“Don’t let go, don’t let go!” The words sound in the distance, intelligible yet distorted as if carried in gurgling watery bubbles unable to burst open and release a scream. For a moment, I can see speech balloons in my mind filing up with gibberish, the ink dissolving as soon as it touches the surface, staining it and turning the smooth round edges into sharp jagged ones. 

My attention focuses on the fact that it is dark, the tall French doors frame a midnight blue sky with plenty of stars. The waxing moon has donned a cloudy bedgown and swings slowly suspended by the invisible threads of Sulafat and Sheliak, shining brightly in the Lyra constellation. The man on the moon is sleeping rocked by stars, I feel a pang of envy. 

Mechanically, I stretch my arm to the left blindly searching for the lamp switch. My eyes, lazy with drowsiness, are still shut and I cringe in advance at the sound the water bottle will make when hitting the floor once again. My hand swats the air up and down. Nothing. Awakened by a strange feeling, I stand up groping around to get my bearings. Two things brutally dawn on me. First, I do not have French doors in my apartment, never mind a view of an open sky. Second, there is neither a lamp nor does there seems to be any furniture at all for that matter. 

I stop on my tracks and turn around briskly to scrutinize the lounge chair I was sitting on a moment ago. No chair. “Don’t panic, breathe!” I hear myself whispering, “there has to be an explanation…”

I walk towards the doors afraid they might be a digital poster or such. They are real and open quietly to a white balcony as I approach. The floor feels soft as cushioning clouds, yet steady enough for me to stand. The balustrade’s slim pillars shimmer, twinkling echoes of the dazzling lights scattered as moondust in a velvet background undulating gently in the soft breeze. I got closer and look down, then up. My surroundings give the impression of a limitless globe pinched at the top, an infinite vanishing point moving further and further, the overall atmospheric haze, unfathomable. 

A third thought crashes into my mind, agoraphobia. Gasping, I retreat, moving backward as slowly as fear allows me. Where the dickens are the doors, I only took a few steps! Terrified, 

I turn around and find them gone. The balcony has become a platform of sorts resembling a field of soft icy grass crunching under my feet; yet emitting the warm smell of a fireplace. I cannot see its size as there is a dense mist around it. I am not sure how long I have been standing here, completely frozen. A sudden wind pushes me from behind and I stagger ahead. To my relief, the field seems to sense my movement and new pieces of grass appear one after the other like fat brushstrokes painted on an inverted horizontal canvas by some creature lying below me. 

Am I walking on a grassy wall? Will I eventually fall? Is it gravity holding me to the floor? It feels like standing up! I look up again a see what appear to be sketched undulating lines coming down as the ribs of an umbrella, its perimeter billowing gently. 

Is the night a midnight blue gown with pearly stars? If so, a wicked thought, I am under its skirts! I blush. Where is it going? 

The footprints left behind become dark holes, crumbs in a path closing slowly as I move away from them. Terrified as I am, I pause to investigate. They are not big enough to swallow me. Time, space, and dimensions do not exist here, I remind myself. The bubbling energy I can feel coming from them picks up my curiosity. “If I am walking to my death, I am going to die knowing!” I assert in a tone aiming for bravery. Gasp. Am I already dead? 

The bubbling energy fluttering around the swirling prints is captivating. I squat and slightly touch the closest to me. It is warm and buzzing and it wiggles like Jell-O. Astonished I see the tip of my finger disappear. I scream and pull it out almost certain I have lost it. No, it is intact. Phew! I place my palm softly and stir the hole. A pleading voice rattles me. “Stop it, stop it! Leave it alone!” 

It is too late; the hole begins to open, and a soft light pours in.

“What have you done!”

A sense of doom falls over me. I do not know where the voice is coming from, it is husky, disembodied, spitting ghostly words swarming around into the invisible prison of an unwelcome edict. Anger rushes over me, the imposition of a story I do not like or even ask to read is chaining me to the indecipherable logic of this existence, caressed by wonder and crushed by fear, sprinkled with the contorting dizziness of disorientation while slapping me into awareness with its impossible beauty and strangeness.

“What the heck is your problem? Show yourself or stop tormenting me!” 

“I would if I could! Close your eyes, I beg you! Surrender, let it take you in its wings… surrender, surrender,” the voice grows quieter until it is almost inaudible.

“Surrender to what?” I ask. 

The atmosphere’s colors shift around as light pours in, thin vertical lines grow in number, and unroll themselves into absurdly bright cones as they move up. Soon, I am blinded by an unfeasible explosion of effulgence and warmth, and begin to fall slowly but relentlessly, the edges of my shape dissolving, becoming light themselves until nothing but presage remains, hovering in the fringes of wakefulness, buried deep where the primordial inhabits. 

Selina does not want to get out of bed. It has been ages sine she had a sound sleep. She tosses and turns with her eyes closed, at once aroused and then sluggish. Something is bothering her, but she cannot pinpoint what it is and slips back into forty winks. For a split second one mind faces another, and this other remembers yet another. And it becomes clear to this other how she is just a figment of imagination, a dream dissolving under the weight of consciousness of the original dreamer, the one in flesh and bones lying in bed, whose mind has wandered beyond the realms of the subconscious into hers. A dream who did not know it was dreaming dies in the hands of wakefulness killing her own. A woman named Selina sucks her teeth pondering… “everything is fine,” her frontal cortex offers. She shakes her unease and goes about her day without a care.