I was completely exhausted yesterday, so I ended up sleeping for fourteen hours straight. I have this wonderful ability to hibernate whenever I feel like it with almost no effort at all: I close my eyes, clear my mind, and within a few minutes I'm already drifting off to sleep. The strange thing is that, during these long stretches of deep sleep, my brain seems to work even harder than usual. I find myself slipping from one dream to the next much more quickly. Does that ever happen to you? It reminds me of the kind of fever dreams I used to have as a child, when I was stuck in bed with the flu. In one of those dreams, I found myself in an intensely liminal space. I was climbing a spiral staircase that wrapped around a massive pale blue column. The walls were white, while the staircase itself was the same soft blue as the column.
At the top, I found myself in a bright room with large floor-to-ceiling windows and a long rectangular table set for a meal. There was no food, but the table was laid with delicate white porcelain plates, polished silver cutlery, crystal candelabras, and deep indigo candles. Here too, the floor was the same pale blue as the great supporting columns.
From there, the space branched off in two directions. On one side, a long corridor of white and pale blue led toward an intense light at the far end—another wall of windows, I assumed. Alongside it was a row of open doorways leading into rooms so dark that I couldn't make out anything inside them.
If there's one thing I've learned about myself over the years, it's this: whenever I'm faced with a choice between a path that is bright and seemingly safe and another that is dark and unknown, I'll always choose the latter. I don't know why. Perhaps my sense of self-preservation has never been especially strong. Or perhaps my curiosity has always outweighed my better judgment. So I stepped through one of the doorways lining the corridor. It was like entering an entirely different place. The place resembled a maze of offices, but the bare concrete walls, the unfinished floor, and the harsh artificial lighting reminded me more of one of those underground parking garages beneath large department stores. Formally dressed people moved in and out of the cramped, damp offices, each carrying a black leather briefcase. Their faces, though seemingly made of living flesh, had no eyes, no nose, and no mouth. I watched them, but they either couldn't see me or were simply too absorbed in whatever they were doing to pay me any attention.
After a while, I grew bored of watching them and decided to retrace my steps. I like to think they're still there, quietly going about their work, oblivious to everything else. Returning to the pale blue corridor felt like a relief after the cold glare of the fluorescent lights. The dining room, however, was gone. Where the passage back should have been, there was now nothing but a smooth, impenetrable wall. With no other way to go, I continued toward the wall of windows at the end of the corridor. This part of the dream is a little hazy, so I'm afraid I can't describe it in much detail. I remember passing through a room filled with books, then several others that were almost completely empty, save for a few white cabinets, a couple of vases, and countless staircases.
I think that if I had really been there, with my actual legs, I would have grown tired of walking and eventually flopped down onto the first chair I could find. But it was only a dream. I felt no fatigue—only the urge to explore every space, all the while vaguely aware that I didn't have much time left. Does this ever happen to you? Have you ever realized you were asleep while you were still dreaming? It happens to me quite often. Part of me thinks it's because my dreams tend to be so strange. There's a part of my mind that's firmly rooted in logic, always quick to notice when something doesn't quite make sense. Whenever that happens, I become unusually lucid. I feel completely aware of my surroundings, almost as though I have full command of the spaces I'm moving through. The last room I can clearly remember was vast and airy—quite literally. There were no windows this time, only an enormous dome left open to a sky mottled with soft white clouds, allowing a gentle breeze to drift inside.
There was also a circular pool directly beneath the dome. The sky reflected on its surface, turning the water such a vivid shade of blue that it looked almost painted. I wanted to take off my shoes and dip my feet into it. Assuming I was even wearing shoes—or any clothes at all. I couldn't actually see myself, and although the water reflected the sky with perfect clarity, it revealed nothing of my own image. I woke up at that very moment, just as I was trying to see through the water to the bottom of the pool. I wish it were possible to go back to that place and keep exploring it, but you know how these things work. Not once did I feel as though I was in danger or truly lost during all the time I wandered through those silent spaces. I simply felt... how can I put it? At home.
