These days, it seems that I am no longer asleep—instead, sleep has swallowed me up. Daylight is now a fleeting glimpse in my life, a little yellow color that enters through the crack in the window. The rest of the time I spend in the depths of the night, where time does not stop, but I stop. Gradually, I realize that my body no longer follows the solar calendar; it has started to move on the time of the moon.
This extra sleep has opened a strange theater inside my head. Every night, new performances—sometimes dreams, sometimes nightmares. Some scenes are so complex that it seems that an invisible writer is sitting in my head and writing the script. And some scenes are such that there is no beauty in fear—only tired running and unnecessary panic. So now I can no longer understand whether sleep is my friend or it is silently punishing me.
Today's incident was born precisely in that confusion. After eating and drinking in the morning, I felt like I would pull myself together a little today. I would open my laptop, and revive old works. But the cold air and the laziness accumulated in my body together pulled me towards the bed—as if the bed were the center of gravity.
The dream began with an unfamiliar door. As soon as I opened the door and entered, I realized that the place was my home, but somewhere there was a strange gap. Inside the room was a woman—older in age, with an unfamiliar expression on her face. An unknown unease arose within me in her presence. I don't remember exactly what words or behavior she said. I only remember that the quiet part of my head suddenly became silent, and another, unknown me stood in front.
In dreams, there are no rules, no shame or social fear. So what happened there was unexpected for me. The whole incident was so unusual that in the end it took the form of a distorted smile. I laughed in my sleep—as if the dream itself was joking with me.
Zombies, of course, are old residents of my dreams. At first they were terrible shadows, but now they have become more of a habit. Yet the zombies inside my head are not ordinary. They seem to move according to broken rules—unusually strong, unusually fast. Their pursuit always meant running knowing that they would lose.
At one point, as I was running away, I thought—how much longer? What if I am no longer human? What if I myself join the group I am running from? As soon as this thought came to mind, a strange silence descended. The zombies no longer see me. It is as if I have become irrelevant in their world. They are jumping at others, but they are passing me by—as if I were the wind.
Now in my dreams, I am a strange existence—neither human nor zombie.
Just someone whom no one wants to take into their group.
And I understand that rejection is sometimes so deep that it even makes its address inside nightmares.
