Writing Prompt: Write Your Dreams

Literally!

Have you ever had a really crazy, off the wall dream? A dream that left you sweating, a dream that made you so lonely you cried or so jubilant that in the morning you wanted to go on a run, or woke with a smile? Ever had a dream that sticks with you even today? Maybe you had it years ago, maybe it was just last night! Whatever the case, WRITE IT DOWN!

Sometimes dreams make the best stories because it's our subconscious telling us the things we haven't been thinking about during the day! Let your brain do the hard work! Don't take those ideas for granted!

For this prompt, I want you to write your dream! No sugar coating, no changing, just stream of consciousness what you remember! Start it where it started, even if it doesn't make sense, end it where it ended, even if it leaves us on the worst cliff-hanger imaginable!

Then take five minutes to edit! Fix little things, make it flow, give it a direction, and (if you're comfortable) post here for me to see! I love reading new writing and I can't wait to see what you all come up with! Happy Writing!

Here's Mine:

I don’t have any family. No, not even extended. I may have a distant cousin or two, but I don’t know how to find them, or if they’d want to know me. I’m sure there’s someone out there, a parent or a half sibling, but they’ve never come looking for me. I think that’s why, after the flood hit, the first thing I did was look at a small struggling family and grab a kid.

“I’m going to help you,” I said. Kira had Mattie and Jacob at the time and I don’t know where the father was or if he’d ever been around. She never speaks about him even now. But she’d managed, on her own, to pull them to the top of one of the skyscrapers in a way only a mother could. People were crowded in like sardines, but the water just kept coming. I don’t know what caused it. No one does, but it wasn’t anyone’s chief concern when it all went down. The buildings crumbled with people still on top and we watched as they got swept away by the rapids, but once we were all lifted it didn’t matter. The gravity shut off and those who survived floated along with the buildings and cars and bits of rubble. Kira’d simply nodded, blond ponytail flapping in the wind eyes vague when I’d thrown Jacob over my back. And, as we all floated up up up into the atmosphere, us and everything else (the cars school busses, buildings) the question became not if we would survive up there without food but if, at some point, we would come crashing back down. Part of me was hoping that we’d find some new sort of civilization up there floating, that maybe we’d just sit in the sky, our biggest worry as a society finding a food and water source. But no, we started falling a few hours after that, once the flood waters had drained away to who knows where. The center of the earth maybe.

Kira and I fell fast and hard and she and her kids took it like champs though we didn’t have a parachute. They didn’t scream, though countless people did. I’d done skydiving before so I tried to show Kira how to orient herself by spreading out her arms and legs like a starfish to slow the descent. But it didn’t do much to help when we were rapidly approaching the ground.

“Throw me.” She mouthed it. It was impossible to hear anything else, but the look in her eyes said she was going to try everything she could to stay alive. I moved Jacob to my chest and dove closer to her, locking our fingers together and touching our feet sole to sole as we approached the ground. It came faster by the second, but right as we approached, I looked her in the eye and pushed with all my might against her feet. The two of us shot outward from each other and landed on our backs with dents in the soft mud.

I may have broken my arm and several ribs, but we were alive which is something I count as a miracle among all other miracles. I’d learned some physics in high school, and even with the softness of the ground to break our fall, even with us shooting outward as much as we could, it wouldn’t make sense for us to have lived. Perhaps it was God, or the absence of sharp things to fall on with all the debris still being lifted, but we made it.

Kira still hadn’t said anything to me at the time; but perhaps my being a late teenager, a kid in my own right, spoke to her. Perhaps she saw a familiar alone-ness in me. I looked at her and saw a young, white lady with two kids and no one to help when the world decided to spit us all out. Maybe she chose me because her instinct as a mother told her she would lose a kid if she didn’t. Maybe looking at me she saw another kid to take care of. Regardless when the flood hit, and the gravity shut off, the world became something different. It became about helping yourself or helping someone else and as much as I hated my own sorry life before all of this, I decided my life was going to be about someone else’s life. For once it was going to be about wrapping someone up with myself and giving a crap. That’s how I wanted to go out: trying.

Kira says now that she wasn’t sure what to make of me at first. The fact that Mattie stopped crying when she looked at me, as if I could solve all the problems the world had to offer (including this one) made her think that I couldn’t be so bad, and if she couldn’t trust a stranger in a time of crisis, when could she truly trust anybody? She said she’d figured that if I wanted them dead I wouldn’t have had to wait long and if I’d been a bad person I would have only bothered with myself.

When we hit the muddy floor and left imprints in opposite directions, the kids koala-d on our chests, the debris still hadn’t fallen yet. I woke up to Jacob frantically patting me, his eyes green and scared and bigger than any eyes I’d seen and Kira standing over me with a hand out. It occurred to me then, that mothers were tougher than anything this world had to offer, and anything I could offer her. But as we ran through the waste and debris of the streets, it struck me that maybe she didn’t know she was strong. Maybe she was so terrified that she needed me around as a buffet to her fear if nothing else. Sometimes in a crisis people make snap judgements and stick close to someone they deem worthy. For me that was Kira, and for Kira that was—inexplicably—me. I offered, she accepted, I reached and she reached, and now we’re family in this messed up world.

The debris didn’t start falling after us until a few hours later, but by then we’d been running down broken streets, trying to get out of the city. The first bit of soggy drywall fell twenty feet in front of Kira and she made the first noise I’d heard from her, a breathy, shocked sort of squeak. Her ponytail bobbed as she looked toward the sky, her breaths getting shallower, her eyes wider the longer she looked. We had a few minutes to find a place to take cover from the worst of it and we weren’t quite out of the city yet.