353. Dreaming Of Reality

Her dreams are becoming more real. At first she thought nothing of this, because she expected it would stop after a while and everything would go back to normal. But the end never came. If anything, her dreams have become even more troubling. The things she sees in them are no longer mere figments of imagination — they seem to carry a weight closer to reality itself.

This is especially true when it comes to people. In the past, the human beings she would dream up always had a certain falseness to them. It was as if they were only facsimiles of people, or canvases on which she would impose her own shape and colour. But now she can imagine someone with a form and a manner almost indistinguishable from those of a real person.

Of course, she knows they aren’t actually real. She’s not crazy. She knows the world she imagines is not the world she lives in with this body, the body she often wishes wasn’t hers. She knows the pain she feels in this body is not the same as the pain she feels in her dreams, like when she imagines she is loved by someone and then discovers she isn’t.

How is it possible that she can have such intense feelings for someone who exists nowhere but in her mind? The people she imagines have no correlates to actual people. They do not look or act like anyone she knows. And how is it possible that these imaginary people seem to act beyond her own will, including in ways she doesn’t want to experience? Her imagined world is now no less outside of her control than the physical one, which further adds to its realness.

She now lives equally in these two different worlds. She experiences joy in reality and in her imagination. Is one kind of joy worth less than the other? She isn’t sure, because the feeling is too similar for the experience to differ greatly. If there is a difference it would have to be expressed in terms of something like “depth”, but even this seems doubtful.

At the heart of her worries lies a question she cannot bring herself to consider fully: is it somehow possible that her existence in dreams is just as real as her existence in this body?