A Father’s Waking Nightmare

I remember the sound. The loud slam of my front door being kicked in by an intruder. I reached for anything close by to defend myself. That’s when I realized I couldn’t move.

My entire body was paralyzed. Not with fear, but with the inability to control my appendages, as if they weren’t even mine anymore. It felt as though I was a marionette and the puppeteer pulling my strings had taken the night off. So I lay there lifeless but fully alert as the sound of a home invader drew nearer.

Another loud slam came as my bedroom door was kicked open. In the doorway stood a large shadow figure. The only features I could make out were burning red eyes and sharp, pearl-white teeth.

He wielded a lumberjack’s axe as he rushed toward my bed.

Somehow, I managed to roll my limp body off the bed, and I started to feel the drop. But it wasn’t interrupted by the blunt force of hitting the floor. Instead, I kept falling. The exhilaration flooded my body like what I imagine a skydiver feels on his first jump.

Finally, I found myself lying on the ground. But it wasn’t my room. I was trapped in a briar of thorns and thistles. I was deep in a dark forest. I could move my limbs again, but they were tangled and shredded by what felt like a million cuts from a dull knife.

I squirmed and crawled my way free. There were cuts all over my body, but somehow I wasn’t bleeding. I looked up through the fog and darkness and saw a figure.

She was yelling to me. She wanted to reach out, but she was restrained in what appeared to be an early twentieth-century electric chair. I could see from her face that she wanted to reach out to me, but her hands were strapped down.

I couldn’t fully make out her appearance, but I could feel her presence.

This was my daughter.

I was regaining my ability to stand, but my body was still heavy, as if the extra gravity of this place was pulling me down. I managed to get my feet under me and move toward her.

I yelled out to her, “Don’t be afraid, baby. Daddy is coming!”

As my mouth tried to form the words, they became muffled. It felt as though my mouth was full of jagged Legos. I spit them out and, looking down, saw a pile of my own teeth. I felt myself gagging on the remainder of what was left of them as they too dropped out. I could taste the iron of blood in my mouth.

Then a booming voice filled my head. I could see the shadow man’s face in my mind.

“Save her if you can. You have thirty seconds to reach her before she dies.”

I ran toward her as fast as I could, but when I looked at my body, it was moving in slow motion. I looked back up to where my daughter was, and with a whooshing sound and streaks of light, she was sucked farther away from me.

There was no way for me to get to her in time. Everything felt completely out of control.

I reached for what appeared to be a stone to pull myself along. As I used all of my strength to wrench myself free from my suspended animation, I saw that I was holding a gravestone. Etched into the rock was a memorial.

The name on it was my son’s.

2019 to 2026.

He was dead.

I felt myself growing even weaker, but then my daughter’s voice called out again. Somehow, I was fast-forwarded directly to her.

I reached for the straps to free her from her electric prison. Just then, a switch was flipped. The sensation of a million volts surged through both of our bodies. Her body began to vaporize before me like the ash from Thanos’s snap. I looked down at my hands as they too began to decay and drift away.

“Did you hear what the judge asked you?”

I opened my eyes, and as the blur of the bright lights cleared, I saw the judge. My lawyer was leaning toward me with his hand on my shoulder.

“You just yelled in the courtroom,” my lawyer informed me as I wiped the saliva from my mouth.

“I must have fallen asleep. What did he ask?”

Just then, I heard the judge speak again.

“Mr. Lee, are you in agreement that your marriage is irrevocably broken?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“I will have my findings reported in a document within the next few weeks.”

The anxiety from the dream persisted as I contemplated which was the nightmare: the dream itself, or this moment where the well-being of my children rested in the hands of this man’s judgment.