Chapter 1
He was having that recurring dream for what felt like the thousandth time, as was the case every other time; he was strapped to a white padded table, with bright white light flooding the room he was in.
There were others in the room with him; they were similarly strapped to tables to his right hand side, as far as he could tell there were at least another five people he could see. He couldn’t be sure how many there were, or how far away they were, the brightness of the light in the room made the judgement of size and shape of the room virtually impossible, and although he could guess that they were on tables the same as the one he was on, he couldn’t actually make out the tables, it looked like the other people in the room were hovering in the air.
There was nothing that he could make out to his left hand side except bright whiteness. There didn’t appear to be any single source for the light, it just seemed to explode out of every surface. It was painfully bright, meaning he spent most of the time with his eyes tightly shut, trying to keep the light out of his head. Stopping the brightness invading his brain like millions of tiny daggers, stabbing persistently away into his consciousness.
He briefly opened his eyes and one of his masked captors was stood over him, looking intently at him, seemingly impervious to the bright light that had been driving him insane. It was a man as far as he could tell, stood there in a white lab coat, and a white surgical mask, and what appeared to be a little white skull cap, much like the one that the pope would wear when in full dress robes.
The man had a large needle in his hand, from which he took the protective cap, and pressed gently on the plunger until a little liquid dribbled out of the end of the needle. Then without warning or ceremony, the needle was plunged deep into his upper thigh.
As normal at this point in the dream he woke up, resisting the temptation to open his eyes, always suspicious that when he did he would find that the room he was in would be bathed in that bright unforgiving light, and he would be living that dream again.
He hadn’t had the dream for a few weeks now; it had come to him less and less often nowadays, not like the times when it had been an almost nightly experience. Considering the amount he had had to drink the night before, he was surprised that he had been dreaming at all, let alone this particular one.
The dream always seemed so real, but his memories played tricks on him when he thought about it. Part of him told him that it was something that had happened to him a number of years before, and he seemed really sure that it had, yet another part of his psyche was telling him that the repeated dreams were making him think that he was remembering a real event.
