You have been dreaming.
This whole time, never tiring of it.
With no destination, you traverse numerous places. Like the electric signals that zip about the brain, you’re having a dialogue with yourself, increasing your capacity for introspection.
You wander aimlessly about this unsettling, unending dream.
One of the worlds you wander through is a grotesque one, one where eyeballs and bloody arms sprout out at random. One world looks like someone splattered paint everywhere. Without a bird’s-eye view from a far-off point, one wouldn’t be able to tell what is drawn on these huge pieces of graffiti.
Dangerous-looking primitive folk, seemingly ready to take up their shields and spears, simply stand around in the darkness with vacant expressions. There is a fishing pond with strange fish and wriggling creatures that cry out when touched. And a stairway that extends so high up, it seems as if it might reach the heavens.
There are ancient plants standing throughout the furthest reaches of a wasteland, a wasteland that looks like a TV that has been knocked over and broken. For some reason, that birdlike woman with the goggling eyes is having a picnic therein.
You seem to have gradually gotten used to this, encountering all of these strange things, taking in their influence, but essentially, you just continue to walk about aimlessly. You move along at an other-worldly pace, as if the eerie scenery horrifies you.
Gradually getting braver, you approach anything, no matter how grotesque, without hesitation, discovering new entrances and exits and diving deeper, further in. Even to the ugliest parts, the parts that make you want to shield your mind’s eye.
Finally, you tire of it. It’s become work for you. You seem to be losing interest in it all. Like a zombie. In other words, it’s like you aren’t even living, like you’re just dreaming the whole time, like you’re in a state of near death.
As if you hate the idea, you collect all of the things you have discovered within your dreams that have left an impression upon you. These items that drip with significance, which I call Effects, are reliably preserved within you, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle coming together to make up who you are.
Among those Effects are those which, on occasion, can impact your surroundings. As you use them, you can set foot into increasingly extraordinary areas.
Each Effect brings with it its own heaviness, and some bring a sense of pain — as you acquire each one, you seem to become more and more exhausted. Becoming fulfilled, growing, but getting more and more tired. It’s almost like becoming an adult.
You continue gathering a variety of Effects.
Like a bicycle, for example. That little vehicle, left in the corner of a fantastical world, moves you farther and faster than ever before. Chasing you as you zip about with such zeal, your braids flying in the wind, is something that brings me a great deal of hardship.
Or like the knife. It seems to be the only weapon that you possess. With it, you walk here and there, stabbing some of the bizarre beings and destroying others. Like the legs that look like they were being grown in some vessel, or the thing overflowing with blood, or the woman that looks like she melted in the hot springs, or the thing that looks like a toy soldier. It is scary for me when you are waving the knife about, and I stay away from you for fear of being stabbed.