The Daemon of Sands

I am walking away from the old house and I feel as though I am walking home. There are people with me, and though they feel familiar within The Dreaming, I do not know them in The Real. We are walking down the road, away from the first church, in the dead of the night, disturbed only by the light of the street lamp.

Suddenly a sand jinn, a daemon of sand, swirls before us, sucking us under and into itself like quicksand. Very soon I will be lost forever. Oblivion awaits … a long-forgotten home. I awake from The Dreaming but am not yet within The Real. Instead I am within a tween time … a tween place … a place of lucidity and of waking dreams.

My eyes still closed, the daemon Diablo screams before the black screen behind them saying, “Why are you so afraid?! This is nothing new or strange! You have been here before!” I do not know what he is talking about.

Now, there is a pressure on me, and I cannot rouse or raise myself. I cannot lift my eyes. I cannot inhale air and breathe, and when I finally do manage to crack my eyelids, heavy as they are with sleep and fear, there is a Presence before and above and around me. Although I can’t see it, I can feel it clearly.

I am fully awakened by the sound of my garbled and inarticulate groans as I struggle to escape the Presence and the dream state. When I roll over onto my side and fall asleep again however, the Dream, as I feared it would, did not resume.