Dreaming of dreaming (of dreaming)
Dreaming of dreaming (of dreaming)
The dreams had begun simple. Short and weird, but slowly growing wider, into forevers of being inside them - inside other people’s heads.
Inside my own head, too, in times and places I had yet to visit or be in.
Come morning, I would wake up to see that time had not gone by for years as it felt, but mere hours.
At first, the dreams were soft, and nice and comforting still. Through circles of sleeping I went, dreaming of sleeping, dreaming of dreaming of dreaming in my dreams, at first things that seemed plausible or maybe not so much.
Days passed with nothing more, just an odd dream now and then, until another one succumbed me. It began as the first one, but in the dreams I started changing and things began happening I didn’t think possible but that seemed too real to be only dreams. Of course, I was certain I was dreaming, maybe slipping into a coma. I was certain the time passing in the real life was longer than mere hours it had been last. But I woke up, into crying out something in a language long forgotten (I was so sure it was).
The days, they continued to pass in a haze, one I’d been living in for years now. I was dreading for the next dream, in a way, because the feeling of being succumbed whole left my body shivering, no matter how I tried to explain it. But I lived through the day and people, spoke to them as usually (no more, no less, and they saw naught).
In the evening I was waiting for the dream to come, the dream of which I’d dreamt. But when I fell asleep, it was to a silent dream, a dream of cotton candy and soft arms surrounding me, keeping me safe. Nothing like the dream of the night prior, nothing like the first dream. And it was shorter too. It followed me into the day, into everything I did, the feeling of security I wasn’t accustomed to. But it held me in its grip, for longer hours of the day and made me bolder for a while.
But come nightfall, a sense of dread fell once again. My security blanket vanished and left me unable to sleep for long hours of the night, knowing there were things to do the next day. I finally fell asleep and this time it was a dreamless sleep, a dark pit of nothingness that reminded me of my emptiness in the morning.
And I let days pass, forgetting the dreams slowly but surely, thinking they must have been a passing thing.
Until two weeks had passed and again I was taken into dreams of dreaming of dreaming (of dreaming). There was me again, the one I’d met before, through whose eyes I’d seen the world previously. The world was a chaos but it didn’t last long and soon there was another dream, another set of eyes to see the world through. This wasn’t me, I knew, but it was me in some sense of the word. I tried screaming but nothing came out, nothing but whispered “Can you see them?”
Who, I wanted to ask, before they were laid in front of me for a second before gasping I woke. From the deepest dream and into a previous one, but it took me a second to realise I was still inside the dreams, but it came obvious when I walked past a mirror and saw a face I could not recognise. And I realised I could see them, if that was what the voice meant. A whisper in my own voice, it had been.
I walked days or months in the shoes of a stranger until I was awoken to a previous state of dreaming and thrown into a head of someone else. I felt the face that met me in the mirror was somewhat familiar and suddenly there was pain and agony everywhere.
I wasn’t me, but I was. I was many and I was in pain that they all were in. And for a fraction of a second I thought this was the them my voice had meant.
Until I saw them in the waking and lost them just as soon.
Yet I knew not what or who they were.
The dread inside me kept growing as the dreams began occurring somewhat more often. Sometimes I could not keep up with knowing whether it was in sleep that I was living or if I happened to be awake. More often than before I felt myself slipping out in the waking and something else taking place for a while, speaking in my voice, walking in my body, using the body language that I used. It was like watching from afar something take over myself, yet staying inside and being pushed into a smaller and smaller part of me.
I did not know what it was that was taking over me, but the explanations people gave me made no sense - “you’re just stressed out, it’ll pass soon”, “it’s just dreams, nothing more” - until there was someone who saw it as more, saw it as worse.
“You’re being taken over by something that got into you in your sleep.”
And I was afraid to sleep, afraid to let more of myself go.
But one cannot go without sleeping for forever, no matter how much they try. And even less with being not a whole but only a part derived from the whole by something greater that sees you as a possibility to steal away.
So only a few nights more could I keep away, delirious in my waking by then, just a shell of myself to myself, someone capable of saying things without understanding the meaning. When I fell asleep, it was the same dream of dreaming of dreaming (of dreaming and so forth) until it felt like there was no more me, only shadows and shells I occupied that didn’t even look like me. There were noises, voices whispering: “See them yet?” and I nodded at them, although all I saw were the shells I was using to pretend to be myself for a little while.
But when I started waking, so slowly, so surely, dream by dream by dream, I saw more clearly, saw more surely what it was I was meant to see.
I saw myself, the other myself that had been living in the chaos, there in the middle of all the shells, grinning and smirking from ear to ear and whispering: “One by one you’ll all be taken over by us,” in every part of my dream.
When I at last woke up and knew it was not a dream in a dream anymore, I knew I wasn’t the me I had been. I was the one from the chaos and that was to be my life.
Not for long, as it seemed the soldiers who were patrolling around had got better weapons and from the dreams I knew, I knew they were after for everyone, because the me that I was to be now, was an enemy. An enemy understandably, an enemy of great power, as he’d shown to me by slowly taking over me and breaking me into pieces that lived in dreams, or maybe nowhere anymore.
Maybe waking up wasn’t real.
At least that was what I wished when I stepped outside to let them do to me as they wished.
At least that was what I wished for when the first shot hit my shoulder with two more coming in rapid succession at me.
baratheonpilled
ellievsbear
titsay
stormborns
