The dream took a few messy turns and left me sitting in the back of a car with my brother and one of his friends filling up the front seats. We were driving through a tunnel on a windy mountain road, although it wasn't mountainous like here, it was more untamed, wet, and green. As we drove down the hill, I watched as an unmanned car in front of us was pulled by a small horse. He was my own, this young horse, and I kept a nervous eye on him as he guided the cart through the road.
We passed a number of small horses, all ambling around and chewing up the long, dewy ferns that dripped down from the forest. As we drove slowly past, the horses looked up, alert and curious, but they quickly disappeared from view in the large clouds of dust our car kicked up in its wake.
When we got to a split in the road, I watched as my small horse had difficulty with the broken-down car it was hauling. I jumped out of my brother's car, knowing it was foolish to have let the horse ride alone, and sprinted to its side. He had pulled over to a turn in the road, which led to a new road unseen that ran into the depths of a very dense forest on the hillside. The small, auburn horse was shaking nervously, making it difficult to untie him to the car he was pulling. Trying to comfort him, I stroked his bony side and whispered into his ear. He gave a loud whinny, and I looked up to see a very old friend standing some ten or fifteen paces in front of us, just at the edge of the forest. My horse watched her with wide, wild eyes as I continued to look back and forth between the two. The friend, a peaceful and quiet girl, stood there unmoving, and seemed to take no notice of us.
We stood that way for about thirty seconds when, suddenly, a large, black creature swooped down from the sky and overtook the girl. As if the creature was made of smoke, it surrounded the girl lovingly and seemed to become her. The horse kicked up its front legs in terror and dashed away into the forest. I stood there, alone and horrified, and watched as my friend's head snapped back, and, looking up, began to float high into the air. Her body was billowing and black, and she seemed to have large, spiny wings, her skin a mottled, icy blue. As she floated upward, her body began to glow with a wicked, unnatural blue. Her skin began to fade into a simple, leering skeleton, and then, the being swiftly let free a tremendous, physical boom (like a silent atomic explosion, though all I could feel was the shock waves through my body and ear canal, and watched as the rest of the forest was disturbed in a wave of movement) and flew away with a demonic shriek into the depths of the forest.
Petrified, I thought of my friend, who I knew was still somewhere within the beast, and of my horse, who, in the dream, I knew, was like my child. I gave a fearful look back to the boys, who were still sitting in his car behind me, and ran off into the forest in search of the horse. I fought my way in, hindered by gigantic, thick plants, and tried to prepare myself for the horrors within (which meant, for me, not only the possibility of meeting that dark, demonic creature, but also the chance of not being able to find my little horse). Trying to push my own fears aside, I made my way through the forest, looking for any sign of life.
I could hear a distant, deep moaning coming from the other side of the hill, and then quickly noticed a shuffling of leaves far off to my left. I saw my brown little horse walk out of a clearing in the jungled hill, seemingly unhurt and walking on what appeared to be a hidden path that got lost in the underbrush. I breathed a sigh of relief and made my way in his direction. Behind him, another horse was following on the path, and then another, and another. I was stunned to see a dozen or so young horses make their way, one at a time in a well-paced line, out of the dark jungle and into the clearing. Then I woke up.
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