An Adolescent Dream: A Coursera Assignment

05-08

I sat on a late-summer grassland, aware that it was a dream, and decided to revisit my previous life. No sooner had I made that decision than a red rabbit with white eyes came by and left me a clock, whose hands moved counterclockwise. I picked up the weird clock and suddenly couldn』t help but jump into it. I saw tons of grayish clouds spinning around.

No traits of living things in this space, I started to feel an uncommon loneliness. It was not the loneliness of not accompanied by no one, but the desperate fearfulness of death. I once thought that death was like a dream, which couldn』t be touched or understood. Nobody had the privilege to speak about neither dream or death in a full certainty. I was in a dream, so, I was dead, for now. If I couldn』t get out of it, I would be dead! This dreadful thought came into my sleeping mind and then I felt a strong desire to escape. Nothing was actually done before the clock took me to the district I lived in the very beginning of my life.

It was the palace of my childhood, a palace of sands, bushes, and rabits. I met no one but this girl named Lucy living beside us and I played game with no one but her. I wanted to take a close look on our relationship since I was dying to understand what made the eccentric person I was now. I never had ease with no one, and maybe, it all started from the my relationship with Lucy.

I was dreaming, I knew. So I could see both of them, in an omnipotent view. My name was Lily then, very similiar to hers. I saw me, Lily, trying to talk her into playing the game simulating the tale of Snow White. Lily instructed her to get into that enormous carton, enormous compared to the size of two five-year-old girl. That was cruel, I frowned while watching, realizing I was trying to suffocate her, the brutal desire of a little child. With her innocent eyes wide open, Lucy agreed without hesitate. A subtle smile appeared on Lily face. Had I killed her? In a dream, I was not sure what happened in the real world. I thought, in the dream, if I had, then I must be in jail, then, what would I do if I woke up in the jail? A shrieking scream entered my ears, giving me no time to think about jail anymore. She was dead! I killed her! I woke up and found the sheet wet with sweat.

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Moonlight entered through the window, with the wind of night blowing up her pink curtain. She was sleeping, sound and slient. Suddenly, her eyebrows frowned tight and breath became tense. She fell into her dream, a wide, late-summer grassland, with no living things on it except for the dark green grass. The sky was pink, just as the color of her curtain. Several suns in the shape of moon hung on the sky. Everything was strange yet fit the setting of an adolescent dream. A rabbit came by, leaving her a back-winding clock, then ran away before stopped at afar, staring at her move. She inevitably jumped into the clock, which apparently carried the magic power of time traveling.

A few twisted thoughts came to her mind while retrieving along the time tunnel. Would I be dead if I should be trapped in this dream? She thought, unnoticed of the essence of dream, but solely the mysteriously part of it. People always wondered if they would be trapped in a dream while no one ever was trapped in any dream. Nevertheless, even if somebody was trapped, he would never come back and tell people about it alive!

After a few hours, which equaled to several minutes in the real world, she finally had the chance to flew out of one hole and surprisedly found her palace of childhood, where she lived from the very beginning of her time until the age of ten, when her parents got divorced and she had to move out with her mother to a shabby old apartment. She felt like crying but in the end managed to hold back tears. She saw herself as a five-year-old girl named Lily, a name which she abandoned after moving out of the big house, playing with her friend Lucy. They were playing a game imitating the tale of Snow White. The little girl of her somehow felt a desire to suffocate her lovely playmate, out of the jealousy of the latter』s lovable nature. She instructed her little playmate to play Snow White and enter the carton as the coffin in the story, then she sealed the box. After several hours, which, again, equaled to another minute in the real world, the little friend of her died in that carton. She was terrified but satisfied. Watching all this, adolescent Lily, whose actually name was Gretta now, screamed out loud and woke herself up. The moonlight was still and transparent, wind blowing as usual. It was just the curtain, which was once pink, now turned to the color of a rabbit』s eyes.

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I felt totally lost in the process of writing both short passage. It became more than one scene, I confess. It felt strange switching the point of view. I came to observe more than just what was experienced by the main character but her surroundings and what she didn』t know.

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I want to know if it is confusing to read these two passages and the atmosphere you feel while reading. Thanks a lot.