I continue following you.
Even I don’t really understand why. It’s just that I can’t stand merely watching you any longer. To me, you are special. Call it instinct, desire, whatever you want. I prioritize following you, like the need for water or food or the need to go to bed at night.
Amidst all of this uncertainty, you are the one constant I can rely on.
My everything.
You are still dreaming.
Amidst all of the doors standing in the darkness where you always arrive first, you reach for a new door this time and open it. Inside the door is the most ambiguous sight yet.
Amidst the endlessly expansive space, several walls tower over you. Huge walls, infinitely taller than your petite frame. Almost all of them have an oblong shape to them, and walking around them takes a considerable amount of time. There’s nothing else there......
It’s something of a mystical sight.
Like asteroids floating throughout the cold void of space, they’re placed at random. You walk through the cracks in those walls. The walls obstruct my view, causing me to occasionally lose sight of you. However, I don’t panic.
This dream seems like it will go on forever. Even if I lose sight of you, I will meet up with you again. There’s a sense of relief— no, a negligence to that though. You will not disappear. You will not come to harm.
That is pride. I’m under the impression that no matter how many times we fail, we can just do it over again. It’s just a dream; it’s not like we can’t take things back — it goes on and on, tomorrow and the next day and the day after that. Even if I lose sight of you at one point, I have no doubt that I’ll meet up with you again soon.
I run my fingertips gently along the walls standing before me. I can feel a pulse, like that of a living creature. The rhythm of a beating heart and the flow of blood through a brain. Working in tandem, they lead to the ebb and flow of thought. Thickening and thinning, sometimes even breaking off.
Thoughts don’t go on without interruption... Perhaps this wall is a symbol of that. These are the kind of meaningful and meaningless thoughts that come to mind.
Trying to find some sort of meaning, I make conjecture after conjecture. But, who knows how much value there is in that. I begin to feel a sense of futility. No matter how much I mull it all over, it’s pointless.
My thoughts are veering off on a side street out of boredom. Numerous meaningful patterns are drawn upon the walls, rather like stamps. Stamps lead to the creation of many memories. They might be a memory of yours, or perhaps some portrait you’ve committed to memory.
Yes, I feel like I remember seeing a wall like this somewhere. That’s right, it was in that movie — 2001: A Space Odyssey. It looks just like that mysterious rectangle, the one referred to as a monolith, that black wall that granted knowledge to the primitive people who were indistinguishable from apes.
It is something granted by the will of the universe. The evolution of humans from apes. The solid and beautiful manifestation of intelligence itself.
Speaking of movies, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory includes a magnificent parody of that, where the monolith is replaced with a chocolate bar, which is subsequently eaten. The source of intelligence, granted by the will of the universe, being turned into chocolate and eaten has a great deal of significance—
“H-Huh?”
I come back to my senses and realize you are nowhere to be found.
I’ve completely lost sight of you.
While I’ve spent all this time spacing out, thinking about pointless things, you’ve walked on. I scold myself for being an idiot and begin looking around in a panic. I sprint along the outer edge of the wall and peer through to the other side. But, you’re nowhere to be found.
I begin to feel a strong sense of terror.
Like all of the blood in my body has gone cold.
Not having you here is so difficult to bear. As if all the food and water has disappeared from this world. It makes me anxious, I hate it, and I’m terrified.
“Where? Where did you go?” As I call out, I rush about in a panic.
And then, I notice it.
Beneath my feet is a little manhole. A completely normal shaft, unsuited to this more mystical scenery. A point that connects the pristine, manicured surface to the dirty sewers. The lid is open, and so I peer inside. Perhaps you’ve fallen down here.
The hole, by some meanings, is a bad omen, like a trap or some other expression that carries such a disquieting nuance to it. If you don’t pay attention, you could lose your footing and fall.
Fall into misfortune and danger.
I was careless, spacey, and I lost sight of you.
And so maybe I missed you falling into the hole.
“Uu, ahh!” I kneel next to the manhole, crying out in a voice that isn’t really a voice.
I peer inside, but I cannot see through the darkness all the way to the bottom. Not here, not here.
You’re not here. You’ve fallen down the hole. I feel uncomfortable, almost nauseous, as if I’ve run my bare hands through entrails.
Without a moment’s hesitation, I leap into the hole.
It’s a deep, deep hole. I dive deeper and deeper, my body tumbling over numerous times, painfully knocking my head along the sides as I go.
Finally my body slams hard into the ground at the very bottom.
I fell and crash-landed.
My body hits the ground, making the creaking sound of cracked bones.
My body writhes at the impact, and I let out a moan.
“U-Ungh, ahh......”
Falling from such a considerable height dealt a mighty blow to my body. If this were reality, I would probably be dead.
While I wouldn’t disagree with the notion that one can’t feel real pain in a dream, this is not exactly correct. There are dreams where you can feel pain, where you can feel hot and cold. For example, in dreams that take place in ice floes or amidst seas of flames. Dreams where you’re being stabbed all over with sharp objects. In these situations, it should hurt: if the mind can imagine it, then you can feel pain. Through that misunderstanding, the body senses pain.
But that’s just my impression. If you’re just watching a dream, then it’s like a movie. There shouldn’t be any damage to your body. So I keep reassuring myself...... it doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t hurt. I surrender the delusion that it should hurt.
“U-Uhh.”
I experience some discomfort, but it’s preferable to pain.
I lift my face and stagger to my feet. And then, I glance around me. It’s dim, as if illuminated only by the faint light of a broken fluorescent lamp.
It looks like a sewer. Having fallen into a manhole, this is probably the preferable place to land. The surface was unbelievably vivid with a mystic atmosphere. In contrast, the deep, wide gutter next to me has a mysterious, syrupy brown liquid seeping through it like mud.
Put simply, it seems to be related to the body. No matter how hard you try to harbor reason and pure thoughts in your heart and mind, your body metabolizes it. Sweat and filth both out. One discharges feces and soils themselves. That muddied filth, that disgusting, corporeal curse, swells about.
Humans cannot become gods. They cannot become an intangible concept. You cannot separate yourself from such filthy things. We get dirty, decay, get old, and someday, we die.
It feels as if this truth is being thrust upon me.
“Uugh—”
Like a living corpse, I walk about wheezing.
I hear footsteps from within the darkness, on the other side of this extensive, slender pathway that follows the sewer.
Maybe it’s your footsteps.
That sound slowly gets farther away, but I want to draw it closer to me — I want to reach you. And so, in this sewer that smells fishy, like a cesspool, I creep along.