A few nights ago, I experienced what I can only describe as a slew of bad dreams. Unlike a video, the slew didn’t hit me linearly, one after the other. I fucking wish that happened. Instead, they hit me in the same way light travels – as a chaotic spray of pixelated particles, gushing and eddying in various directions, looping one second, crashing the next.

A mishmash of horror, anxiety, dread, and, of course, insomnia – shooting at me like a fucking AK-47.

That’s actually exactly how it was. Bullets. Each bullet, a nightmare. The nightmares were the bullets’ gunpowder.

In one nightmare, I was bald. That is to say, my hair had fallen out, and been replaced by thin, black snakes. Each strand of hair had become a slippery, stagnant serpent. My (snake) hair wasn’t sliding around or anything, it was dead. Deader than dead – it was something that had once indeed been alive, that had taken root inside my skull, died, and was now flowing out from my baldhead like tendrils.

In another nightmare, I was in a dark room in the middle of nowhere – how I got there, who knows? – and the floor was covered with rats. My hair was fine in this one. But my feet were covered with scurrying little pink feet. I vomited a little. The rats enjoyed it. It was a feast for them. I could hear them gnawing at the chunks of carrot and potato. Little fucking vermin. It was disgusting.

In another, my whole family had died. I was alone. For whatever the reason, at around this time – the time my entire family had mysteriously ceased to be – my friends, and pretty much anyone I had ever known, decided to ditch me. I was alone in the most extreme possible way. And I wasn’t even me; I was a ghost, looking down on the situation, the loneliness, from a place of omnipotence.

I was everything, and nothing, all at once. It hurt.

At some point during the night, I woke up. Looking around me, I saw a river of white light pouring in through the vacillating window shade. The night was bright, and somewhat disturbing. I was sweating, but not profusely – considering the dreams and all, you know.

The thing is though, when I woke up, I more or less felt the same as I had in those nightmares.

It’s not that it had felt as if I were still dreaming; I was wide-awake. And I knew it. It’s just that, those dreams weren’t really dreams. I mean, of course they didn’t happen. The events they played out were indeed fictional; my hair didn’t turn into snakes, my entire family didn’t die, and I was never in a rat-infested room, out somewhere in the middle of nowhere. But the feelings, the emotions – the loneliness – that was and very much is real.

When our mind wanders as we sleep, we, or at least some part of us, lives on. Pushing forward in real-time. And that travelling element of us – it never dies.

Life happens in stages. Nothing is permanent. Everything is transient. Like the clouds above, the course of our path bends, sways, dissolves and manifests in random intervals. We’re just like the white puffs of cloud above. Forever changing. Caught in a vacuum, a perpetual state of flux.

Dancers to the sounds of some drum, beating in the far distance.

When you spend most of your life feeling lonely, isolated, and fairly fucking anxious – you start to question what the point of it is? Why keep going? Why willingly subject yourself to such misery, when you know that there is a way out? That there is an infinite light you can step into that will take away all your pain.

I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t know why I keep trucking. I don’t know how, either.

But I guess, that’s the thing with dreams. You never know how you got there. You don’t know what you’re doing. And once you’ve been swallowed, life invariably seems a little bit strange, alien, and desperate.

All you can do is hope, pray; believe that one day – you might finally wake up. I guess.