Waking
There is something quiet disturbing about waking from a nightmare you can’t remember. It’s not the actual nightmare, it has faded, nor the feelings the nightmare has invoked. Instead, the disturbance is knowing, really knowing, that something has followed you back.
You can wake and know it was all just a dream, all just an illusion that your own mind placed upon you, but when you wake and sense nothing, it’s the absence that is disturbing. It’s as if the dream, which is now a void in your mind, something that had substance and form just moments ago, has transmuted your reality. Sensing nothing is worse than feeling something when you wake. Because that feeling is exactly the same sense as you have of your dream.
And if both your dream and the waking world now occupy the same space, both having the same properties of nothingness, are they so different? And that is when you realize that there is something there after all, something that came back with you. It’s why your heart sounds in your ears and your sweat fails to cool your skin. Because, for a time, you know that you aren’t alone, and that the waking doesn’t make you any safer than your experience of dreaming.
