Sleep

I find it difficult to sleep when the power's out. I can't recall the last time before last night (Ondoy, perhaps?) but at that time I slept alone in my room while our parents and the rest of my siblings shared a big room upstairs.

There's a story that bugs just creeps me out until now. An R. L. Steine, methinks. It's about a kid who woke up to a normal day and finds the whole neighborhood suddenly so weird. A neighbor with a child of his (or her? I can't recall) age moved in and they became friends. His old friends never. called him nor dropped by his house. It was summer. He assumed they were out on summer camp. He found their new neighbor weird. People looked at them oddly when they were together. There was also something unnatural about the neighbor's parents. They never bothered to even greet him when he comes over to their house.

Turns out the protagonist was dead and the kid neighbor sees dead people. The dream in the beginning of the story was what really happened. The kid left some fire when they roasted marshmallows at home one night. Their house burned down he died in his room. All along he thought it was a just a bad dream. I'm not sure how it ended exactly but the idea still creeps me out as it did uhm, 10 years ago.

What if I wake up to a bad dream and later on find out that the dream was the reality, and the happy world I live in is the real dream? What if this is all a dream, and in reality there's a zombie apocalypse going on? Or we're being invaded by aliens. I'm not really sure. If life's but a dream, I haven't woken up.