This is interesting. Obviously there's not enough here to come to any definitive answer, but also the author clearly intended us to be left with that same feeling as the character: upset and without a clue as to what she just went through.
If I were to try to analyze it, personally I'd say this is a haunting or something like it due the intensity of the emotions. It's a recurring dream and yet she hasn't built up any resistance to it. She feels the shock and grief full blast when she wakes up, sobbing for a while in the dark, the emotions taking a long time to fade. That lines up with a psychic or haunting phenomenon's characteristics (at least based on how they tend to be portrayed in fiction). I'm specifically reminded of the movie A Stir of Echoes, where the main character experiences a vision of a murdered girl being strangled, given to him as a means of communication by her ghost who remained buried in the basement, and experiences that choking sensation in their real body as if they were there in the moment. Memories, even "past life" fictional memories, don't tend to have that extreme emotional weight to them where you can still be shocked even after experiencing the same thing repeatedly.
last edited at Sep 1, 2024 2:11AM