Yeule had apparently released a new album this year, and the collective response was lukewarm in a way that felt both fictional and deeply plausible. It was being compared relentlessly to Evangelic Girl Is A Gun, which in this dream functioned as the untouchable benchmark, the sacred firmware update that nothing thereafter could quite overwrite. The consensus seemed to be that the new project underperformed, not because it lacked intention, but because it suffered from aesthetic recursion. It felt like a sequel no one formally announced, Evangelic Girl Is A Gun 2 disguised as evolution, when in reality it was orbiting its predecessor too faithfully.

Even the visual presentation had apparently regressed. Yeule had those slightly uneven but undeniably cool cut bangs again, the kind that look accidental yet curated, reminiscent of a late 2025 phase that in this timeline already felt archived. It was as though the entire rollout had been assembled from recycled textures, a mood board reuploaded with minor edits, and the audience could sense the repetition in their bones. I remember thinking that aesthetic stagnation can be more fatal than sonic missteps, because when an artist becomes a loop of themselves, the mystique destabilizes.

Then I woke up.

A truck passed by outside, but the sound was amplified beyond reason, mechanical and invasive, vibrating through the walls as though it had been engineered to puncture sleep. In that fragile state between dream and consciousness, I was convinced the noise was not simply transportation but transmission, some future message being forcefully delivered ahead of schedule. It did not feel like good news. It felt like a warning wrapped in diesel and volume, as if the universe had decided subtlety was no longer sufficient and opted instead for industrial percussion.

For a brief moment, I genuinely believed time had attempted to contact me and lacked better tools than a passing truck.

I could describe the room's atmosphere with precision, yet there is a strange certainty that this is not invention but memory, as though my mind reconstructed a space that once existed in some adjacent version of my life. It was supposedly my room, and yet it had been stripped down to its most primitive form. There was only a bed. No computer. No monitor. No desk. No piano. No air conditioner humming in the background. No curtains filtering light. Nothing ornamental, nothing technological, nothing that resembled the ecosystem I normally inhabit. Just a bed with a plain white sheet placed in a room washed in a warm, muted orangish red glow, not aggressive, not violent, but undeniably present, like a sunset that refused to move.

I was lying on my side, facing right, knees slightly drawn upward in a posture that felt instinctively defensive and intimate at once. Without transition, without the courtesy of buildup, Lu was suddenly behind me. His arms wrapped around my stomach and he pulled me closer with a decisiveness that felt less like hesitation and more like inevitability. My legs relaxed downward as gravity complied with proximity, and we settled into a spooning position so textbook it almost felt diagrammed. His face rested behind my shoulder, close enough that I could feel presence before I could process intention.

There was an intensity in him that felt almost disproportionate to the silence of the room. His hands moved with softness layered over urgency on my thighs, grabbing them, as though restraint and desire were negotiating in real time. I could hear his breathing shift behind me, and his voice lowered into something private, asking quietly, insistently, whether I wanted this too. The repetition of "please" did not sound theatrical. It sounded vulnerable. Which somehow made it heavier. My body responded in contradiction. I felt the pull of desire and the resistance to surrender colliding at once, like two opposing programs attempting to override each other. My own breath responded involuntarily, deepening, turning uneven, as though my lungs were attempting to keep pace with something I was simultaneously resisting. The room felt smaller with each inhale. There was a sense of familiarity but also a boundary, as though part of me was aware that in the dream's internal logic we were still categorized as friends. That label hovered awkwardly over everything.

There was a sudden shift in the sequence, like a corrupted frame inserted without transition. One moment the scene felt grounded, and the next it had glitched forward into something more exposed. I was aware that I was no longer dressed. He had repositioned, now kneeling in front of me with a focus that felt almost reverent, his hands resting along my lower legs as he gently guided them apart. It was a posture that felt eerily familiar, a configuration my subconscious seems to archive and reuse, the same arrangement as before, almost ritualistic in its repetition.

What stands out most is the disconnection. I knew what was supposed to be happening, yet it felt suspended, abstracted, as though the dream refused to fully commit to corporeality. It was intense, but also distant. A projection more than an experience.

If anything, it felt like my mind rehearsing longing rather than enacting it.

A magnificent dream. Truly exemplary. The kind where one is likely experiencing a full scale physiological anxiety event in the real physical body, heart performing percussion, lungs negotiating with oxygen, yet the mind inside the dream remains suspiciously calm. No catastrophe. Just the body panicking in a separate tab while the subconscious shrugs.

