Into Darkness

Jeremy in his dinosaur pajamas and curled up in his race car bed, he is laying in bed staring at the ceiling and has a question pop into his head.
“Mom!” he calls out.
Footsteps of his mother come closer and closer until the door opens and let some of the kitchen light in. His mother comes in tall and lanky-like almost as if being calm and fully relaxed.
“What do you want sweetie?”
“I have a question.”
His mother walks to the side of his racecar bed and sits down asking, “What is it?”
Jeremy stared at his mother with innocence of the question, “Where do we go when we fall asleep?”
“Well Jeremy,” she stops for a moment to think and then comes up with an answer, “we have a new world.”
“A new world?”
“Yes. A world where we can imagine and dream and think freely. It can be whatever you want it to be.”
“So it’s like another happy place?”
“Exactly,” Jeremy’s mother pauses, slowly puts on a different face and adds onto it, but in another tone. “It’s not always happy though Jeremy.”
“It’s not?”
“Oh no,...sometimes it's scary and we don't like it.... we...we fall into another world sometimes.” His mother turns away from him and starts to talk to herself almost trying to process to herself what she is saying aloud. “We can dream good, but... it’s not always that way. Our mind doesn’t always comprehend to see good when we sleep. The dark abyss we sometimes see when we just close our eyes and not even sleep, it can’t be all so real, but it sure feels that way and we begin to think it is real because we made it real.”

Jeremy says in a hush tone and is scared, “okay mommy, I think I’m good now.”
Jeremy’s mother immediately responds, “You’re not though.” She pulls onto the bed sheet with her hand white knuckling and tightly cinched to it as she stares at the bedroom wall, “we are never safe. ...When we sleep, it’s darkness. We can never see light in the darkness. It’s strange though that we can see shadows that are following us and our personal demons that haunt us, but no light. The open mind to think freely is our hell.”
“Mommy, are you okay-?”
“-but just when you think you’ve got past, it comes back... and it comes back harder. Hear the screams and whispers of all those you know and don’t know. These-these strangers that we know of in our dreams are fake, but they know us so well in real life. They know where we are at any moment, they know how to please and trick and scare us. These strangers, they are shadows and demons-”
“That’s enough mom-”
“It’s time that’s not enough Jeremy. We choke on our thoughts and our dreams every moment when we sleep.” The mother squeezes her throat with her other hand. “We can’t breathe once they have a grasp of us. We all think, “it’s not time yet,” but oh how we are so wrong sometimes. The wishes that come true are nothing more than dust and it’s the dust we breathe in and kills us. When it takes our breath, it’s just a matter of time before they come. Before they come.... Before they come and take our souls and enter into darkness-”
“Mommy-”
“-yet, our imagination shows us what is real and not, but doesn’t do any good. ...Once the darkness rises,... it never falls.”

Jeremy saying in a scared, but reassuring tone, “...Okay mommy, I’m gonna go to sleep now.”
Back in reality from her hypnotic moment, she acts like a mother releasing her throat and the bedsheets free and pats him on the leg with a calm voice, "that's my boy."
She stands up and walks to the door like herself, blocking some of the kitchen light and then turns around to look at Jeremy with a smile and dead eyes back to her hypnotized state, “...It’s okay Jeremy.”
Jeremy under the covers stared at his mother in the doorway with confusion, “what?”
She stares just behind Jeremy’s bed for a moment and then looks back at Jeremy and closes the door walking out, putting Jeremy into darkness.

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