Writing Prompt - Mystery
Writing Prompt
Mystery
Adam Webster
3/30/2021
“Surrealism is an art movement that utilizes imagery from the unconscious mind. Base a short story off of a dream you had but didn’t quite understand.”
https://www.thesaurus.com/writingprompts/mystery-writing-prompts
#4
A dream I had but didn’t quite understand: Years ago I had a dream where I was in an old style room, looked like fancy cabin quarters on a train. Dark stained wood, almost black color lined the walls. Green and gold drapes on the windows. Two large windows that spanned the length of each side wall. A single door with a window. In the cabin there was a brown and black chest, in it were old bottles with sand sculptures in them, the sand would move and mold into different sculptures and shapes if you held them, some would keep moving as if it was a movie being played in the bottle. One looked like a sailboat in a storm, riding the rough waves, up and down the sailboat went. Another pushed the sand to the top of the bottle then slowly fell down, some of the sand sank to the bottom, some reshaped to form a side facing skull with the cranium destroyed and cracked. I opened one bottle and sand covered every inch of the room, Eventually, a tall man came through the door. He was slender and had bandages wrapped around his face, completely covering it. His arms were extra long and hung past his knees and wore a black suit with a white tie, a slightly darker shade then his shirt.. He took the bottle out of my hands and placed it back in the chest then locked it shut. The sand flowed into the chest. At that moment I woke up.
“Put the bottles back”, boomed a deep voice. “But I want to look at them”, I uttered with a diminishing tone. The tall man took the bottle out of my hand with ease and stated, “You are not ready for them yet. In time you will be ready to use these.” I hugged my knees and pouted, “Can’t I just look? They’re going to be mine anyway.” The tall man placed the bottle back into the chest, then closed the lid and locked it. The tall man kept his hand on the chest then talked down to me, “No, even taking them out of the chest and looking at them will cause the sand to spill out, less sand means a less meaningful picture. If you happened to open one, you would lose all the sand. Do you know what it means to lose all the sand in one of these bottles?” I squinted my eyes and scratched my head, “It means the bottle will be empty, right?” The tall man placed his hand on my head and straightened my hair, “In simple terms yes. It means you will lose that part of your future, that event will never happen. Even looking at the bottles will cause your future to slowly slip away.” My head tilted to the floor. “Why am I the only one with a new set of bottles?” The tall man took his hand off my head. “Someone or something destroyed the original set that was given to you at birth. Now I’m here to help look after the bottles, so it doesn’t happen again.”