I Fell in Love With a Ghost in My Dreams

🕯️ I Fell in Love With a Ghost in My Dreams

Writer’s By [FarooqHashmi]

They say dreams are stitched from fragments of memory — a whisper here, a touch there, things forgotten by morning light. But what happens when the dream lingers, when the memory isn't yours, and the love feels older than your own bones?

It began on a quiet November night, with rain tapping like fingertips on my window and the moon half-asleep behind clouds. I drifted into sleep as I always did — alone, with only the sound of the storm outside. But in the dream, I wasn’t alone.

She stood by the lake, barefoot on the glass-like surface, as if the water had forgotten how to ripple in her presence. A woman dressed in flowing white, her hair like ink poured from the heavens, eyes too familiar to be forgotten. Her gaze found mine across the fog, and in that moment, something ancient stirred inside me.

I had never seen her before — yet I knew her.

“Do you always visit strangers in their dreams?” I asked, my voice muffled as if underwater.

She smiled — gently, sorrowfully. “No. Only the ones who once loved me.”

A chill passed through me. I looked down at my hands, suddenly unsure if they were mine. The dream had weight. The air pulsed with something I couldn’t name.

“Who are you?”

Her eyes shimmered, not with light, but with memory.

“Someone who waited,” she said. “And someone who remembers.”

Each night after, she returned.

Sometimes in a garden made of forgotten songs, where the flowers hummed and trees whispered lullabies in languages I never learned. Other times in a candle-lit room where we danced, though no music played. Her laugh was like wind through wind chimes — fleeting, soft, and just a little sad.

I stopped setting alarms.

Days felt dull without her. I drifted through work like a man half-awake. Coffee lost its taste. Sunlight its warmth. But when the night came, when the world quieted — she would be there.

We never kissed. Not once.

But our hands would brush, her fingers cool as moonlight. We would talk, endlessly. About nothing. About everything. About life, and longing, and how the stars remember stories the world forgets.

She never told me her name. I never asked again.

Then one night, she wasn’t there.

I searched the dream like a man lost in fog. Called out. Waited. Nothing. Just silence and an ache that felt too real for a place built from sleep.

I woke with a start, sweating, breath shallow, heart aching like grief. I hadn’t even realized I loved her until she was gone. A dream. A ghost. A stranger who had filled the hollow places in me.

The next night, and the one after — still no sign.

I thought I was going mad.

So I did what madmen do.

I searched for her in waking life.

I went back to the lake from my childhood — the one from the dream. It had changed. Smaller. Quieter. But there was still something… familiar.

At the edge of the trees, I saw it: an old stone, half-buried, covered in ivy.

I cleared it gently.

It was a grave.

“Eleanor Mae Hallow. 1914–1937. Beloved, lost, remembered.”

My hands trembled. The name meant nothing. And yet everything.

I don’t know why, but I sat down beside her, like I’d done a hundred times in dreams. The wind shifted. A white petal floated past.

And then — a whisper. Not through ears, but through memory.

“I told you I’d waited.”

That night, she returned.

Not in the lake, nor in the candle-lit room — but beside me in a field of stars.

She looked different. Brighter. Lighter. The sadness had faded, replaced by peace.

“I had to go,” she said softly, resting her head on my shoulder. “You remembered me.”

And in that moment, I understood: she hadn’t haunted my dreams… I had wandered into hers.

I don’t see her every night anymore. Just sometimes, when the world is quiet enough, and my soul remembers the weight of her name.

I don’t know if I believe in ghosts. But I believe in her.

I believe in a love that crossed the boundary between the living and the lost — not to haunt, but to heal.

And maybe, just maybe, she believes in me too.

✍️ Writer’s Note:

Some stories aren’t written in ink but in dreams — lingering softly between the waking and the sleeping world. If you’ve ever felt love in a dream that never left you, maybe… you’ve met a ghost too.