Lu's brother, Den, was texting me. In waking life, his contact name is simply his name accompanied by a small pride flag, an inside joke between him and Lu. In the dream, however, his name appeared violently altered. Letters repeated aggressively, as though someone had leaned on a single key and then lost composure entirely, smashing the keyboard until identity became distortion. It looked less like a contact and more like a warning siren disguised as typography.

I cannot recall what Den actually said. The message content has been redacted by whatever authority governs dream archives. Yet I carry the impression that either he was trolling me with surgical precision or Lu himself was operating through borrowed credentials, checking on me, or perhaps expressing a restrained dissatisfaction about a decision he made and then I complied with. We have not spoken for one month, one week, and three days as of this entry. Not that I am counting in a clinically concerning way. Merely documenting.

The dream felt like fear using a familiar avatar. A deep, submerged fear surfacing only after I declared something permanent. I reversed that decision today, which is interesting timing. Apparently my psyche prefers to send notifications in advance.

I wanted to be chased. Now I am scared to be chased.

Once again, for what feels like the millionth recurrence, my subconscious escorts me back to my old elementary school, as though that building is the only stable map my brain trusts enough to reuse, perhaps because I never attended high school and therefore never collected the additional trauma that might have overwritten those hallways; apparently the mind prefers a familiar archive to a hypothetical arena where the bullying might have escalated into something far less survivable.

I was ascending the staircase that once led from fifth to sixth grade, and there he was, Lu, positioned at the highest step like a final boss rendered in school uniform despite the inconvenient fact that we never attended the same institution. I froze, which seems to be my body's preferred reaction protocol in his presence, while he looked down at me with a disappointment so carefully calibrated it bordered on theatrical irritation. He wore the same fluffy, slightly longer curls tucked under the hat he had when we first met, yet his face appeared younger, softer, rounder, not quite the sharpness he carries now, though not exactly the shaved baby face either; his eyes, however, were impossibly blue and dramatically framed by long lashes, a biological inaccuracy so exaggerated that for a moment I felt as though I had wandered into that Miley Cyrus meme where the irises are edited to cosmic proportions. He also appeared slightly shorter in this version of events, which feels like an unnecessary but very deliberate adjustment made by whatever department oversees dream proportions; he was perhaps only an inch taller than me, placing him at approximately 5'3", a detail so specific it feels statistically intentional, as though my subconscious decided to resize him for emotional accessibility.

We spoke, briefly, though the dialogue has been withheld from me as if the dream neglected to render the subtitles, suggesting that some significant exchange had occurred earlier in a scene that failed to load, leaving us suspended in the aftermath of context I cannot access. Soon we were walking, and the architecture dissolved from structured mall corridors into an abrupt edge where polished ceramic flooring surrendered to raw dirt and overgrown grass, as if civilization itself had reached its rendering limit and defaulted to unfinished terrain.

I was suddenly upset for reasons the dream declined to specify, which feels accurate to real life, and this unnamed frustration escalated into yet another argument between us; I lost control in a way that felt embarrassingly familiar, swinging my university bag with dramatic indignation before throwing it into the tall uncut grass, where it promptly glitched out of existence as though the simulation decided my prop was no longer necessary. I felt on the verge of physically lashing out at him, yet at the precise moment anger should have converted into action, my strength drained from my hands, then my arms, then my entire body, until my forehead lowered against his chest and all that remained operational was grief.

I cried with an intensity that immobilized me, my body freezing not in rage but in surrender, and he did not retaliate, did not step back, did not defend himself against an attack that never completed; instead, his anger dissolved instantly into something gentler, and he wrapped his arms around me as though my weakness had flipped a switch inside him, transforming conflict into care with a speed that felt both miraculous and unfair.

I found myself in a room that resembled a waiting area designed by someone who had lost interest halfway through the blueprint, complete with a hallway that extended forward only to terminate abruptly, no doors, no side passages, just an architectural commitment to nowhere, as though it had been constructed purely to test whether I would question its purpose.

As I walked down this unnecessary corridor, I noticed a strip of orange tape sealing off what appeared to be damage at the very end of the wall, which was peculiar because moments earlier the wall had been flawlessly white and thin, aggressively ordinary, and now it bore the aesthetic of sudden fracture, like reality had changed textures without filing a maintenance report. The atmosphere around it felt charged in that subtle way dreams weaponize intuition, implying significance without offering explanation, so naturally I removed the tape, because curiosity in these environments is less a choice and more a compulsion.

