Bang! Then nothing. Then an intense ringing. I covered my ears with my hands, hoping that would stop the sound. But I couldn’t move my hands. It's like I was paralyzed. The ringing got even more intense. Then I felt pressure in my chest. Intense pressure, as if an elephant was sitting on my chest. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn't move. I started panicking. The ringing was so intense now that it was all I could hear. It felt like someone put a ringing phone next to my ear and it wouldn’t stop ringing. I couldn’t stand it. Then nothing again. The I woke up drenched in cold sweat at four in the morning. “It was just a dream Leah, get yourself together.” I thought. But it felt so real. I stepped out of bed and flipped on my light. I went to my bookshelf and grabbed my dream journal. I wrote down every single part of my dream that I could remember so that I wouldn’t forget it later. My therapist gave me this when I started having these intense dreams after my mom died. This is the third time this month that I've had that dream. I have an appointment with my therapist tomorrow to see how I've been doing. I can tell her about the dreams. I think I might be going insane.

Oh yeah. My name’s Leah, and I’m 11 years old. The dreams? Yeah, I’ve been having them since I was six. Since a year after my mom died. She’s a police officer. Was. She’s dead now, so she can’t be a police officer. She was on patrol and saw a fight breaking out. One of the people involved had a gun. They shot and killed four police officers and severely injured three. My mom was one of the three that got severely injured. She was sent to the hospital right away. She was the forces main officer. They couldn’t risk losing her. She was in the hospital for a long time. She was in a coma the first time I visited her after the accident. I didn’t understand what had happened. Then a few weeks later, her vitals started improving and working on their own. Then she woke up. We all thought she was going to be okay. We even had a welcome home party planned for her. The day that she was supposed to come home we had all of the party decorations set up. Then the hospital called us. They had left for just a second to take a sample of her blood to the lab to make sure that everything was good. When they left, she just died. We haven’t figured out why to this day. When the nurses heard the machines going crazy beeping, it was too late. She was already dead. They tried everything they could. She was gone. I didn’t know what they meant by gone for a long time. Even after her funeral, I kept asking “When’s mommy going to come home?” My dad never wanted to hurt my feelings, so he always said later. After a while he felt he should tell me the truth. Then next time I asked, he said that she wasn’t coming home. I asked why not. My dad said it was because she was dead. I was devastated. I didn’t stop crying for days.

Ever since I was six and knew what really happened to my mom. I’ve had dreams. And not like regular dreams that seem sort of real. I mean dreams that have made me not be able to sleep for days because it felt so real. Dreams that I have frequently repeat themselves, so I have many pages in my dream journal that are nearly identical. Sometimes I think that maybe my dreams tell me things because sometimes I’ll have a regular dream and what happens in the dream happens in real life. My therapist thinks I’m insane. Everyone thinks I’m insane. Maybe I am. But I don’t think I am. If I was actually going insane then I would be strapped to a hospital bed. But you never know. I could be going insane. But that’s not the point. The point is the dreams are too real to be just common night terrors. I had one dream the night. It was freakishly accurate to how she was killed. The dreams bleed into my life now. Fits of terror just walking home from school. The therapist gave me medications. Anti-depressants and a medication to help with “schizophrenia”. Do I have that? Possibly. I was given the medications to see if I was schizophrenic or not. If the medicines helped, then I was. But if not, then they would switch the medications out for another test run of more medications. Sometimes I can take up to 15 pills a day. They’re making me sick. No one can see it, but I can. I know my body. Recently I haven’t been able to keep food down, I can rarely sleep, and my immune system is deteriorating fast. Faster than anyone realizes. The pills are slowly killing me. But they don’t realize it. They think I’m doing it to myself, so they give me more pills. I should stop taking them and maybe I will get better. But they will notice. I could throw the pills away, dissolve them in water and dump it down the sink, flush them. But if I run out, I will have to get a refill.

At school everyone thought I was crazy. I got bullied. I had to get transferred to homeschool recently because of the bullying. But my dad is losing money and I might have to go back to regular school. I hope not. The doctors think I have every stress and trauma related mental illness imaginable. I know one thing, I’m not normal. I can tell. If I was normal, I wouldn’t be having dreams that so accurately portray things yet to come. I get up and get ready for the school day. My dad says I can’t skip doing my schoolwork today. I grab some clothes and a towel and head in the the bathroom to take a shower. I strip my clothes off and step into the tub. I turn the shower on and let the hot water soak my hair. I wash it, condition it, and add some extra conditioner to make it soft. I wash my body and step out of the shower. As soon as I step out of the shower I am hit with a very sudden burst of cold. Like colder than normal. I grab my towel and walk out of the bathroom not wanting to be in there. I wrap my hair up in the towel and get dressed. My outfit choice for today is dark high-rise jeans and a camo crop top hoodie. My dad knocks on my door. I say come in since I am finished getting dressed and he steps in. He looks very tired. The next thing he said shocked me.

“You-your mother's body was stolen. The people who run the cemetery woke up and where her grave was all dug up and her coffin was missing.”

“N-no, that’s not true,” I shout, “it can’t be true!” I am now in tears. I push past him and run out the door not even bothering to grab shoes or a coat.

My dad chases after me shouting for me to come back and that I will freeze, but I don’t listen, I don’t care. I run out in the street forgetting to look to make sure no cars were coming. I hear a horn blaring and I see bright headlights, I brace for impact, I feel a crack in my head, and everything goes black.

I hear a lot of beeping. I try to open my eyes but I cant, I can just tell that the room is very bright. A lot of the light is shining through my eyes lids. I squint to help less of the light come through. I feel like my head exploded. It hurts ad there is a lot of pressure. I can finally open my eyes and when I do there are people standing all around me. I don’t know a lot of them. Maybe I do, and I just haven't seen them in a long time. I don’t remember. I don’t remember a lot of things. I remember running and the blaring horn and the lights. That’s it.. I put the pieces together and assume that I was hit by a car or truck. I can’t remember why I was running though, or what I was running from or to. I assume I'm in the hospital because of all of the bright lights and the people wearing white robes and masks. How bad was I hurt? And how long was I out for? The machines started going off as my heart rate spiked. I was scared and didn’t know why I was here or what was happening.