Dreams craft a world with the rules of a fevered script, conjured by your own neuronic haze, and when you land inside it, it’s like being dumped into the deep end of a pool you didn’t know was there. What’s wild is how quickly you ditch it all. The moments between dreaming and waking dissolve, like watching your own hard drive wipe itself: the panic wrings you out, the guilt that squeezes your gut, the hint of forbidden pleasure that was so sharp it woke you up sweating. Give it five minutes—the whole thing’s gone, like it never happened. A glitch in your memory.
The machinery doesn’t sleep just because you do. Your meat and mind are busy in the background; every twist, every blow, every flicker of feeling you didn’t process in real time gets stuffed into this relentless private theatre of the unconscious. That starts in childhood, when the brain is a language sponge sucking up every stray word. Then you’re an adult, and dreaming turns itself into a grim rehearsal room where you practice futures you don’t want to face—and sometimes learn which ghosts you should probably leave behind.
People have been scraping meaning out of dreams since forever. Priests, sorcerers, proto-hackers hustling interpretations for the rich and desperate. The wrong dream interpretation could land you dead, if you sold it to the wrong king. My coder colleagues were obsessed with that kind of shit, trawling for meaning in their midnight logs. It never hooked me. Creating apps to demystify the unknowable. Mystery was the only thing left that gave me meaning.
I lived with a foot in two worlds—the bland grind and the magickal thinking. Maybe that’s what made my dreaming sprawl: more intricate, more layered, more wired. From when I was a kid I kept a notebook by my bed, scribbling the wreckage of each night: plot lines, half-glimpsed images, that greasy aftertaste of emotion. Keeping at it did something to my wiring: dropped me straight into the driver’s seat. Lucidity. Suddenly I wasn’t a leaf swirling in some algorithm’s updraft—I could call the shots, talk directly to the NPCs, even terraform the world itself. That power, though, was double-edged. The same clarity that made me a king also forced me to stare down the shadows in my own personal hell.
I kept thinking those nightmares were just my own trash. The stuff I’d stuffed down deep: mistakes, betrayals, the things you can’t admit even to yourself, much less to your ex. My remorse was like chum in the water, and something in the dark came for it every time. I would snap awake soaked in sweat, all circuits overloaded. When I later medicated, it was only to short-circuit the endless night shift of my own subconscious, the nightmare OS that never crashed. Lucid nightmares were therapy with no off switch. Worst, though, was the false awakening: you think you’re out, then the system glitches and drops you into something grimier. A recursion of self-loathing.
So how’d I end up meditating myself into that mess? Maybe I’d just dropped off. Everyone knows you can only dream if you punch out consciously. Daydreams were a different flavour, although I was an addict there too.
I clocked it instantly: I was dropped on a street I’d known once, a patch of local homes bulldozed in waking life. The paths jammed with people, but all their faces were replaced with blanks, as if reality had ghosted out the details. They turned as one, reaching for me, and the quiet was so much heavier than any scream. The air was cleaner than anything Topside, crisper than Ultrahigh’s chemical stench. I breathed it like I’d just crossed a thousand miles of desert. I was that thirsty.
I bolted, elbows out, weaving through their slow arms and the drag of their ancient sadness. You could feel it: they were people who’d had joy, once. Now all they had was the memory of the loss, and it weighed down every twitch.
The street glitched under me, treadmill-style, keeping me locked while the faceless crowd closed the gap and started clawing at me, stripping skin, hair, everything. And then, snap—I landed not in my own bed but flat on my back in the grass of my shamanic vision, the animal crew gathered around me.
What the fuck was the point of all that? The owl and the deer just watched, not saying shit, but the way they looked at me—I got it. Their eyes weren’t normal animal eyes—they were the kind you’d see in species that had been erased. I realised then: I’d been blaming them, but that horror show was all on me. Not their circus, not their message. Just me, running my own code until it crashed.
