The Tribunal

I talked to Milo about needing a break for the sake of my mental health. He seemed really understanding.

You know, right up until he rejected my request.

I guess I don't know what I was expecting. Milo's always been one of those types. You know, one of those faceless suits who wants to be your friend. Think Michael Scott meets Bill Lumbergh.

I should've called in sick.

I think I've been having nightmares lately- when I'm not having lucid dreams about Hawthorne, I mean- but I can't remember all of them. I just wake up screaming.

It's so exhausting that I fell asleep several times at work after I talked to Milo. Fortunately, I didn't scream, but I did have several dreams. Of course.

Each dream was brief but vivid. First, I was in a courtroom. There were bright lights on me, and the walls and ceilings and floors and everything were all blindingly white. The judge had a thousand eyes, and so did all twelve jurors. All of them were staring at me.

Just before I woke up, the judge said, "I hereby pronounce the defendant, Tia Bravo Fuertes, guilty of-"

In the next dream, I was standing in a prison cell, a many-eyed priest in white speaking to me.
"You are being sentenced for a reason," he said to me.
"Why?" I asked, scared and confused. "What reason?"
He started to reply, but I woke up before I could hear what he said.

In the third dream, there was an executioner standing over me, a hundred holes cut into his bone-white hood for the eyes that covered his face. The priest from the second dream that day was there.

"Do you have any last words, any additional confessions or desperate prayers to make before you are executed?" asked the priest.
But I was too terrified to respond.

The only good thing about that dream was that I woke up before the axe struck, although it was still too close for my liking.

There was around an hour between each time I fell asleep, an hour of trying to forget what I'd seen. Each time, I'd nearly succeeded when I fell asleep again and found myself back in nightmares where, far from the lucid dreams I've been having about Hawthorne, I had no control.

Everything in the nightmares I've had about the Eye is white. The clothing, the walls, the floors and ceilings, even the sky and the ground. All of it is pure, unfeeling, all-seeing white. The Eye's domain is a court of sterile and exposing light.

Not sure why I'm waxing poetic about this. Just a bunch of nightmares anyways.