This night, I had another one of my lucid "nightmare" dreams. 
   I was with a group of people that included my dad and we were 'tasked' to go somewhere, I believe -- sort of like the Fellowship of the Ring, in a twisted way. We somehow ended up on the peak of a mountaintop, where the sun was shining and I felt no cold. We quickly found a way down, into one of the tunnels in the mountain, and took what felt like a three-day walk through the tunnel until we hit light. Emerging from a small lift-up, we saw that we had been walking in circles. 
   With no other option, we began to climb down. Strangely, this climb was very short, and not at all like we had just been on what felt like Mount Everest or the Carpathians. 
   The moment my feet hit the ground, there's green fields sprouting all around me. The sun is hotter and around us there only seems to be two people, who whisper and stare as we pass. One man, one woman and both with a drastic age difference. 
   One of the people in the group happened to have a compass, which he used to direct us South. This group also happened to consist of two babies and a toddler, who I thought looked vaguely familiar. 

Can't remember exactly what happened next but we'd somehow managed to reach an urban area, where we got a small apartment on the first floor. This apartment was on the same, dead-end, sloping road that I live on in real life, though the house was far smaller and did not have the same structure. 
   On the driveway, there were an inane amount of people crowded around; one being a TA at my school, who my form happens to be bros with (don't ask), and I believe that I saw someone who I could recognise, but couldn't. 
  On the driveway there's only one exit, a hill-road that has a dangerously-steep path in real life. This driveway had changed, and I found myself walking towards it -- looking forward, and not up like I would have to, I saw that it didn't look like England whatsoever (where I live) but more of a hotter, Spanish area. 
    Then, just as I turn to stare forward, I see a crowd of colourful-dressed people chasing after someone. Just one person. My dad. I don't know what had happened in between prior to this, but the group had somehow split and I don't think that I had acknowledged the disappearance of my father. 
  I back away to the TA, who looks exactly the same as he does irl. My dad turns the corner, and I immediately start crying because I realise that this had happened in another dream. 
   He has this ear-to-ear grin on his face that looks more malicious than friendly, his eyebrows are raised like he was actually laughing, and his eyes are eerily wide. Though he may look like my dad, I knew instantly that he was not. 
  The crowd had mysteriously disappeared when he turned the corner, and he began to approach the person who I believed was a friend I couldn't pin-point, talking to them briefly before turning to me with that same grin on his face. He grabs my shoulders, and my eyesight begins to go a little black and blurry. 
  My head spins when I hear a foreign voice coming from my dad -- it's accented like he had come from somewhere like Spain or Greece, and not at all like the light-accented voice he had whenever he spoke English. This could not be my dad, I knew. I wouldn't stop crying when I saw him, but my eyes didn't sting and I couldn't feel any tears. Only that I felt like I was crying -- almost like dry-sobbing. 

Again, can't remember what comes between, but I find myself in that little apartment in a fine, average-sized room which looks too fine to be in that ratty house, but I find that I'm not alone. In the room I only manage to see three of the walls, not the fourth, where there is supposed to be a door. 
   On the wall in front of me is a thin, tall window covered only by a translucent, slim curtain that still shows the outside; it had turned night, and the three children and their mother were in the room with me. I didn't feel scared, only terrified of what my dad had become. I know that I had bolted the door when I entered the apartment, although I couldn't remember doing such a thing. 
   I didn't seem to notice that the woman didn't look at all related to the babies or the toddler, who I realised looked faintly like my little cousin who lives abroad in our home country. But I still feared what my dad was, or who he had become, so I told them to duck underneath the window in fears that he would peak through -- his face already instilled an odd, shearing fear inside of me, and I had no intentions of seeing that shit-eating grin again. 
  They do as I say, and are perfectly-quiet, I lay stomach-flat on the floor and is almost face-to-face with one of the odd babies, who seems to speak basic English despite being what looked like a few months old. Couldn't pick out what she was saying, but it felt like hours until I seemed to be trapped in a reverie of sorts, and I snapped back only to find the woman and her children gone, and myself stood in the middle of the room, in plain view of whoever looked through that window. 
   I walk backwards, entirely out of my control the way I walk, and I walk until my feet hit a small bed. Even as I unwillingly climb into that bed and shut my eyes, they're still somewhat fixed on the pitch-black window. 
   What feels like a few minutes passed, and I opened my eyes. Outside of the window is bright, and the fourth wall had suddenly appeared. I look around to see that the number of these beds had multiplied, and strange children seemed to have taken up sleeping in them. None of them I recognised, so I climbed out of the bed and walked outside of the room. 
   I enter the small 'living room' where a larger window faces the outside -- odd, seeing as I have no windows that do as such aside from the one in my bedroom -- but I freeze when I see nothing but a pitch-black outside when it had only been daylight a few seconds prior. 
   A few feet away are a gaggle of girls in dresses, who lingered near the bolted door. I watched carefully, but my heart lurched as the door was cracked open by one of the girls. 

