I was walking with my friend Charlotte to my house. The sky was dusty and grey, only a few dejected clouds smeared across. Rotting, brown leaves were floating to the ground from the trees lining the street, but none of them actually had leaves – They were simply falling out of the sky. Their decaying scent filled the air, humid and stale. The world seemed to be so abandoned. My house was only a few meters away from us at this point. We’ve only been walking for a few minutes. Only it wasn’t my house – It was small and drab. Like one of those poor bungalows that you would find on a rundown little street. The only resemblances it had to my real house were the dull red and orange bricks, the chipping front steps and the white front door. The porch was square, with a white metal fence around it, but that wasn’t all – Tall, white metal bars coming from the top of the roof enclosed the entire porch like a cage. The paint was chipping and disintegrating. It was more of a jail cell than the front of a house. The front steps lead to an iron door, painted white as well. You had to unlock it to get onto the porch. The metal bars and fence seemed to embrace the door, closing off the entire area from the world around it. The dream skipped to when we were on the porch. Looking out from the prison-like area, I noticed that the door had around eleven locks on it. They were huge and silver, like the house was hiding military weaponry or something. “My house has so many locks” I said to Charlotte, who seemed to be undisturbed by any of it. I can’t remember what she said next, but she mumbled something like “Really?” and went over to see for herself. She looked and looked but she couldn’t see them. “They’re right there” I said, pointing right at them. She still couldn’t discern the locks. I placed my hands on sides of her arms and moved her into my view. “Now can you see them?” I said. She nodded silently in a daze, but it was clear that she still couldn’t detect the locks and had no idea of what I was talking about. I stopped trying. We both turned around to actually go inside the house. Another white door stood in front of us. Beside it, there was a large, rectangular window with its shades open atop the same thick, cement window sill that my real house had. We couldn’t see inside – There was only darkness. This time, the door had no locks. Nothing but an ashy brass handle. I tugged on it, but it wouldn’t budge on the first try. Was it locked from the inside? I tugged again and this time, it made a loud crackling noise as it opened. It was the type of sound you hear when you open a door that hasn’t been touched in years. Like the house is gasping for air after being suffocated for decades. Right when the door opened, we heard a laughter coming from somewhere in the building. It sounded like a little girl, but it was a horrendous cackle, like she was choking on her own spit. As soon as I heard the noise, I lunged underneath the stone window sill, in an effort to hide from whatever was in the house. Charlotte followed, landing with her face on my boots. I wriggled forward like a caterpillar, attempting to make more room for her. My face was pressed up against the filthy orange bricks, cobwebs flickering in the wind before my eyes. My vision was blurry and my cheek was cold from the frigid wall. The dream yet again cut out a chunk of the story, leaving behind a blank space waiting for me to fill it in. This time I was all alone in the cell of a porch. Charlotte was on the outside with my whole family on the driveway. My dad, my mom, and my brother were there. They were all laughing and smiling and carrying luggage, except for Charlotte, who just stood there. She was staring me right in the eyes, a look of emptiness plastered on her face. I turned around to open the door to the house again. Someone had closed it. I reached for the handle and clicked it open. Instantly after I did, I saw what had made the hideous noise that I heard earlier. A little girl stood in the doorway. Her hair was mangled and dirty, like a cat had used it as a scratching post. It was jet black, much like I dyed my hair a few days before the dream, and cut short to her chin. She started to scream, a ghastly noise that came from deep within her, a tortured cry. She was wearing a pallid, faded pink nightgown with white polka dots and lace around the hems, a small bow in the middle of the neckline. Her skin was dead, a bruised, yellowing anemic color. Blue contusions were flecked all over it and her veins stood out like her skin was made of glass. When she looked up at me, her hair moved out of her face. She looked just like Anne Frank, but she looked like me at the same time. A gruesome mixture. After screaming in my face for a straight minute, she turned around and ran back into the hot, dim house. I followed after her, stumbling into the darkness. After running for a few seconds that seemed more like hours, I reached a room. It looked like it was made for a newborn baby. A white but grimy cradle sat at one side as a tall mirror sat at the end of the room above an also white cabinet. A closet that had one door slightly opened was across from the mirror. The girl was right in front of me, and she was leaning against something on the floor. It looked like another baby cradle, but it had one leg broken and it was slanting. I grabbed her hair and started shaking her head back and forth violently; yelling obscurities along the lines of “Get out! I don’t need you here! Why are you in my house!” A feeling of panic spread out from my chest and permeated me. I was sobbing. She kept leaning against the cradle as I was rocking her head in terror, and she was breathing heavily. I could feel the hot breath on my hand. Her head began to spin around to look at me while in my hands. Her face was no longer that of a ghostly girl: It was now a man. He was grinning like a maniac, but his toothy grin morphed into a hostile frown very quickly. He began to scream incomprehensible obscenities at me. He was trying to tell me something. He was angry that I was in the house and I shouldn’t be there, and that I was dangerous. The dream then cut to me looking at myself in my bathroom mirror. The house had returned to normal, the lights were on, and my family was there again.