It’s the dream inside the dream again—the most persistent one. The one that waits at the edge of sleep like a familiar ghost, holding open the curtain to the next act. Every night, it picks up where we left off, as if time itself decided to take a cigarette break and forgot to clock back in.
Last night, the scenery changed. New walls. New faces. Maybe not so new—maybe I’ve known them before, in another lifetime, another layer. The air smelled of déjà vu and something older, like dust on an old record spinning just slightly off-center.
In this dream, I relive old traumas as if they’re theater plays that never got their curtain call—reruns mixed with new scripts. I’m standing in scenes I’ve never walked through, but somehow my feet remember the way.
Is that what it is—these dreams inside dreams? Are they the other lives I’m living when I’m not living this one? The versions of me that never woke up? I remember every one, like postcards from a thousand parallel selves.
Sometimes I wake for a moment—to pee, to breathe—and when I close my eyes again, I’m right back in the same dream, like the story refused to go on without me. The dream inside the dream, the reel inside the reel.
But which one is real?
Which one is perceived?
Or am I the dream itself,
folded inside the dreamer,
waiting to be dreamt again?
The real unreal—where stars blink in and out like forgotten wishes. Which star do you wish upon when none of them feel fixed anymore?
Then there I am—high in the rafters, looking down on the show. People in the center stage, laughing, crying, pretending not to be scared. The fool’s court, bright lights, big smiles. All eyes on them.
We need to laugh, or not laugh at all. Because laughter, in dreams, is holy—it’s the echo that proves we’re still somewhere. But which fool fooled us more—the one before, or the one after?
The seats are filled with the usual crowd:
the anxious ones twisting programs in their hands,
the quiet ones watching everything,
and the hollow ones laughing just to hear the sound.
The headliner stole the show, of course. They always do. Right before the credits rolled, we slipped out—down the aisles, out the door, through the parking garage before anyone could stand.
By the time they noticed, we were already halfway down the highway.
A car pulled over on the side of the road, ticketed for breaking dream-rules.
Traffic thick as honey.
Then came the fog—sudden, swallowing.
And then, like an inhale after too long underwater, I was home again.
Or maybe just another home.
Another set of walls, another self, waking up again to the same impossible truth:
It’s all the dream inside the dream.
And I keep remembering it all.
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