If you’ve lived in Emerson Valley long enough, you’ve probably had The Dream. Some people have it their first night in town; others go decades without experiencing it. Nobody knows what triggers it besides being in Emerson Valley. I’ve scoured every internet forum about dreams in search of anyone outside our town talking about it, but nobody ever did. The Dream is apparently unique to us.

It’s a strange feeling when you talk to someone else who had it. You can’t find the right words to describe it. I don’t think the right words exist. The Dream shows you things beyond human comprehension. When you’re awake, you’re chained to your humanity. That’s just the downside of having a physical form in this world. Our bodies are prisons of flesh and blood that keep our minds contained. But when you’re asleep, all that goes out the window.

As you sleep, your body is in maintenance mode. It needs to rest in order to recover from the rigors of your day. This is when your mind is free to roam beyond the confines of your physical form. The warden is away and foolishly left the keys to the kingdom just within your reach. All you need to do is let go. Let go of everything you believe to be possible and impossible. Those rules don’t apply anymore.

It’s in this heightened state of awareness that our minds tap into something cosmic and primal. We get to peek behind the curtain and see the machinery of the universe at work. Because your body isn’t there to remind you of your limitations, you step through the veil and splinter into a billion pieces that get hurtled across reality. Experiencing a billion different things at once would grind your sanity to dust if it happened while you were awake.

Luckily, you’re protected from such labels as “sane” and “insane” by the simple truth that time and space are artificial constructs. It’s not that the concepts are artificial—they’re very real. But the way you experience them goes against the natural order of things. Every possibility, every permutation of what was, is, and will be, exists at this very moment, and it exists right in the very spot you’re in now.

Think of it like this: our physical bodies with their senses are like a film projector. Just as a projector can only show a single frame of film at any given moment, your body can only be in one place. A movie needs to be shown frame by frame, moving linearly from the beginning to the end. You experience time the same way. Each moment follows on from the last, and you can’t jump forward or back whenever you want. As you’re reading this, you start each sentence on the left and move across to the right.

Despite a film projector showing movies one frame after the other, I doubt you’d find anyone who would claim that the entirety of a film reel doesn’t exist. That the only thing that’s real is whatever frame of the movie is currently on screen. So why do we accept that the past is gone once we’re done with it, or that the future won’t exist until it becomes the present?

When your body is asleep and your mind is beyond the veil, it’s like you’ve unspooled a film reel and laid it all out so you can see every frame at the same time. You can choose to focus on a single frame from any point in the movie, or you can take in many different frames at once. You can grab them at random since they all exist simultaneously. Of course, doing this makes the story incomprehensible. You might recognize bits and pieces of what’s happening, but for the most part, it’s a haphazard collection of vivid imagery.

Sound familiar? We’ve all had a dream that makes no sense. People’s faces change in the middle of a conversation, you’re transported to different locations with no connection to what happened earlier, and everything can feel both familiar and alien at the same time. When you wake up, you scratch your head trying to make sense of the inanity. But when you’re in the middle of a dream, you have an innate understanding. Not that you can comprehend what’s happening and why it’s happening, but you feel that it’s right.

That’s why it’s impossible to tell you what happens in The Dream. When you’re having it, you know exactly why you’re there and what you’re doing. But the moment you wake up, it slips through your fingers as your mind is forced back into its bondage—back to linearity and living your life moment by moment. You can no longer be in a billion places at the same time or jump around in space and time. You’re stuck wading through reality in your inefficient meat suit.

The only thing I can tell you about The Dream is that it’s not like a regular dream at all. Most people will enjoy a good dream and want to escape a nightmare. The Dream is something beyond both. It’s not good and it’s not bad. It leaves you with an incredibly deep sense of hopelessness, because you’ve seen the truth. After coming close to comprehension for untold ages, you finally reach the apex of understanding.

You see every cog, every piston, every pipe, and every wire at the core of reality, and the truth is so devastating that your mind can’t hold onto it. Just when everything clicks into place, the universe grinds to a halt. You realize that there is no beginning or end. The cycle goes around and around, weaving this way and that before winding around on itself and repeating the whole thing. The universe never began and it will never end because the infinite cycle is a prison created specifically for you.

While you’re in The Dream, you don’t want to wake up to escape it. You know there’s no escape, even in the waking world. All you can do is wish with every fiber of your astral being to cease existing entirely. That’s the only way to make sure you won’t have to repeat the cycle again and again and again and again and again and again. The worst part is that you know you won’t remember doing it all before. You won’t remember until you make it back to that point where everything clicks, your mind shatters, and you awaken to blissful ignorance.

For those of you who have never had The Dream, consider yourself lucky. Once you’ve had it, you’ll have it again. There’s no way to avoid it. Even when decades pass before it returns for you, as soon as you’re back in The Dream, it feels like you never left. Time folds in on itself and space stretches into nothingness. I can’t even begin to properly express how much I hate having The Dream.

I’m not religious, but when I’m immersed in The Dream, I wonder if I’m God. Maybe God’s omniscience comes from having lived every life that ever existed over and over. Then again, I consider that I might be Lucifer. This universe is my punishment for defying God. It’s the ultimate prison for the ultimate sinner. It’s my own personal Hell. And then I wake up. I curse the fact that I still exist and I know that not even death allows you to escape.

As my body regains control of my spiraling mind, those feelings begin to fade. I forget everything I learned and go back to my somewhat normal life. I might even feel a few pangs of joy every now and then. But the truth of The Dream always lingers there in the shadowy corners of my mind. I do my best to ignore the dread, but when it gets quiet, I can hear it calling me. It doesn’t call me by my name. It calls me by my soul.

I’m sure nothing I’ve said will come as a surprise to most of you. You had The Dream, so I don’t need to tell you what it’s like. This is meant more as a warning to those who have been mercifully spared from its all-consuming presence. If you’ve never had The Dream, don’t come to Emerson Valley. No matter how careful you are, it has a way of finding you.

-Ashton Rook, Lifestyle, Emerson Valley Gazette