Dream

"Ahh! I’m exhausted!" I groaned, throwing myself onto the bed.

The moment my back hit the mattress, I felt my energy drain away completely. My muscles relaxed, my body sinking under an invisible weight. As if a long day at school wasn’t enough, Takeshi and Ryou’s endless jokes, Ayaka’s letter, and my relentless inner turmoil had left my mind in shambles.

There had been a strange heaviness weighing on me lately. It wasn’t just fatigue. It wasn’t muscle pain or an illness—it was more like an unseen force pressing me down, trapping me beneath a massive, suffocating blanket.

My eyelids grew heavy, my mind tangled with restless thoughts. I struggled to stay awake, but my body betrayed me. A deep, nameless fear coiled within me, whispering warnings I couldn’t quite grasp. A strange tingling sensation crept along my spine. The room felt colder than before, and just as my eyes shut, I swore I heard a whisper—too faint to make out.

And then, as the weight of reality slipped away, everything faded into darkness.

When I opened my eyes, the world was shattered into pieces, floating like broken glass suspended in nothingness. The sky above me wasn’t the sky at all—it was a shifting mass of shapes, moving too fast for my mind to process. There was no up, no down—no sense of direction.

My feet were submerged in water up to my ankles, yet I couldn’t tell if it was warm or cold. I tried to move, but my body didn’t feel like my own. I wanted to take a step, but was there even ground beneath me? Here, everything was uncertain, everything was intangible.

Above me, a solitary light hovered, but it wasn’t alone. Shadows coiled around its edges, shifting and reshaping into unfamiliar forms—things with too many limbs, faces that flickered between expressions. The glow pulsed faintly, as if reacting to my very presence, its flickering rhythm almost synchronized with my erratic heartbeat. As I shifted my gaze, the ripples distorted further, warping reality like a fragile, trembling reflection in water.

I felt I shouldn’t look at it, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away. A primal fear, rising from the depths of my consciousness, seized every inch of my being. That light—it wasn’t just light. Something was watching me.

And suddenly, the air thickened. A chorus of whispers swirled around me, unintelligible yet deafening, as an unseen force seized me, pulling me into its grasp.

As my body was lifted into the air, I simultaneously felt myself being pulled down into the water. My bones groaned, my muscles stretched beyond their limits, as if unseen hands were pulling me apart from all directions, tearing at my very essence, stretching me until I thought I would snap, yet never quite breaking, just prolonging the agony in an endless, suffocating loop of unbearable tension.

I tried to breathe, but my lungs refused to expand. I wanted to scream, but I had no voice. The silence burned my throat, merging with the vast unknown consuming me. The fear inside me grew, morphing into something beyond terror—something without definition.

I looked at my hands, but they were no longer hands. They melted, warped, stretched into spirals of light and shadow, shifting between form and formlessness.

And they were gone.

First, my fingertips vanished. Then my wrists, my arms… My body was dissolving into nothingness. I felt myself unraveling, as if I had never existed at all. In that moment, I couldn’t even remember who I was. Who was I? What was I doing here? My memories—my very identity—were being erased by the light.

And then, the light pulsed like a heartbeat, as if it were alive, watching, waiting. It wasn’t just illuminating the void—it was controlling it. And then, it swallowed everything. The water disappeared. The darkness evaporated. All that remained was the relentless, blinding radiance pulling me upward. I was no longer aware of anything.

And in that instant, only one thought echoed in my mind:

Is this the end?

A hollow emptiness followed. A sensation of falling without end. The wind howled past me, carrying voices that overlapped like a broken recording—some pleading, others laughing, and some screaming in anguish, all disjointed and out of sync with the world. Their lips moved in delayed sync, as if time itself was broken here.

My stomach lurched, twisting with a sickening weightlessness as if gravity itself had abandoned me. The pressure built around my chest, tightening with each passing moment. My limbs flailed, searching for something—anything—to hold onto, but there was nothing but the vast, endless void swallowing me whole. And then—

I jerked awake, my chest rising and falling rapidly. My hands were cold as ice. But what unsettled me most was the feeling that I had brought something back with me. I gasped, my hands gripping the blanket as if to anchor me to reality. The cool air against my sweat-drenched skin sent shivers down my spine, contrasting with the lingering heat of panic.

My ears rang with a low, pulsing hum, as if the remnants of the dream refused to let go of their grip on me.

The weight of the blanket was suffocating, both grounding and trapping me. The cool air against my sweat-drenched skin sent shivers down my spine, contrasting with the lingering heat of panic.

My heart was pounding so hard it felt like it might burst out of my chest. My fingers trembled uncontrollably.

Was it real?

Or was it just a dream?

But that dream… it wasn’t like any other. It had been too real—I could still feel the water clinging to my legs. I wiped my face with my hands; I was drenched in sweat.

What did it mean? Something had changed. I could feel it in every cell of my body. A mix of fear and excitement coiled in my stomach.

My heart pounded erratically. It was like the first gusts of wind before an approaching storm.

And when morning came, I knew—nothing would ever be the same again.