The barn looked over a series of vegetable gardens, small houses with red roofs and farther – the mountain slopes densely covered by green forests. The day was very hot and smelled like burning bitumen, like at his father’s construction sites.

In contrast with bustling Bangkok, everything seemed to have stopped here. There wasn’t even a perceptible gust of wind; the total silence accentuated the tranquility of the place.

“Where is the boat, mom? Where has everything gone?” Trevor asked, terrified, not able to grasp what had happened and how he ended up here.

Trevor looked down at his clothes. He was dressed in blue woolen joggers that bagged oddly at the knees and a white t-shirt with the letter 'R' embroidered in black near the hem. Both the t-shirt and the joggers were too big for him, as if they belonged to somebody else.

Everything around him looked vividly realistic. That terrified Trevor. He tried to pinch himself, but nothing happened. Trevor squeezed his eyes shut, held his breath and clenched his hands. Then he cautiously opened one eye, then the other, but it all remained unchanged – the barn, the red roofs and the stranger.

Trevor decided he needed to leave this place quickly and took a step. The red-hot tin of the roof scorched his heels. He shuddered from the sharp pain… and opened his eyes.

“Get the lamp, now!” Trevor heard his father yelling. He grabbed the lamp and quickly passed it forward.

A shot of pain jolted Trevor awake. His heel had touched the glass of the kerosene lamp while he was sleeping, which then fell and nearly broke.

“Are you burned?” his mother asked, inspecting the heel. “Thank God, he seems fine. You scared us. Wake up, honey, we're about to get off.”

The odd dream and strange transition haunted him, but something was about to happen that made him forget about everything.

The next day tragedy struck. There was a car accident. His parents were killed and he spent a month in hospital hovering between life and death.

Much later, the strange transition and the eerie feeling of reality gnawed at him for a long time and he began to see it all as a sign of the impending tragedy, a warning, which he fatally did not understand and so could not warn anybody. He felt guilty for not telling his parents about the dream for a long time. Maybe they would have understood the warning and that horrible accident could have been prevented. The hard feeling of guilt settled deep in Trevor’s heart.

The fears eventually faded, the tragic memories replaced by new one, and the boy’s memory erased everything he had experienced at the time of the accident.

And now, Trevor was taken aback by a simple question about dreams. It made him think and return to that distant past. In fact, it was after the crash that he stopped dreaming. Trevor usually went to sleep and couldn’t remember anything when he woke up. He could not tell whether he had had a dream or not. He did not remember his dreams, as often happens to many people after an exhausting day.

At first, he paid no attention to it. Later, as he grew up, at about the age of twenty he believed that he really did not dream. It was natural for him.

“You know, Amanda, it’s been a very long time since I’ve had a dream. I don’t dream when I sleep, like at all. Ever since I was a child, I think,” answered Trevor, and then remembering something important, exclaimed, “Color. Probably color. This was a very long time ago. But I do remember that those dreams were in color.”

Amanda looked at Trevor with surprise.