What if your dreams weren’t just dreams? Would you know? Would you be more powerful or vulnerable there?
Some say sleep is just a little death. Do you think you can return from death?
These stories are inspired by dreams that I or others have had. I’ve then gone on to make a little collection of them for your reading pleasure. But be warned, don’t read them before bed time and make sure your room is well lit when you do read this.
Relation to my other work
Estranged encounter is a mystery-horror short story set in my shared universe and is a contemporary of my Niels Feynman comic series. There was a lot of back story that I couldn’t fit in the comic and that really wasn’t for young kids anyway, so I decided to do a separate series for that content.
I wrote this as practice for my upcoming bigger novel projects and as a way to show another side to the world Niels inhabits, one kids should not know about, one filled with monstrous creatures indifferent to your suffering and always hungry.
Genre: Science fiction – Horror (cosmic horror)
Themes: depression, fear of closeness, dream symbolism, interconnectivity.
Plot
Three centuries from now human have access to time and space travel, thus their world is so much bigger now. Amongst various interplanetary conflicts several ordinary people find themselves caught in a deadly trap they had no way of knowing they were falling into. Many try and escape, resist, fight back thinking it is a monster of a more tangible nature, one they can confront and beat because of their human exceptionalism. Yet one by one they all fall, some get further, closer to the truth, but in the end, none ever get to change the wish they made, and none get what they truly wanted.
Spoilers
The common thread between the protagonists is depression and a mysterious collection of poems, which read when they are in such a vulnerable state enables an ancient creature to possess the protagonist and take over the bodies they no longer wished to have.
Each chapter features another protagonist struggling with personal issues which they cannot escape, and in the end, they are all consumed by a creature which seeks to liberate itself with a key that they had inadvertently been passing along from one to another.
Hisame Artwork 