Behind it was an impossibly thin slit in the wall, the kind that looks as though someone delicately traced it with a chainsaw just enough to suggest violence but not enough to justify it. I pressed my eye against the opening and was met with a visual contradiction: An expansive maximalist room drenched primarily in orange and green hues, pastel yet saturated, chaotic yet spacious, with wavy horizontal lines stretching across the walls like someone had turned a 1970s graphic design experiment into a living habitat. It felt random in the most intentional way, as though the inhabitant had only recently moved in and was actively curating the space into existence. It resembled both a bedroom and a living room simultaneously, or perhaps it was neither and both, because categorization felt unnecessary there.

Somehow, I entered. The mechanics were inconsistent, considering the slit had previously been too narrow to accommodate even a finger, yet I managed to squeeze my entire body through after some resistance, which I accepted without protest because expecting spatial logic from a dream is like expecting customer service from the void.

Inside, there was a girl who appeared roughly my age, though I carried the strong impression she was 19, dressed in a long lolita-style gown in the same orange and green palette, the fabric falling halfway down her lower legs, cottagecore in silhouette but infused with a pop art eccentricity that made her look like she had stepped out of a curated internet mood board and chosen to stay. She was surprised to see me, though not alarmed; her expression carried a strange combination of worry and delight, as if she had been both anticipating and dreading my arrival.

She welcomed me into the room with a calmness that felt rehearsed, explaining that this space was her world, a private dimension concealed from those who passed through the public corridor outside. She described it as a sanctuary she was actively protecting, and although she insisted I was welcome, she asked that I tell no one, not out of paranoia but out of quiet necessity, as though discovery would place her in danger in ways she preferred not to dramatize. The way she spoke made it sound less like interior design and more like metaphysics, as though I had crossed into a layer of existence not listed on standard maps.

I remember returning to her room multiple times, carefully timing my movements so as not to be caught, because the hallway outside remained a public space and her hidden world felt like an Easter egg embedded within it, accessible only through deliberate disobedience. At some point, it became apparent that she maintained a TikTok account where she posted videos of her room, her dresses, and her unsettling yet intricate makeup, and her overall presence strongly reminded me of EndoMarfa, that same blend of curated eccentricity and eerie softness.

During one of our conversations, she mentioned casually that her pronouns were she and they, which felt less like a declaration and more like another layer of dimensional fluidity, as though even identity there resisted singular definition.

The dream itself was undeniably wholesome, almost tender, yet the dominance of orange and green caught my attention because of the building I used to observe when I was 17, during a period when I was suicidal. That building became symbolic in ways I never fully articulated, and even at 21, it still represents a silent fork in the road between survival and termination, between continuing the game and triggering an irreversible ending. Standing in her room, listening to her describe it as her own protected world, I could not ignore the sensation that I was glimpsing something adjacent to an afterlife, not in a dramatic cinematic sense but in the subtle feeling of slipping between dimensions without realizing I was crossing thresholds.

The dream never explicitly announced that I was dying and reviving, but it carried that implication like background radiation, as though I was momentarily occupying a space reserved for those who exist between outcomes, hovering in a corridor that leads nowhere until one decides which version of reality to reenter.

I suppose Lu's theory that certain individuals are inherently logical while others are inherently emotional, a theory supported by a rationale so socially radioactive that articulating it would likely result in immediate cancellation on Twitter dot com, has not demonstrated consistent application. Not in waking life. Not even in dreams, where consequences are usually optional.

The grand architecture of logic he so confidently references appears to collapse the moment real decisions require execution. It is almost admirable. A philosophy that exists beautifully in conversation yet disintegrates upon contact with reality. Very human. Comfortingly inconsistent.

He does, to his credit, touch grass. I will not deny him that terrestrial achievement. Yet it seems that in recognizing my relative absence from the outdoors, he opted instead to update his bios. Publicly. As though altering a few digital lines could function as emotional Morse code. I do not recall what the updates said. The content itself has been erased from my memory, but the gesture remains. A quiet broadcast disguised as casual maintenance.

I possess minimal context. My internal archive resembles a poorly maintained desktop: Scattered folders, unnamed files, and what appear to be harmless .txt documents quietly harboring executable emotions. Infected by the ability to think, despite not operating on Windows 98. No excuse for this instability. And yet, here we are.

