I went to work that morning on barely three and a half hours of sleep, and my head felt like static. Yet, somewhere between exhaustion and reality, I dreamed again – this time of Erica, Iris, and the spaces between us.
Erica and I were moderators of a website, sharing unseen access to people’s private messages. In the dream, suspicion whispered louder than trust. I gave in and read her messages – not out of jealousy, but because distance had begun to rot into doubt.
Each message from other men echoed the way she once spoke to me: coy, laced with innuendo, intimate. The more I read, the heavier it felt, as if the words themselves were blades disguised as affection. Around me stretched tall, wet grass, fences half-fallen, ditches thick with mud and fog. It felt like wading through the outskirts of myself.
The scene shifted to a plaza where family and friends lined up for something called Slurp, trading cups of it for tickets or animal feed. Everyone was part of this strange exchange – except for Patrick and me. We stood apart with our mountain bikes, half-observers, half-outsiders.
Beyond the plaza loomed Mount Fuji – except it wasn’t Fuji as I remembered. It was monstrous, too vertical, too close, its fields of yellow and green spiralling up like veins. I knew it should have been distant, yet it hovered over me, immense and wrong. I wanted to look away, but couldn’t. That’s when I heard myself whisper, almost silently, “I need to wake up.”
The alarm went off immediately after.
Iris was there too, faintly – a voice that told me to go, then scolded me for going. Even in dreams, she carried that contradiction. She once said she wanted honesty, so I shared my thoughts – and when I told her about the dreams, she called them disappointments. “It’s all in your head,” she said, as if a dream could be anywhere else.
Maybe she was right. Maybe they all were. But that morning, standing in the fog of half-sleep, the mountain still hovering in my mind, I realised that knowing something is in your head doesn’t make it any less real.
