REM: Three Hundred Thousand

This is a dream I hadI don’t know why I remembered it, or why I decided to write it down. It’s strange, and a little disjointed — the kind of dream that feels like it’s borrowed pieces from different nights, stitched together by memory.I’ve tried to hold onto the shapes and the sounds and the numbers, but even now, the pieces are lost like disappearing messages.I wrote it anyway. Not to explain it, not to make sense of it, not even to tell a story in the usual way. I just wanted to live with it, on the page, as it felt when I had it odd, uncanny, and fleeting.So, this is it. My dream. I woke up thinking it was over.The dream had been strange, but not frightening. Just strange enough to stay with me, like a story I had watched rather than lived. A girl running out of a house that looked like mine, down the stairs, through the gate, and into a waiting bus. The road outside bending impossibly until it became the same road that led to my church.I remember hearing about money and looking at the driver and the female bus conductor Three hundred thousand naira for a three month delay. One million if i wanted everything to change lives immediately. I do not know who was speaking. I do not know who was listening. I only know that it felt like a price was being negotiated for a life and that I low-key wanted to indulge.When I woke, I lay still for a while, trying to piece together the fragments before they dissolved. I got up, used the bathroom, and scrolled through my phone, replying to Big Dan and some snap messages It was 3 am and it was hot,I stayed up until they brought the light a couple of minutes later.Then I let the coolness coming from the Ox Fan in my room, lull me to sleep.But when I fell asleep again, the story was still waiting for me. The second time, the dream did not begin with running.It began with watching.I was outside, standing near a wide window that looked into an activity hall I did not immediately recognize. Rows of plastic chairs stretched across the floor, filled with people facing the front.It took me a moment to realize why the space felt familiar.It was not a church exactly. Not the main sanctuary. It was an Activity hall used for night services, for gatherings in my University. A temporary place made permanent by repetition.Inside, a thanksgiving service was in progress.People were standing one after another, coming forward with envelopes and bundles of money, offering testimonies that rose and fell in steady rhythms. Applause followed each one. Smiles. Nods. Approval that moved across the room like a wave.I remember thinking I was only observing.Safe behind the glass.Untouched by whatever was happening inside.Then I turned to enter.And in the same instant, without any transition at all, I was no longer at the door.I was already at the front.The shift was so sudden that it felt like a mistake, as if the dream had skipped a necessary scene. One moment I had been a watcher. The next , every eye in the hall was fixed on me.The pastor was speaking.His voice was calm, but it carried easily through the room.“Are you sure,” he asked, “that you are the one who made this money?”In my hands was a thick bundle of notes. Far more than anything that would belong in an ordinary thanksgiving offering. Even before I counted it, I knew the amount with the strange certainty dreams sometimes give.A hundred thousand naira.I remember thinking...why just a hundred? another number rose in my mind.Three hundred thousand.The price of delay.”Linking two dreams together. The number sat heavily in my mind, as if it had always been there.I could feel the attention of the entire hall pressing inward. Not curiosity exactly. Something sharper. Expectation mixed with disbelief.I did not say it was my father’s.Everyone already knew my father was wealthy. Saying his name would have explained everything too easily.Instead, the answer came out of me with absolute conviction.“My mother gave it to me,” I said. “Everything I have is from my mother.”Only then did I notice her.She was kneeling a short distance away, near the top of a staircase that led down from the hall. Her head was bowed, covered with a scarf that hid most of her face. She was slimmer than my mother in real life, her posture quieter, almost fragile.But when she lifted her head slightly, I saw enough to know she wasn't her but it was meant to be her.Or someone standing in her place.The entire scene shifted again.We were no longer inside the hall.We were moving quickly down the staircase beside where she had been kneeling. The air felt cooler there, darker, as if we had stepped out of a bright stage into the wings of a theatre.For a moment, we were inside a house.I do not remember the details of it, only the feeling of urgency filling every room. She was waiting for her daughter, calling out in a low, strained voice that did not sound like the confident woman everyone had just been applauding.In the strange way dreams allow, I was both inside the moment and outside it.Watching.Knowing.I remember thinking with sudden impatience that she was wasting time.Leave the daughter, a voice in my mind urged. Run now.But she did not.She waited.Until the sound of voices calling her name rose from outside.“Sade"The name echoed through the air, urgent, insistent, searching.When she finally ran down the stairs and reached the outside, the compound was full of parked cars.Her new one stood on the right, shining, obviously the one everyone would expect her to use.Her old car sat farther to the left, half hidden among others.For a second she hesitated.Then she vanished from my side.And in that same instant, I was no longer beside her.I was the daughter she had been waiting for but I wasn't with her.I watched from a distance as she chose the old car instead of the new one, slipped into it, and started the engine with shaking hands. The vehicle lurched forward, racing toward the gate as voices behind her rose into shouts.When the first gunshot rang out, it sounded impossibly loud, like something tearing through the fabric of the dream itself.The car swerved.Another shot followed.But none of them struck her.She drove onto the road beyond, the sound of the engine fading rapidly into the distance.And I remained behind, standing outside the compound, watching the empty space where the car had been.Feeling, with quiet certainty, that she had escaped something I still did not understand and that somehow, I had notAs if I had been left behind to pay the rest of the price ( another three hundred thousand)As if my escape was lost the moment I gave her credit.

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