It's a form of therapy to write first-person, based-on-a-real-story kinds of entries. But when I prompted someone close to me to comment on my "true" stories, his words were: "stick to fiction."
Therefore, for each of the first kind of entry, I'm going to try to submit an acutely fictitious piece as well. Here goes.
Story One
Prompt: dreams.
Lucy had been dreaming in color lately. Loud colors.
She didn't approve of them at all.
Still, she supposed it was a kind of blessing they didn't come on all at once. Lucy was grateful, if somewhat ruefully, of this pitying allowance. She was convinced that, had her dreams been flash-lit with all the new hues at once, Lucy P. Wittmyer, for all her strength and stamina, would have fainted on the spot. Nevermind that she was already asleep, either. That visual onslaught would have overwhelmed her, clear and simple.
Lucy liked to think of herself that way. Not overwhelmed; 'clear and simple'. She was a 'clear and simple' kind of person, as any member of her church group could testify. Her mother would have agreed to the nomenclature. Her husband certainly believed her to be of this sort. He had, in fact, remarked upon just this quality as he proposed. "You're a clear and simple woman, Luce," he'd said. "Clear and simple. Like a summer sky. When I ask you to marry me, I know right upfront I'm looking at a beautiful day the rest of my life." Lucy liked this about herself. She liked to cut out distractions, go about her business, to deruffle her life as thorough as possible. To keep everything clear and simple as much as she could.
That's why these colors, these vivid greens and reds and oranges in her dreams, were startling her. She didn't like them. She had no idea where they were coming from, and they seemed to belie a complexity and curiosity wholly against her nature.
Her dreams were plain as day, and always had been. From the time she was young, her sisters Ruby and Carol might wake up yelping in the night about a dragon, or a boogeyman, or something even more fantastic. Otherwise, the next day and in a thoughtful way, the girls might recount a shimmering palace or other wonder in their dreams. To both the good and the bad, Lucy had listened. She always failed to visualize anything meaningful. Imagination did not come naturally to her, and soon enough she lost interest even in listening to her sisters' accounts. Her own dreams were filled with sitting in a dream classroom, walking through a dream park, or doing dream homework. She might wake annoyed to realize the efforts of her dreams wouldn't count toward her report card, but she never woke shocked by creative terrors nor did she smile, dreamy and languid, refusing to open her eyes and banish the fantasy brought to life in her own sleeping mind. Until recently, of course. Until the colors first started appearing in her dreams.
She remembered most occurences. Despite the unusual nature of the colors appearing in her dreams, they were still dreams, and there were some that Lucy knew of as a lost event and nothing more. On occasion she would wake, the fingers of her mind grasping futilely at smoke in the wake of the sun, and know only that she had been dreaming of color. Real or imagined, many tones or one, she could not say. Only the imprint COLOR remained in her head when the rest had cleared.
The first time it had happened, she had been eating blueberries. Well, not her, but dream-her. Dream-Lucy, for ease of reference, was eating a bowl of blueberries in the kitchen. Dream-Lucy remembered thinking, oddly, that the blueberries were exceptionally tart, in the most delicious way. Dream-Lucy, on having this thought, suddenly knew, as certainly that the walls around her were her own kitchen walls, that she was not actually tasting the berries. Rather, she realized, she was thinking that the blueberries were perfectly tart, and so to her dream-tongue or dream-mind or whatever it was, they were. She was experiencing knowing "tart" without tasting anything at all. On the eruption of that very unusual and complex thought, Dream-Lucy had reached for a new handful and discovered, between the gray casts of her dream-fingers, a collection of brightest imperial bulbs, crinkled at the top with a deep navy. The deep blue of them lit up were the only thought she could hold, for just an instant, before she'd woken. The flash of it lingered in her mind all day.