Distorted Reality

Can one dream while awake? Can one dream within a dream? What foolish questions. Had I the answers, what then? Dreams are an escape; dreams are windows into our souls; dreams are an attempt to process experiences; dreams are our minds lost in the infinite expanse of nothingness; dreams are glimpses into alternate realities; dreams are confused messages from god trying to speak in our language; dreams are void of meaning; dreams are all possibilities at once.  

Dreams are what I fear.

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I am walking again, more aware of steps and curbs than before. My momentary immobility brought some purpose to my wanderings. I am dumb; I know so little about this world that I have woken into (or am I dreaming in?), and that stupidity frightens me. I must erase my ignorance. I seek a library. How large they must be now and how much, much more information they must contain. A phone, an oddly familiar sounding word, yet I don’t really understand how it works. It is miraculous even that I figured to take it from that dead, dead guy and was able to figure out how to use it to write. Yet, were I to think about it, I did just press the picture with a pencil. Intuitive? I suppose, but all of those other pictures I have no clue. But see, here again is my stupidity, I wish not to live dead-alive (which is what I have just now decided to label my state of existence), and daft, but dead-alive and informed. A life of ignorance is equal to death. No, I seek to illuminate my mind to what I’ve missed, to how this world worked, perhaps even, to what happened.

Yes, I am walking again and this time with a destination. Again, shall we? I am walking again, but this time with a destination... yet? I am walking again, but the world before my eyes is a kaleidoscope of images overlayed and muddled together. I am unable to determine which reality I inhabit.  

I am walking again, in and out of my mind. In and out of realities. I am walking again, not nowhere, but somewhere, but I don’t have legs. I don’t have form. This is my death? Chaotic. Void of meaning. What? I am dead? No words, no thought, but also not no words, not no thought. Wait? Something grasps at me, tears my formlessness back into form. I remember now that I am an am——I shouldn’t be focused, but I am focusing. This is a toe, a ligament here, cell nuclei abundant. My bones are porous? What if I remember myself incorrectly? Wait, it’s too fast, I don’t have a word for that… this is wrong——my eyes are open.  

Who’s this? He is talking to me, and he is very animated about it. Why can’t I hear him? Oh… I remember now, I have ears. A different language? Great, I supp—he has something stuck in his teeth. Has that been lodged there for a bit or did he just eat? In this dank dungeon? Gross. Wait, where did he go? I can’t hear him anymore—--

"This has already happened," I thought, and then in an instant the room, its mold covered ceiling; the hanging spider webs that swayed from some draft seeping in through from somewhere; the flickering light cast meekly about the room by numerous unseen candles; the mixed aromas of melting wax, moist paper, moldy wood, damp stone, death; the barely audible odd crackling fuzzy noise emanating down a hallway; all of it crumbled out of existence before my eyes. 

Slowly, like a fog lifting from my brain, my madness dissipated, my eyes refocused upon the world as it, piece by piece, rebuilt itself around me. Am I getting it right, I thought, I’ll never know. This has happened before, hasn't it? I always find myself somewhere different from where I remember I was before the world loses cohesion. Is it the same world though? I can never know for certain if my memories are memories or if my now is a memory or what is or is not a dream.  

 Ah... yes, I remember. I am walking. I suppose—wait. Why did I begin writing this?

A library. Yes, I found a library, at least I think I am reading the engraved words above the doors correctly——there are stairs leading up to the entrance.