"I watched myself die… thirteen times before I realized I wasn't the one dreaming."
It didn't feel like a dream at first.
There was no sound. No weight. No warmth. Just… silence. Thick and absolute. Like the kind you only notice when your ears are ringing from the absence of everything else.
I stood in a hallway ..... my school's hallway, I thought, but something felt off. The walls were tinted in this pale, sickly red, and the lights overhead flickered like a dying heartbeat. The floor was soft under my shoes, not tiled, but not carpeted either. I didn't look down. I don't know why. I just didn't.
There were people, too. Students. Frozen in place like someone had hit pause on reality. A guy mid-laugh. A girl flipping her hair. A teacher reaching for the door handle. Everyone stuck like statues.
Except one.
Ten steps ahead of me, a girl turned her head, only her head, slowly, and too far, like her neck was made of rubber. Her eyes were pitch black. Not hollow. Not blank. Just... wrong.
She didn't speak with her mouth, but I heard her anyway — loud and low, like her voice was scraping through my spine.
"This version of you... doesn't belong here."
Before I could move, the world shattered.
I don't know how else to describe it. The hallway cracked... not physically, but visually. The space around me splintered into shards like a broken mirror, each shard reflecting a different version of this same moment.
And in every shard, I saw myself.
Dozens of me. Hundreds. Thousands.
Each one doing something slightly different. One was running. Another was standing calmly. One curled into a ball. One held a knife. One cried. One laughed. One jumped through a window. One just stared at me with a look of pity.
And in every single shard --
I died.
Over and over. In so many ways.
Fast. Slow. Loud. Quiet.
It didn't even feel like fear anymore. Just numbness. Cold and endless.
Then one of them... one version of me... broke the pattern.
He didn't die.
Instead, he turned toward me. Lifted his head. Smiled like he'd been waiting.
"Guess it's your turn now."
⚡ I gasped awake...
"Huff... Huff... Huff…"
My chest heaved like I'd just broken through the surface of deep water. My throat burned. Sweat clung to every inch of me — my shirt stuck to my back like glue.
I blinked rapidly. Everything was still spinning.
I could still see him — that version of me, the one that smiled before everything collapsed — burned into the back of my eyes like a flashbang.
"Huff... I— what the hell was that..."
My fingers trembled as I gripped the edge of the mattress. For a few seconds, I didn't move. I just listened — to the slow creak of the fan above me and the pounding in my ears.
My room was here.
My desk. My books. My backpack slumped over the chair.
But it all felt… wrong.
Like someone had taken the real version and reconstructed it from memory — and missed the tiny details.
Still dazed, I fumbled for my phone. My thumb clumsily mashed the power button.
The screen flicked on.
October 12th
7:16 AM
I froze.
"No, no… it was the eleventh. I swear it was just the eleventh."
My breath caught in my throat. I stared at the numbers, half expecting them to flicker back into place.
They didn't.
"Huff… huff…"
I unlocked the phone.
Notifications were normal — memes from my friends, a ping from a class group, two missed calls from Mom.
But then I saw the wallpaper.
And my stomach sank.
It was a photo of me. Standing in front of some school building. But not my school. The architecture was different. Cleaner. Taller. The uniform I was wearing had a different crest. I was smiling in the picture — wide and confident.
I had never seen this photo in my life.
My hands started to shake.
I got out of bed, slow, like I didn't trust my own body. My legs felt… floaty. Weak. I walked to the window and pulled the curtain aside.
It looked like my neighborhood.
But it wasn't.
The corner shop had a different name. The streetlight design was wrong. There was a train line where there used to be an old tea stall.
It was all almost the same.
That's what made it worse.
I stepped back, heart pounding again.
Sat down on my bed, phone still in hand, and whispered:
"This isn't my world."
And this time, I wasn't dreaming.