It's some ugly hour of the morning right now. I've woken up early, my body overheated due to some
low-grade fever from some cold I probably picked up during travel.
Waking up like this isn't new for me, and normally, I'd just dump my muddled thoughts out to my dear
friend Nameless—just as she'd do the same—and we'd talk it over, enjoying each other's company and
feeling ourselves grow closer as we did it.
But Nameless isn't around anymore.
God, I miss her so fucking much...
I had a dream last night, as usual, this one a proper fever dream.
I was in an office that looked like it could've belonged to a CEO or other executive. A couple of
old white men were there, my father included. I was begging them for answers about whether Nameless
was alright, if she was alive, etc, and they demanded I pay them first. I obliged, only for them to
tell me they didn't know anything—and when I asked for my money back, they threw a handful of pocket
change at me, versus the wad of bills I'd handed over.
I stormed off, wanting to go to the beach with my friends to clear my mind. Once there, however, I
realized that none of my friends, despite their insistence they'd take care of all the planning and
supplies, had remembered to bring any sunblock.
I wandered off to go buy some. When I found a store, however, my perspective got locked into place
as a young couple in front of me started having a conversation: The girl had had some interaction
with her mother that'd hurt her feelings.
Meanwhile, sharp pains and strange sensations drew my attention to my ankle, where this large
green-and-black worm was visible beneath the surface of my skin. Even as I watched it lurch along,
I was unable to cry out, speak, or move at all, as my agency remained preempted by the conversation
the couple in front of me was having.
Right when I spotted a second such worm in my calf, I woke up, mercifully wormless.
[There was more I'd written for this post, but the longer I left it up, the worse I felt, so I've
removed it. Don't worry, it wasn't anything important, anyway.]
Now playing:
OMORI OST - Numbers
(The past few weeks have been very demanding of me, particular in terms of emotional labor; but for
now, I offer to you this compilation of posts I made in a Bluesky
thread around this time last year~)
I'm feeling talkative tonight, so I'd like to share something about myself with you all if you'll
let me, something I usually keep to myself.
Specifically this: My life is dominated by my dreams.
I mean this quite literally. I'm not speaking about my personal ambitions, say, or my hopes for the
future, or other such abstract dreams, though I certainly have such things and pursue them
relentlessly~
No, I mean it very plainly:
I spend FAR more subjective time in my dreams then I do in the waking world. Consistently.
What's more, the memories of all of my time spent in various dreams and nightmares are roughly as
tangible to me as my memories of the waking world.
And these aren't lucid dreams, mind you. I've tried many, many, many times over the years to induce
lucid dreams, and I can count on one hand the number of successful attempts I've had—and my
subconscious almost immediately booted me out in nearly all of those cases, heh.
It doesn't help that the omnipresent haze of dissociation hanging over me makes the waking world
feel as cloudy as a dream half the time, making it difficult for me to spot things that are
"unusual" enough to warrant a reality check... but I digress.
More than anything, though, it's the subjective duration of the dreams that affects me the most.
In the span of a single 8-hour period of sleep, I've had dreams that have felt like days, weeks,
months, and even over a year in length.
Can you imagine?
You're in the middle of awful deadline pressure at work, and after a grueling shift, you crawl into
bed and pass out.
For the next three weeks, you're trapped in a labyrinth, the walls made of meat and chitin, the air
thick with magic that turns all trapped within into monsters.
Slowly, you piece together how to navigate the flooded halls and nameless flesh temples that
constitute the maze, and you find the reality warper at the heart of it all, a broken woman who
overdosed on superpowered nootropics that made her dormant powers explode out...
And then you wake up.
You're completely disoriented, having no idea where you are. As your body stumbles through the
morning routine in a sluggish autopilot, your mind slowly reboots, slick and slimy with the black
murk of the long dream.
Right. This is your apartment, and you have work today...
Hours later, at work, the important project you were working on yesterday feels unfamiliar, as
though you've not looked at it in nearly a month—because from your perspective, you HAVEN'T looked
at it or even thought about it in nearly a month.
At lunch, a coworker sasses you over something stupid.
With your body exhausted by the waking work and your mind frayed from the long dream, your anger
immediately boils over, and you storm off.
Your dreams are shorter over the next few nights, and eventually you resume your old routine...
That story isn't a hypothetical, but rather one of many, many such experiences I've had over the
last few years.
Thankfully, dreams longer than a week are quite rare for me; most of my dreams feel no longer than
1-3 days, although even that adds up quickly.
1 day stranded on an abandoned, half-sunken ship, surrounded by countless others like it.
2 days wandering alone through a lightless seven-story tall mutation of your childhood friend's
house.
3 days in an empty airport, watching great black tornadoes rage silently outside through the
windows.
4 days riding a bike through your parents' neighborhood, now long abandoned and overgrown.
5 days in a hotel that's 150 storeys tall, the center opened up and the bottom floor a gigantic
pool.
6 days lost on a sprawling campus under eternal night, the dark-eyed students sullen and walking
quickly.
It goes on and on and on.
I could continue for hours like this, telling you about dream after dream after dream, places and
sights and experiences that all feel no less real to me than my waking memories—and which
collectively constitute a greater part of my "lived" experience.
My heart still aches for the woman I met, loved dearly, and even married in one of my
over-a-year-long dreams.
You'd recognize her immediately if you could see her:
Long black hair, sharp black eyes, ghostly white skin, a knowing smile, and a penchant for wearing
all black clothing...
Remembrance is an amalgamation of several dreams.
Permanence, while an outgrowth of Remembrance, is also the product of some other dreams.
THERA is / will be as exact a recreation as I can possibly make of a game I played in a dream, all
the way down to the "list on a black screen" selection UI.
And yet, for as profoundly as all of this has affected and continues to affect who I am, I usually
don't like talking about it.
Why?
Because ultimately, "they're all just dreams," and no amount of explaining can communicate to others
how little their lack of "reality" matters when I'm living them.
But it's gotten late, and this thread is quite long now, so I'll leave it at that.
Thank you so much for reading these mad ramblings of mine, heheh.