A black haze overtook me, and it only left when I felt the urge to open my eyes. I was back in the bed. 
   Confused, I stared at the daylight outside of the window; it had felt like hours since I had woken up before, but in reality was probably only a few minutes. 
    No other bed was in the room with me aside from the large, fancy grey one that had been there before. No other children, just me. I felt strange in my mind when I realised that my heart seemed to take this as something normal, so I walked out of the room again and passed the same people in the little living room. The outside of that same window was pitch-black once more, and once more there were the same gaggle of girls by the door, reaching for the lock. I bound over after a moment's hesitation and grasp one of the girls by the shoulder who doesn't speak, but frowns when she looks down at me. I had jerked her hand away from the door, and from a peripheral vision I saw that three-quarters of the girls that were there had disappeared into nothing. 
     "Don't open that door." I said. But it didn't sound like me, and my lips felt stuck together, so I didn't know how I had talked. The girl stands in her place even as I move away, no longer reaching for the door but her eyes trailing me. 
  That same black washes over me again. 

I was in my school this time, the day not bright but the sky was grey and cloudy. It was lunch-break and I was with my friends, grabbing my own lunch at the outside canteen box-thing. 
    Can't remember what happened most of lunch, but I remember how it was just a bright-sun afternoon, albeit for the clouds and grey, but it had been day, nonetheless. I headed in, alone, passing a few of the boys who kicked around a football, almost making me trip once or twice. 
   A feeling washed over me when I stepped in, but I wouldn't look back. It felt like I couldn't, anyway. I kept walking, deciding to walk around the school for a little while on the ground floor as I had French next for fifth period, and it had never been one of my favourite subjects. 
   There were no students in the halls, which I found off but brushed aside easily. I didn't notice the cold that had formed -- it didn't feel like that humid warmth that I felt outside at breaks. It felt like sunset. 
   My eyes then turned to the many windows of the school overlooking a 'square ring' outside where generally the older years would go to eat on the benches. I couldn't see those dark benches, but I could see one thing. Night. 
  Just then, I feel my phone buzz in my blazer. I pick it out of the inside pocket, and see that one of my friends had texted me; which seemed impossible, as we weren't allowed our phones at all during school hours. They texted me, asking me where I was. I walked to the Reception, close by even though it felt like over a mile away, whilst trying to text them back, a difficulty for me; this felt odd, as I was talented at texting while walking. A grown habit. 

There are two, bright-yellow doors which lead to the short hallway that leads you out -- only a member of staff's 'keycard' is able to open the doors, but I jog over when I see a student brush past into the hall. I follow, but the night seems to have gotten darker. 
   There are two, automatic, grey doors at the end of the hallway, and then there is the exit. I see my friend is not there, and I slumped my shoulders and looked down to see that my phone was not in my hands. 
   Dejected, I begin to walk back through the halls, my mind screaming to me that I was being stupid, and that it was already the end of the day, which, once more, could not have been possible. 
   It felt as though all that I experienced earlier was a sick dream, and I had awoken to be in my school already. A dream inside of a dream. 
  I headed for the, no doubt, emptied canteen when I see someone jogging to me. I step back and my heart lurches. It was my dad. Then the fainting memories of that terrifying grin that he had, his scarily-wide eyes and his bared teeth assaulted my mind all at once. When he had acted like that, it was as if there were two souls inside of a body, and the darker, less prominent one just happened to suddenly take a permanent place in the forefront of his mind. 
   But this dad didn't have the grin, the eyebrows or the wide eyes. He looked apologetic, fearful. He put a hand on my shoulder that was colder than I had ever felt -- my dad was basically a human radiator, and it felt inhuman that he was so cold. Even knowing that he was now somewhat 'normal', I still felt inexplicably unsafe around him. 
     "I know." he says. 
Then I woke up.