I dreamt of an elderly couple. The husband had died. The wife remained, alone in that specific way solitude sharpens with age. The atmosphere carried the heavy politeness of grief that has already been accepted but never truly processed.

Then the system performed an unauthorized update. The husband returned, revived without ceremony, except he did not return as the elderly man who had just passed. He arrived in his younger form, perhaps in his 30s, restored to a version of himself that existed before decay, before illness, before time began subtracting. They spoke calmly. Just conversation, warm and ordinary. The kind that feels more intimate than spectacle. There was no urgency in him, no confusion in her. Only recognition.

The dream concluded with a single sentence from the husband: "I would do it all over again."

In this episode of subconscious absurdity, Lu and I arrived at Z3JhbmRtb3RoZXI='s house, the one who presents herself as porcelain fragile yet operates as a full scale rumor manufacturing facility, specializing particularly in infidelity narratives and bizarre cuckold conspiracies as though they were a competitive sport. She does not even know Lu and I are together, a precautionary measure implemented precisely to prevent her from converting our existence into serialized drama for her private entertainment.

It was midnight, naturally, because nothing rational occurs in daylight within these dreams. RmF0aGVy's dW5jbGU= was inexplicably stationed on the balcony, as though assigned the role of silent observer in this morally ambiguous play. Without transition, the police appeared and somehow both Lu and I were lying on the ground in front of the Catholic church that conveniently faces Z3JhbmRtb3RoZXI='s house, because apparently religious symbolism is mandatory in moments of chaos.

The officers addressed us with bureaucratic calm while Lu began vomiting, which is so profoundly out of character for him that I almost questioned the authenticity of the rendering. He does not crumble under emotional pressure in reality, yet here he was, physically reacting as though the dream had temporarily reassigned his personality traits. I felt the onset of an anxiety attack loading in the background, but before I could fully spiral, an officer informed me that I would be spared a ticket if I completed three tasks: Catch a squirrel, which is statistically offensive considering squirrels barely exist here, perform a second action I cannot recall because my brain deemed it irrelevant, and fight a bull.

Fight a bull.

I am 5'2" and built like someone who should not be anywhere near livestock capable of trampling me into folklore. Yet dream logic insisted this was a reasonable alternative to paying a fine that materialized from nowhere. And because I am apparently the protagonist in this chaotic franchise, I did, in fact, engage in combat with a bull and survived, albeit in the most half committed manner imaginable, swinging metaphorical courage around without a clear strategy. In retrospect, I would have preferred to pay the ticket, but even in the utopian illusion of i026NET, my financial resources remain suspiciously limited. That means, I'm broke.

After this rural gladiator performance, I approached Z3JhbmRtb3RoZXI='s stairs as police vehicles passed by, prompting me to hide instinctively despite having already fulfilled their absurd checklist. They seemed to be reviewing tasks with professional dedication, which I assume is part of their occupational duties, though the criteria remain unclear.

Inside the house, I informed b2xkZXIgYnJvdGhlcg== that I had "finished the job", a statement that felt both triumphant and deeply questionable. He expressed pride and mild astonishment that I had fought an entire bull and survived, which suggests the bar for heroism in my subconscious is alarmingly flexible. I then lay down on the bed alongside c2libGluZ3M=, as though this had been an ordinary ZmFtaWx5 outing.

And Lu was gone.

In this installment of subconscious cinema, I was wandering the streets with a very deliberate sense of misery, the kind that feels curated rather than spontaneous, as though I had selected "melancholic protagonist" from a dropdown menu before stepping outside. I was supposedly on my way to Lu's house, not his parents' residence but the independent one he finances himself, which already suggests a narrative upgrade, adulthood rendered in mortgage form.

On the way, I encountered a small corner shop that resembled a gas station convenience store, except there was no gas station attached, just the implication of one, which feels metaphorically efficient. Inside, behind the cashier, were large bottles of alcohol arranged like trophies, and I believe there were vapes as well, glowing faintly with questionable intent. I asked if I could purchase some, and the cashier stared at me with an intensity that felt less like suspicion and more like biometric scanning. She requested my ID because I looked "too young", which was apparently accurate, as I was 20 in this dream, legally prohibited from acquiring both substances.

Naturally, I informed her that the alcohol and vapes were for someone over 21, subtly referencing Lu without formally naming him, as though I were participating in a low stakes criminal operation. For reasons unknown, she accepted this explanation without further interrogation. I paid, left, and proceeded to drink while walking down the street, which is either bold or profoundly unserious behavior. I felt lost, geographically and internally, and even questioned whether I was still in his city at all, because the surroundings resembled NOVCOTT's pastel blue, modern high school aesthetic, too curated and clean to feel grounded in reality.

