5:27 a.m.
Tune: “Slept So Long” – Jay Gordon
I was already exhausted, running on three hours of sleep, when the dream began – another vivid immersion where I could feel touch, pain, and the weight of choice.
I was in my mid-thirties, walking beside a young woman through the halls of a school. We flirted; I made some foolish, playful move – then everything went blank. My body kept walking while my mind vanished into static.
When awareness returned, I stood among colossal black towers, their matte surfaces swallowing light. The ground glowed faintly under a thin mist – just like my old 3D visionary artwork from the late ’90s.
Behind one tower waited a massive pod – half machine, half sarcophagus – a chair inside it glowing with controls. Before I could understand what it was, I blacked out again.
Now I was underwater at the edge of the ocean, staring up at propellers turning above me. I couldn’t breathe, yet because I knew I couldn’t, I somehow could. Consciousness flickered like a dying bulb.
When I awoke, the world was broken – a mall drowned in waterways. My brother was with me as the water turned to lava. He jumped; I slipped, one foot burning as it touched the molten flow. I told him to go. He ran.
Later I found myself in an immense chamber – people in armour and lab coats surrounded me. I wore rags. “To save everyone,” I said, “you don’t need to keep me hooked up for long. One year is enough.”
“We don’t trust you,” one of them answered.
Then blackness.
When I opened my eyes again, I was in a small room – the kind you’d find in a clinic. Outside the window: a shining metropolis, skyways crowded with floating cars. A woman in a lab coat smiled gently.
“You saved us all,” she said.
The monitor above the chair read: 4 Years.
She guided me to a windowed lounge. “All of this was your creation,” she said, gesturing to the city beyond. “We rebuilt the world from your dreams.”
I looked down at my hands – wrinkled, aged. My reflection showed white hair and hollow eyes. The words left my throat raw: “I went through fifty years of my life already.”
I collapsed, tears burning. “It wasn’t worth it,” I whispered. “I missed everything.”
Even as I woke in my real bed, that ache followed me – the sense of returning home from a lifetime away. In the shower, I thought only: It’s not worth being a god if it costs your life.
The part that lingered wasn’t saving the world. It was my brother – imagining him left behind, crying alone in some ruined building. That image broke me more than the years I lost.
Maybe that’s what the dream meant. Not creation. Not sacrifice. Just the quiet, unbearable grief of distance.
