It's not a dream .04.

I woke up in a relative amount of pain pulsing through my body from head to toe. My skull felt filled with fluid which was a bizarre, unpleasant sensation, and my limbs throbbed… aish, what on earth happened to me? Oh yes. The stage.

It was an awfully ridiculous thing to recall considering my circumstances, but now that the nasty headache was at bay, I remembered the events of yesterday. I was alone in the playhouse, reading through Cullen’s notes at the piano, craving chai tea as I cried my eyes out – much like the dream I had – and then… and then what? The rest was a complete blank, which alarmed me for a moment. It was unlike me to forget things as important as this, and sifting through the past as hard as I could, I simply couldn’t remember. Did I even get to watch some episodes of Ninja Warriors before bed?

I groaned again; this time in frustration; and helped myself to a sitting position in bed. The action however immediately made my bladder swell uncomfortably, and I realized the last thing I wanted right now was to wet the bed. I got up; staggering slightly; and approached the bathroom across me.

However I was not prepared for what was to come. If perhaps only I’d woken up any earlier; if I’d opened my eyes quicker; I probably would have been given some answers. Even clues as to how I was in this predicament. I didn’t even need to relieve myself to discover the truth.

The moment I opened the bathroom door, there it was. The mirror. Staring at me. Showing me not myself, but a paper white man with equally pale red, perfect bed hair that gleamed in the morning sun. I stopped in my tracks, staring at it a little longer and was taken aback at how… well, life size he really was. It was the pale man I admired on an unhealthy basis. It was Count Dracula’s son. Standing there in identical position at me, staring me in the eyes; hand on the doorknob like me, mouth agape like me, eyes widening… just like me.

I laughed. Nervously. Incredibly nervously. These delusions were becoming awfully real. Little by little they were seemingly crossing the borders of fantasy and reality, and oh! Perhaps I really was in an asylum already. Yes! There were probably doctors wheeling my wheelchair to my room as we speak, getting their syringes ready!

‘Hah… aha…,’ I wiped my brow, watching the man in the mirror do the exact same thing with incredibly vivid accuracy.

It’s a dream, it’s a dream, my mind cooed. Go back to sleep and you’ll wake up in your crummy apartment again to the Ninja Warriors theme song. Maybe even to that horrid notice being slapped on the door to cough up the overdue rent.

However my bladder was already throwing a tantrum of the century, and I winced as it threatened to burst. Dream or not, I was not prepared to wet myself.

Cringingly, I approached the toilet. White and clinical, staring at me with a mocking look as the pan lay open like an exposed tongue. You’re going to see something weird down there, it laughed at me, and I found myself glaring at it. Well, it was now or never I guess.

I had somehow managed to complete the task, and slightly irked from what I’d seen, I returned to the hospital bed. If not for my screeching bladder, I would have raced back to bed immediately. This was all… incredibly real. So real that I had a difficult time convincing myself otherwise. It was definitely farfetched to actually believe I woke up in someone else’s body (let alone the man that looked as posh as a porcelain doll even when he woke up), considering this type of stuff was strictly fictional. Strictly for writers and filmmakers.

Strictly impossible.

If this was really the case, where was the real me? My original body? Was I safe? Maybe I was kidnapped? Experimented on? Hence this?

‘Oh, I am so dead…’ my own voice even sent chills down my spine. ‘I need to sleep, I need to…’

So deep, husky, intense… I was on the verge of crying when the room door – much like last night – suddenly burst open, and I stared at it in a panicked frenzy.

‘See this here?’ one of the voices questioned excitably. ‘He just gripped it and bam! The thing fell off on its screws. I’m surprised he didn’t trip over a magic banana peel after that.’

Someone boomed with laughter. ‘He broke the doorknob!? OK, yes, we desperately need Suga-hyung back home.’

Suga-hyung? Somehow the unofficial nickname I gave him of being the salmon pink candy man was not after all so far off. Perhaps I would have laughed on any other day, however my cheeks were frozen stiff at the realization. Was Suga the name of the body I unwillingly invaded? … Wait, then who was the Yoongi they mentioned last night? I thought about this hard for a moment and kept both names at the back of my mind when I noticed the boys enter the room fully. There were two of them this time; both with black hair, good looks, and healthy complexions. One would probably be unable to tell them apart. However I immediately recognized one out of the two boys by a particular striking facial feature.

The said one had lips that reminded me of a particular actress. I was actually surprised at how striking this physical quality was of his, and I was probably staring at them with my mouth wide open when they saw me, each beaming brightly.

Almost instantly, I found something remarkably picturesque about the other one: he had an incredibly square smile. ‘Hyung, you’re awake!’ the square smile with tousled hair cried happily, staring at me as if I was some sort of miracle.

The one with the lips smirked. ‘And white as a ghost. What happened the other day?’

The other one nodded fervently at this question. ‘Yeah, it’s really unlike you to be up and about at that time of day. Good, but unusual. We were all really shocked when ajhussi got hold of Namjoon.’

I stared at them at a loss for words. In fact, what could I possibly say to them?

‘Oh, help me! I woke up in your friend’s body but I’m actually a girl!’

… I thought this possibility over but quickly decided against it. There was no way they would believe me. But then again, what could I really say to them to explain the situation I was in?

‘Uh…,’ I stared at them, but qu