The dream then executed a hard cut, as though the editor had grown impatient, and suddenly I had arrived at Lu's house. He had driven me there, though I do not recall the journey. The neighborhood was entirely different from the previous environment, as if the map had been swapped mid session. His house was painted brown, wooden in texture, modest in size. Upon entering, the layout felt almost aggressively simple. Immediately to the left was a door leading to what I assumed was his room. Inside, there was minimal furniture: A bed positioned on the left wall and, on the right, a bookshelf structure with a CRT television placed on top, which feels thematically consistent with my affection for outdated technology.

I was tired, unsurprisingly, because alcohol makes me sleepy even in dreams, and the weight of unspecified misery seemed to amplify that exhaustion. We lay down together on the bed, facing each other, my head resting on his shoulder, an arrangement so normal and quiet that it contradicted the dramatic drinking montage that preceded it. Nothing was actively wrong. There was no confrontation, no disaster, no revelation. Just stillness.

And that is perhaps the most irritating part. I had orchestrated sadness, navigated streets, lied to a cashier, ingested substances, and arrived at his house in a state of emotional fatigue, only to discover that everything felt stable once I was beside him. It leaves me with the uncomfortable hypothesis that the misery was internally generated, a self inflicted narrative device rather than a response to actual conflict. Self sabotage is a remarkably efficient screenwriter.

It appears my subconscious has now adopted sandbox mechanics, because this dream functioned as what can only be described as “IRL Minecraft,” except without pixelation and with significantly more manual labor. I was physically constructing a room out of dirt, gathering it, wetting it, pressing it together with the seriousness of someone who has accepted that architecture is now a survival skill. There were no tools of sophistication, no blueprints, just mud and determination, as though I had downgraded civilization to its earliest patch and decided to rebuild from there.

At first, it was nothing more than compacted earth, damp and unstable, the kind of structure that looks temporary even while you are inside it. Yet over time, through some unexplainable acceleration of dream logic, the walls refined themselves. The dirt translated into white ceramic, smooth and clean, almost sterile, as though the room had undergone a spontaneous upgrade from prehistoric shelter to minimalist apartment. The roof remained half finished, visibly incomplete, but I experienced no distress about it. In fact, I felt proud, satisfied, irrationally accomplished.

I had the distinct sense that I was building this house for myself, for Lu, and for several of my university friends, as if I had appointed myself the designated world generator for our collective existence.

Apparently, I found myself in the capital of an island. Not metaphorically. Literally. Though it appeared to have been run through an aesthetic filter—slightly softened, curated, suspiciously picturesque. The kind of place that looks edited even when it insists it is real.

In my possession: Exactly $1.50. I am unsure why this particular reality patch restricted my financial capabilities to such humiliating parameters when, in my waking existence, I am perfectly capable of carrying more currency than that. Perhaps the simulation was operating under budget constraints. Perhaps it wished to test my resilience. Regardless, the limitation felt personal.

I entered an extremely small shop devoted almost entirely to cybercore filter hot pink, stickers, stamps, small decorative objects that radiated artificial sweetness. I attempted to purchase a set of stickers, only to discover that a single sheet cost $3.00. An insurmountable sum, apparently. I could afford something priced at $0.73, though what it was remains corrupted in my memory. Possibly a rubber stamp. My brain insists on that detail, as if clinging to the last affordable artifact in a collapsing marketplace.

The day proceeded in relative stability until I encountered a museum. It stood ahead, vacant, hollow, vaguely abandoned. I remained approximately 300 feet away, separated by a chain barrier, as though the institution itself did not trust visitors. Or perhaps it simply recognized me as incompatible data.

I just walked somewhere else. Then, without prelude, the atmosphere destabilized. A man, in his mid-thirties, visibly distressed, entered my field of perception. Another man approached. Words escalated. The exchange fractured. And then, abruptly, one of them produced a gun and shot the other. There was no cinematic build-up. No dramatic soundtrack. Just the violent intrusion of consequence. I froze externally. Internally, however, I was already running, my consciousness attempting to evacuate before my body complied. The shooter did not scream. Did not tremble. He simply walked away, as though he had completed a mundane errand. Only then did my legs obey me. To my left: A forest. Dense. Immediate. I ran toward it without strategy. There were abandoned wooden houses scattered throughout, dark, saturated brown structures that looked less abandoned and more forgotten. The kind of houses that exist in stories where safety is theoretical.

