I'm a nightmare dressed like a daydream [kait]

Anastasia was asleep, but in the way of those who were dreaming, she was unaware.

It was not a happy dream. It was a nightmare, the very worst kind. It was a new kind of nightmare, based on a fear she'd never had before.

She was buried. Buried in a coffin, six feet under, but alive. She wouldn't die. She would stay there forever, never dying. So many fears were irrational, but this one made perfect sense. Anastasia could not die without someone making a true, proper effort to kill her. If she were in an accident, they would declare her dead, and then - if the damage was bad enough it took her a while to recover - bury her. The only reason she hadn't been buried the first time she'd died was they'd been busy autopsying her parents. There had been no next of kin to deal with the funeral or demand the bodies back, and so she'd lay on a slab for three days until she'd suddenly snapped awake enough for someone to notice.

She had tried not to think about it, but on the boat ride to the islands it was hard to think about anything else. Every possible direction was bad. She couldn't think of home (she missed it too much), she couldn't think of her parents (good and dead), couldn't think of her own situation....

What else was there?

And so it came back to the dream. The same dream, three nights in a row. In a tiny box, underground. She could see, despite the fact that there was no light, and she knew exactly how small the space was... and she was afraid. So afraid, not making even a single sound, but terrified that she would be down there forever.

If she suffocated, would she just keep coming back, over and over again?

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Tag to @"Kait"​

To Anastasia, the nightmare was more or less the ultimate one. It was haunting, the sort of thing that was going to stick with her long after she stopped dreaming that particular dream. So to suddenly be told - by absolutely no one - that her dream was boring... well, that was enough to maker her jump.

While the box was dark, and should technically had been pitch black, Anastasia could still see just fine using the logic that dreams ran on, and she was very much alone. And yet, for reasons entirely unknown to her, her fear was slowly slipping away, replaced by, of all things, disappointment.

Disappointment? She was buried alive and she was disappointed in herself?

There were so many questions, but as dreams tend to do, everything just sort of smoothed itself over. She simply accepted she was disappointed. She simply accepted that there was a disembodied voice talking to her.

And then she began to talk back.

"I was being buried alive." Because of course that would be a perfect explanation. "Could you get me out?" There wasn't really any fear left over. It was easy enough for her to slip away from fear when distracted in real life, and in dreams it was all the more true.

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Tag to @"Kait" ​

The whole thing was absurd. She couldn't get herself out. She was trapped - trapped in a coffin, six feet under. Or at least she thought it was six feet, but in the way that dreams worked, nothing outside of what she was aware of was really there. It wasn't as if she dreamed up an entire earth - no, really only the things she could directly see existed, and then they faded to nothing around her.

She couldn't even see anything, but she could sort of feel that whatever it was had moved away, and then that it had come back.

"I don't have any secrets." She muttered quietly, but that was not quite a lie. She had secrets - she just didn't generally consider them so. Her parents professions were a matter of state secrecy, but realistically she didn't know much more than the general idea of it. She didn't truly consider her parents deaths to be a secret, nor her powers - she would speak about it if prompted, but she would never volunteer that information.

For some bizarre reason, it didn't occur to her to ask what the voice was. In the real world she would have absolutely asked, but in the dream it simply made perfect sense that there would be a disembodied spirit floating around. It was a graveyard, after all.

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Tag to @"Kait" ​

She couldn't see the thing, but she could feel it when it poked her, and she reached up to try and swat the poke away, only to miss it entirely.

The whole thing was really just strange, but it wouldn't be until the next day (assuming she even remembered the dream) that she would realize just how strange it was.

"I can't die." She muttered quietly. It wasn't quite true (she could actually die), as it was simply extremely hard to do. She could be killed if someone knew about her power in advance and was very intent on killing her. "So I was killed, and then I came back, and I came here to avoid it." Was that a secret? She supposed it was something that you couldn't figure out without talking to her. It wasn't like she had wings or a third eyeball or anything. There was no way to tell what her power was unless you witnessed her die and stuck around, or if she told you.

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Tag to @"Kait" - thread dropped​