He tried to look away from the bodies in the mud-clogged waters, knowing they hadn’t anticipated the storm would arrive so fast, or with such fury. But on this night, when he wrenched his gaze away, he saw them: two specks of white in the swallowed city, tiny stars in the engulfed night. In all the hundreds of times the dream had come, he’d never seen them. They felt like a stare, a gaze, directed at him.

Then the dream shifted. He was surrounded by people, shoving and shouting. The anger from the crowd seeped into him; their heat like an iron an inch from his skin.

Many held signs that blurred in the fight, some crashing down in the swirl of bodies, others pounded against the pavement as if intended to stab through the very earth.

When the bullets started whizzing past, it was as if a shock wave rolled over the crowd; people covered their heads or ducked. And he saw them again: eyes, watching the massacre, then turning to him.

Overwhelming heat came next. Not anger, but embers and ash and flame. Trees fully engulfed, like a city of skyscrapers on fire. Yet someone was there, someone was surviving all this, and their eyes watched from beyond the flames.

The smell of the hospital came a moment later, both fetid and sanitized. Bleach applied over and over again across tiled floors on which gurneys rushed, carrying people covered in plastic.

It wasn’t just the doctors and nurses wearing masks, but the attendants at the help desk, and the panicked family members trying to find their loved ones. Some covered their mouths with scarves or their hands.

He heard the high-pitched beeping of the sinking heart rates, the suctions pumping stomachs.

Once again were eyes. But this time, they didn’t watch from behind the doctors, the hospital walls, or even the windows. They were in the far distance, almost miniscule amongst the towering stones that lined the horizon.

Suddenly, those eyes were right in front of him.

He was in the rock itself, encased in the dark, unable to move or to breathe, trapped, with something slithering across his skin—

He snapped the blinds shut.

He could still feel the wretched smoothness of the scales, the sensation of being encapsulated within the rock. It was always what ended the nightmares, his mind unable to stand the feeling of the encompassing swirling of the snakes around him.

But this time, those eyes—those different, haunted eyes—felt like someone stabbed through his chest to his heart.

His hand drifted from rubbing his forehead to his closely cropped beard. A necessity, now, if he were to be unrecognizable.

If there was any doubt, the dreams reminded him of the reason why he had to run. Why he had to stay away.