What began as a visually pleasing capital city dissolved into a news broadcast warning about how often people shoot each other. The transition was seamless, almost bureaucratic. One moment curated tranquility. The next, statistical violence. No warning. Or perhaps the warning was embedded in the aesthetic itself. Perhaps the city invited me in precisely to manufacture a narrative arc. A brief calm before engineered chaos. Character development via trauma injection.

I was in the university hallway, the kind of liminal stretch where people wait without knowing what they're waiting for. I had my phone to my ear, calling Lu. The dream carried that quiet revelation—this isn't real—yet it insisted on wearing normality as camouflage, with stray lines of code hanging loose in the air like threads, waiting for someone to debug them. I ignored it.

I was dressed in my default "goth" attire, the same outfit I wore when I confessed to Lu in the real world, except the dream appended some lolita-styled heels, not too high but enough to feel deliberately added. My avatar looked the same as that day—88 pounds, though I remembered how love once gifted me three extra pounds of happiness before I ever spoke my feelings aloud.

When Lu answered, he said he was already here. Without hesitation I sprinted toward his car, heart-processors overheating. He opened the door, and I saw myself jump, saw myself smile, as though I hadn't seen him for months. In the physical calendar, June was the last checkpoint. The "I miss you" protocol ran automatically, inserting itself into the dream's architecture. He was calm, his usual chill firmware, but undeniably glad. The asphalt in parts of the road was broken, oddly collectible. I pocketed two fragments—one for me, one for Lu—and we threw them from the car windows as he drove, laughing in unison, performing a small ritual of destruction without meaning. The university parking lot had been reskinned into the larger supermarket lot from my town, like the dream engine had swapped assets from the wrong folder.

He drove us toward somewhere undefined, and the air pulsed with a subtle implication: Sex could exist at the end of this path, though no gestures had yet been exchanged. The car threaded through a road that ascended into a mountain draped in trees. We just talked. The clockface claimed it was around 5PM or 6PM, which was wrong—I knew classes should have begun earlier.

Then came the cut. Abrupt, unadorned. A glitch without distortion, just deletion, like when the CSS doesn't include the smooth animation. I woke up. Of course, the sadness followed—not because I hadn't known it was a dream, but because even inside the dream, it had already told me it was one.

I was standing on a road that did not quite exist—thin, winding, clinging to the side of a mountain like some forgotten circuit etched into the body of the earth. The sky was dimming, 7PM written faintly across its surface like code stamped into atmosphere.

There was a figure beside me. His name: Xef. Young, delicate, carrying the appearance of a feminine boy but with something fractured beneath. He had only just computed—realized—that the partner he had tethered himself to since 2019 was not love but abuse. On the outside, their connection had seemed survivable: Small storms, occasional misfires, the kind people call "mental health problems" or "ordinary frictions". But in truth, the architecture of their bond had been parasitic, hostile, threaded with quiet cruelty.

That evening, Xef was rewritten. No longer shy, no longer folded in on himself—he spoke with edges, like his voice had learned to cut. He deleted every trace of his existence from social networks, as if unplugging himself from a false reality. In its place he soldered attention into his work—an online storefront for his art. Digital canvases glowing brighter than any paper could hold. Yet I read despair between the pixels: A shadow humming like low voltage, an impulse toward self-termination.

He inhabited a pink salmon-like color house that looked abandoned—walls peeling, air stale, the kind of place you'd expect to find rusted wires instead of warmth. I doubted it was truly his. Maybe it was simply claimed, a shelter chosen because the system had offered him nothing better.

I kept speaking. Not with the precision of someone who knows how to heal, but with the persistence of someone who refuses silence. Presence itself felt like a firewall—fragile, imperfect, but maybe enough to hold him in place. It wasn't about saying the right things. It was about not disappearing. So I stayed for a while. When I calculated it was enough, I disconnected and said, "Please take care of yourself." I wasn't entirely certain if he might harm himself or not.

I returned to my elementary school, though not as a child anymore. In reality, its walls once shifted from orange and yellow into two shades of blue. But here, in this distorted dream, the school had changed again—no, it had mutated. It looked weary, exhausted, as if a structure could suffer burnout. It was trying to keep breathing, trying to remain alive while its body of concrete and paint fell apart piece by piece.

