The Dream

Her eyes popped open, like a cork escaping an ice-cold bottle of champagne. She rested her head on the pillow for a minute lost in translation, trying to piece together the fragments of the dream that were whirling, blizzard-like, around her head. It had been the same dream. The same dream she had dreamt over and over again for the past fortnight. She had been wearing a heavy red cloak with a fur-trimmed hood, pulled right up over her head and drawn close around her neck. It had been snowing. Hard. She could hardly see and the wind was icy - that much she could hear because she hadn't felt cold. She could remember walking up to a black iron gate and peering cautiously through the bars when she saw it. And then she had pushed and the gate had silently swung forwards and her feet had carried her onto the pebbled drive and up towards an old Victorian house, which looked dark and uninhabited apart from a glowing ball of light coming from a window on the first floor. She could sense her pulse beating under the cloak and she had reached a pale white hand inside and laid it upon her heart. Those same feet had carried her resisting, fearful body right up to the front door with it's cracked white paint and rusty hinges that had screeched ominously as her trembling hand had pushed, not hard, and the door had creaked open. And now she had been inside. She could smell the age of the house, the years wafting towards her out of the darkness. For it had been pitch-black inside and any light she had been gifted with from the moon had been shut out as she entered. However, with the loss of the light came the gain of the low-pitched hum. A hum she didn't recognise from a song her ears had never heard. It had sounded like it was coming from down the spiral staircase. She couldn't see that is was a spiral, but she had guessed correctly. And as her feet carried her onto the first step she imagined it to be elegantly winding down from the first floor like a giant tongue. As she had climbed the gentle eery hum had grown louder, but not because she was getting closer to it - that much she knew - but because her ears felt it crescendo as her pulse quickened. She had felt that her heart couldn't possibly beat any faster or it might explode. Her senses had suddenly been so alert that her eyes had fought the darkness and been able to make out a huge portrait from the top most stair. And as she had teetered there swaying slightly a brilliant white stallion with fierce red eyes had glared angrily back at her, as it reared on it's powerful hind legs. She had gasped and the darkness had rattled in through her open mouth and at that exact moment the humming had stopped. Scared and unnerved by the horse and the sudden silence, she had unintentionally stepped backwards, her foot getting caught up in the heavy red cloak or had it been the darkness that had crept back up behind her? She hadn't known. But the sudden realisation that she was going to fall backwards down the spiral staircase had hit her. And then at that split second in the dream she had woken up. Her eyes had popped open like a cork escaping an ice-cold bottle of champagne. And now she was here in her large white cloud, with the duvet pulled up around her neck encasing her in a safe soft feathery cocoon.