My Dead Friend: Alone in The Auditorium

It was mid 2002, and I was a year 10 student at high school. It was a Friday when I last spoke to Chris, my school friend. I walked home that day, as I always did after school, and went on with my normal daily routine. That night I went to sleep, it was late Friday night, and I remember it being quite cold outside. In my sleep I began to dream a very strange dream that night. This was it…

I was standing at an empty auditorium. It was dark, and I could see the red cloth of the stage curtain faintly in the two lights shining dimly upon the stage. All around me it was pitch black. The auditorium resonated with an eerie silence as I looked around, wondering what I was doing in such a place, and alone at that! Out of the still darkness I could see a figure walk towards me. As the figure approached me I could recognise the face. It was my friend Chris. In a loud tone he spoke, ‘Hi Dejan, you’re just the person I wanted to see’. Stunned I looked back, and slowly walked towards him. I don’t recall the conversation we had, but it was quite a lengthy talk. In time Chris’s figure disappeared and I was left standing alone there in the dark silence of the auditorium. I woke from my dream, and looked the the time. It was 1.30am, and I thought that I had heard a noise, a screech, something surely woke me up! After being awake for a few minutes I drifted back to sleep.

On Monday I walked to school like usual, and I walked across the oval and headed for the classroom line-up. As I approached the students I felt there was something very strange in the air. The atmosphere wasn’t as normal. Something was wrong. Luke one of my friends walked over to me, sombre faced, and asked me, ‘Dejan did you hear?’, ‘No what mate, what are you talking about, I just arrived here’, I replied. He looked at me, and said, ‘Chris died Saturday morning’. My jaw just dropped. I was in shock. Apparently he died in a car crash Saturday morning. The crash happened to the road parallel to the school, and he was just a passenger. What shocked me the most is that the crash happened approximately at 1.30 in the morning, at a stretch of road not 800 metres from my house! That was exactly at the very time I dreamt of Chris.

I was shocked then, and I still haven’t got over the shock eight years later. Was my dream of Chris, his spirit visiting me for a final goodbye? How was it possible for me to have dreamt of him in the exact time that he died so tragically only a stone’s throw from my house? Was the noise I heard, the sound that woke me up, the actual sound of his car colliding with that tree? I still have so many questions I wish could be answered.  So many whys and how’s?

All I know for sure is that I will never forget that night, when I last spoke to my friend Chris. The time I saw him in that empty auditorium…