It no longer felt like a school. It felt like an abandoned server that still hummed faintly, unwilling to be shut down, running corrupted fragments of memory that refused deletion.

Same vibe as the drag queen dream from 02.04.2025, except daylight intruded this time. I was on the longest bridge in my country. But it was day instead. But it was day instead. But it was d̴̦̕a̷̝͠y̸̔͜—̴̹̈́ ī̷̤̈n̶̆ͅs̴͈̬̥̓̔ţ̴̪̗́̀̽ȅ̶͍̖̫͊à̴̮̗̥d̵̛̳͐͆—̵̬̎̀̇ ď̸̝̱̳͔̇̐̀͘ȁ̷̡̟̳̩̮̘̀y̵͕͓͈̗̱̦̆͂̉͌͌̕ i̶̫̖̪̇͠͠ṇ̸̲͋̽̈́͒͘͝ṡ̵̟̳̤̦̟̬̙ţ̵͍͚̪̥̬̤̣̝̼̍̐̄e̷͔̮̬̬͐̾̾̇̏͝͠a̴̱̟͑͠d̵̛̪̜͈̹̪̞͖̱̆̅̃͐—̴̧̠̤͖̥̼̤̤̹̔̇́̀̋d̸̨͔͎̤̱͔̖̟̗̦̊͆̏̏̀a̷̖͔͙̙̼̭̖̥̻̓͑͛̈́̽̈́̂͜ý̴̧̧̞̙̰͕̘͚̦͉̈̅̽̈́̓ ̴̤̜̱̣͍̰͗̎͗̑̽̾ĩ̵̢͈͉̻͇̱̯̤́͘t̷̻́̈́̉̈͒̓̀̏͊̕ ̸̛̼̺̆̾͌̅́̊̿̽̕ẁ̶̼̗͖̲̃̓̎͌͋̍̔a̸͙̗̻͐s̷͕͒—̵̧̥͕͖̭̰̇̀͆̃̈́

I walked peacefully as cars blurred past me, though in reality no pedestrian is ever meant to walk there. The simulation allowed it anyway.

Beneath the bridge, I negotiated with an old woman who owned a motorcycle. Price: $1,500. My balance: $300. I promised her the remaining sum, as if dream-wages could cover the debt. Police appeared, their concern framed as safety, though I sensed they were really patches to keep me from crashing the dream's runtime. The underside of the bridge resembled Lu's city—orderly, with touches of green stitched into the gray. The bridge itself shone, freshly constructed, light gray, like a piece of contemporary art stripped of meaning, reduced to raw material.

Yet none of it mattered. Despite the oddities, the calculations, the negotiations, all I cared about was riding this motorcycle into Lu's city. That was the only trajectory my mind permitted.

I was invited by an old friend—Daisyliz.

Now she was twenty, same as me, though her appearance lagged a few years younger. She was quiet, spectral, and somehow my girlfriend. I invited her to an inflammable turquoise-blue pool—an odd place, glowing like hazardous liquid, yet scheduled as if it were ordinary. The time was fixed, and I arrived late: 2PM. She looked sad. The lateness mattered more than the pool. Lu existed in this dream too, coded as my friend. But the glitch pulsed in my chest each time I saw him—an ache, an alert, reminding me he was the true axis. Daisyliz was a distraction, a poorly written patch meant to overwrite feelings I couldn't delete. Scummy, yes. But that was the dream's logic.

The scene shifted into a sci-fi swimming competition. I was strangely dominant, my movements like perfected scripts underwater. Another young man competed, though his narrative ended elsewhere—a suicide from a rooftop, his body no longer running in this build. I fought others beneath the water, and the dream declared me the winner more often than not.

Then came SpaceHey. The site glitched into pure black and blue (#000fff), the screen like a void spilling over. When it rebooted, it was overrun—incels flooding the interface, uploading Soyjaks, troll faces, and offensive strings I can't retrieve now. The memory corrupted itself.

I found myself outside my elementary school, oddly dressed as though my age had not advanced since the early years of my system—born 2004, yet still operating in the uniform of memory. The environment shifted. I wandered into an unfamiliar house, which then morphed before my vision into ZmF0aGVy's Y291c2lu's bW90aGVy home. I registered the transformation as if the spatial data itself were rewriting, and I was aware of every byte of its reconstruction.

