Guess I’ll throw the beginning of my WIP into the ring...

The water was colder this time, the current stronger where it sucked at his feet. Tugging him further down into deeper blue water while his eyes blurred from the shock, trying to keep sight of the frantic bubbles skittering to the surface that were growing ever further away. Hair, darker than he remembered, longer, tangling in front of his eyes. He raked his fingers through it to try and clear his sight, freezing in space with hands outstretched. Shadows around him. Something big is in the water with him. Walls made of dark stone loom in the darkness, carved in the likeness of a monster with eyes of shifting gems. A halo of celestial bodies centered around the head of an owl whose neck was just a little too long.

He could still feel it, the thing in the water. The image on the wall was covered by the night sky- dark and streaked with stars. He tried to find the source of the sudden darkness, twisting in the water that felt more like thick honey now, cloying and tugging at his clothes. The night sky around him had eyes, and they were bright in the darkness, iridescent. He’d seen them before, looming like the moon through a thick fog, but this time they were different, closer.

They blinked.

Minho woke, frozen, covered in a cold sweat while staring at the ceiling. His fingers refused to move, and every muscle felt pulled tight like a rubber band. His breath caught in a throat still ragged from gasping during the fourth nightmare of the week, this one with even more realism than any of the others in the past. It was some sort of recurring nightmare, one that had resulted in a fear of deep blue water from a young age.

The dreams had started a long time ago, just with the feeling of water pressure on all sides, bubbles and shifting shadows. The shapes evolved over time, always resulting in sleep paralysis when he finally woke up, research and even a therapist not quite helping with understanding the strange visions. Now in his mid-twenties, Seong Minho eventually found the strength to wriggle clammy fingers and toes, slowly working the pins and needles out until he could wedge himself into the corner of his room, eyes adjusting to the light filtered through his curtains. It was getting harder to move once he woke up now, the feeling of the water pressing him down into the bed like a real, physical force. Even the strange muffled sounds of being underwater lingered, his ears prickling with the sensation of bubbles floating upward.

There was a small notebook on the crowded bedside table beside a well-used candle and an empty glass of water, a pen tucked into the last page that had been hastily scribbled on the last night they had the dream. Minho had started writing the dreams down at the age of ten, when they became more than the sensation of water and a prickling feeling of danger. Several notebooks of different sizes and materials leaned against each other on a shelf above the bed, all describing the dream as it began to continue and become more detailed. Books weren’t as common anymore, technology evolving to have tablets used in place of pages, but the fondness for writing and looking back through the pages kept Minho buying small notebooks at the store whenever pages were running low.

There was another book, bigger, beneath the one that Minho was hastily recording the dream in. He was trying to get all the details down before they could be forgotten in the minutes after waking, knowing what would happen if he didn’t get to the pages in enough time. It had happened before, leaving Minho with the crushing anxiety that something truly important had been left unsaid and lost. That, and something about scribbling the image of the beast down onto something physical, the presence of graphite on paper that was stained with age and tea giving the beast more realism than using his tablet, where anything could be conjured. Something about looking through old drawings, growing fainter and more smudged as the years went by, made the dreams feel like they were more than just dreams. The carvings on the walls were harder to recover from his memories, almost like something prevented him from having more than a foggy recollection.

A blinking light in the corner of his eye caught his attention, now that the morning routine of scribbling everything down with a single-minded purpose had been fulfilled. His little brick of an alarm clock proudly presented the time in a deep blue, the one color that Minho had found annoyed him the least in the morning. It wasn’t the emerald litany of go go go or the ominous flashing of red lights that had nearly given him a heart attack the first time he had woken up from one of his worst nightmares, watching as the ceiling of his room warped with crimson that dripped and ran down the walls. Later that afternoon, his therapist had told him that sleep paralysis could include hallucinations.

The clock had only been red for one day.