Yesterday I dreamt again.
I was in the cell again, the one with bright, transparent white walls. There was a visitor, a familiar one, in dark red dress, face that is so pale and lips matching her dress color. It was from an image from long ago, I remember. She was just there, staring, as usual.
"Do not tilt first, because if you tilt, then I will, too," she said.
Then everything stood still, as if time itself took a leave for a moment. I do not know how much time passed after that, but then, it is meaningless in the dream world. Laws of the real world doesn't apply there.
Waking up to the call of prayer, it was unusually cold. The moon hung in its usual place and shone as brightly as ever. It was a beautiful dawn.
I know it's not real. The dream, I mean. Maybe my own subconsciousness is trying to relay a message. Some parts of my brain that has grown tired with all the moping and self-blaming sessions.
'Hey, pull yourself together. We are tired of your shit. Let's face the day instead of drowning yourself in the past.'
I will, someday, but the torrent of memories are often too great and vivid that it feels useless trying to fight it off. Being swept away daily is not exactly what I aim to do, but after each events, I am left helpless and scattered. I need time to pick up the pieces I have before they are taken away by the waves.
The sandy beach feels gritty under my bare feet, and the wind feels coarse against my skin. The sun is, as usual, warm and unforgiving. The glistening waves carry bits of trash coming from other places and dump them on the wet sand. If I try hard, maybe I can find a meaning in those piles of rubbish, but I am too preoccupied with the ones inside my mind to even try.
Terra-forming my dream landscape isn't hard, but the more I concentrate, my time there will be much shorter than usual. I do not like that. It is as if my efforts are wasted. Building a sandcastle, and then letting the sea wash them away, like an offering to an ancient patron deity. In my dream, I am absolute. The only weakness is the duration I can be there. Our REM won't last long, and often we dream only when we are about to wake up. Perhaps in the last five seconds or so. However, in the dream world, this can last longer. Those five seconds can be five minutes, five hours or even five days.
Suppose that we can get stuck there in the dream world, and we lose control of it. How can we know that we are actually dreaming? At times, I leave the reins free and just go along with the jumbled, disjointed dream sequence. Where I will end up, I don't know. Just like how the sea carries its unfortunate victims and deposits them at some far-away places. And when I leave the reins free, I will just forget that it is a dream and just be passive, accepting what's being thrown at me and process it at my own pace.
Building something from scratch is easy enough, but when I lose concentration, what I built will sometimes be gone. Maybe there's a limit to the amount of things I can project inside the dream world. Or simply because I found another object to focus on and the object is disintegrated to become an ethereal building materials for the new object that I want to create out of nothing.
Once I tried splitting myself into two halves, and succeeded in doing so. However, making the other me sentient is something I cannot achieve at that time. He ended up mimicking my every move, or so I believe. Now that I think of it, I don't remember how he looks like. I know that he is essentially me, as I imagined him to be like that, but we can even lie to ourselves. Maybe it was just me convincing myself that the person I created was a copy of me.
In other words, I was successful in making another lie in a world where 'real' is just a word and doesn't carry as much power as it is in the real world.
'Hey, another me. I baked a sweet poison cake. This won't kill you, right? If you believe that it is not poisonous, it won't be poisonous. Imagine that it is just a blueberry-filled ice cream cake. It is your favourite, right? Maybe you need to switch your food preferences. In a way, that is like killing your previous self. The cake itself won't expire. It will just wait there, until you can bring yourself to pick it up and take a bite.'
Inner monologues are fun, it allows you to converse with your own mind and find out how different your mind and your gut feeling can react to different situations. Too much of it, however, can lead to triggering something I don't wish to remember.
Now we wait. The cake is still there, and the ice cream is still frozen. They will remain that way forever, taking up spaces not meant for them. Where I will end up after eating them, I do not know. Bite the lemon, and take a swig out of the glass, simple enough. But it's not easy to leave the darkness behind. Everywhere we go, our own shadow tails us.
What a sweet monster we are. We spin exquisite lies to impress, weave them around unsuspecting preys and leave when there's nothing more to gain. I don't think we can change this, but I suppose I can try to see it in a different perspective.
A wild goose chase, no doubt, but at least it will be fun.
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