it. "I'm sorry." And every time she said that, the world would go dark. Everything that was tangible around me faded away. The pizza man, my father, the arriving paramedics all collapsed into ash. All that remained was my mother, who was still levitating in slow motion, and myself, witnessing what was happening.

Only after a while would I realise that it was no longer slow motion that she was moving in, but simply the speed at which she was morphing into something else. A black silhouette swarmed around her, swallowing her up as she retracted her arms into it. It was almost as if she was a caterpillar, wrapping herself in a cocoon as she turned into something else.

I had seen this all too many times, but it was still impossible to feel crestfallen over the incident. No matter how much I told myself to get over it, and that it was over, I would still break down into tears in my dreams and wake up crying. My familiarity with this event after seeing it in my dreams for years couldn't stop me from putting it behind me.

And this was when I told myself that it was all over. That I had been brave and went through the dream well. Because in every cycle of this dream, I would never get to see what she would turn into after the black figure engulfed her. I would either wake up or stop dreaming and continue with my sleep.

This time, however, things changed for the first time in 20 years.

Instead of ending right there, the nightmare went on. I couldn't help but feel uneasy, as I sensed that there was some sort of eerie aura surrounding my mother's "cocoon". It wasn't a good feeling at all, and it made my heart pound against my chest to the point that it was as if it was trying to escape.

I told myself to wake up from the dream so that it would stop. However, that was something out of my control, as I remained in it. With no other choice, I sat there on the empty ground, watching apprehensively as my mother transformed into something else that I had never gotten to see before.

As the black "cocoon" surrounding her began retracting, I peeled my eyes open to look carefully at what was happening to her. She pushed herself out of the dark figure, facing away from me so I couldn't see her. It was clear that her outfit had changed, which somewhat blended in with the void-filled background. Everything looked somewhat normal.

Until I realised that she didn't just have an outfit change.

She spun around instantly, staring right at me. I didn't even know whether to continue referring to her as "her" anymore. It was as if "it" had become more suitable. As soon as I recognised what she had morphed into, I decided that using "it" was indeed better. I stopped staring at the familiar beast, getting up and turning away. I immediately made a run in the direction away from it, dashing through the endless void.

However, it all went to waste as the heavy footsteps got louder and closer to me. I knew that I couldn't outrun it. As soon as I felt it right behind me, I heard shrieks coming from other invisible beings, prompting me to join them in screaming before the alien dragged me down into a lying position.