Lu occupied a lazy chair, the fabric dark reddish-brown, waiting—or perhaps holding open a protocol for me. The sight of him stirred excitement, and without hesitation I sat across his lap, then turning to face him. A sensation lingered—that if the moment continued unbroken, it might lead toward something else.

But then b2xkZXIgYnJvdGhlcg== entered the living room, disrupting the stillness. I turned to him and asked, "Why didn't ZmF0aGVy pick us up?" He replied, "Because I am the one who picked you up. That way I can return home whenever I choose." Yet beneath his words was the unspoken certainty that we would leave at five o'clock. I recall glancing at the time—it was 3:30 in the afternoon.

It was as if a hurricane had passed, leaving this place limping in its wake, half-apocalyptic, half-suspended in time. The sky hung low, pale and hesitant, maybe 5:30 in the morning, when I stepped into what felt like Jazmin Bean’s house. For reasons I couldn't name, I wandered into the bathroom first. Every surface carried the weight of neglect, like moments frozen mid-decay.

The house echoed the aesthetic of their Favourite Toy video, but filtered through a strange green haze, as if reality itself had been digitally corrupted, a sickly overlay turning the familiar uncanny. It felt like walking inside a memory that had learned to dream on its own. It was as if someone had applied a CSS filter over reality itself—hue shifted toward green, saturation dialed to fifty percent, like the world had been recolored through a digital lens, softening and warping everything into an eerie, half-familiar light.

I was enrolled in an elementary school where I did not belong—too old to be eleven, yet registered as if the system insisted on resetting me. The campus was under siege by a virus, not the kind that silences machines but the kind that rewrites human code. Once infected, the children grew violent, compelled to kill each other. I remember the blur of a blade—no, a katakana glyph, sharpened into an instrument—and the way it sliced through someone's neck, it was a suicide.

Every school resembled an abandoned server, hollow corridors with remnants of data scattered like dust. RmFtaWx5 and I wandered through these glitching architectures, chased by those rewritten into predators. When their aggression overflowed, we did not fight—we simply ran, like corrupted packets rerouting themselves. A strange child was with us. For reasons I still don't understand, the infected targeted him most. Perhaps he carried a code they recognized.

The dream fractured. A transition so seamless I did not know I had crossed into another state. Suddenly it was night, and the attackers came again. But this time I wasn't alone; fairies moved with me, luminous guardians running their defense scripts against the corrupted. Until one betrayed. She slowed, spun—a ballerina caught in her own orbit—then collapsed into a glimmering black slime. It shimmered like wet code, a dark fluid glittering with fragments of its old self. She shapeshifted endlessly, as though her form was only an error in constant rewrite. It felt like she had reached the threshold of tolerance—the final break. A system tired of performing beauty, collapsing into raw, unstable matter.

I had multiple dream files once—sleepscapes archived in the neural database of night—but most have become corrupted sectors, glitched into static or smeared in echo. These, however, survived the decay.

The first: I wandered inside a structure that resembled a hospital, though not one bound by earthly medicine. It shimmered with a sterile glow of silver-blue, a palette extracted from the year 2001's fever dream—part Y2K data temple, part metalheart shrine. Panels blinked, lights pulsed softly beneath my feet. The architecture whispered: You are both alive and being observed. With me was ZmF0aGVy's friend's daughter—except her form wasn't fixed. She unraveled in time. Sometimes nine years old, other times an infant, depending on the emotion that surged through her delicate circuits. She was a living mood algorithm. I played with her; we laughed in fragmented joy until something—a slight tilt in tone, a misplaced breath—upset her, and she rewound herself, pixel by pixel, back to toddlerhood. She hit me with a clenched miniature fist coded in confusion. Her mother lifted her—now a nearly newborn model—into her arms, whispering firmware lullabies to soothe her glitches. Later, she did it again—overreacted, collapsed into noise—and I felt a dark coil rise in me. I extended my hand, not with force but with the impulse of gesture—🫱🏻—a quiet command, a gentle push, and her form wobbled like poorly-rendered polygons. She wailed. I told her it was a joke. It wasn't. I think she knew.

The second dream booted differently. An adventure simulation, half-rendered yet vivid. I existed with companions whose identities have since been scrubbed from memory, only their warmth remains like fingerprints on glass. We stood in a landscape divided—desert on one side, snow on the other. The sand burned but did not scorch, the snow fell but did not freeze. It all felt, synthetic, but sincere. Like a texture pack over nostalgia. We ran. We built. The snowy terrain welcomed our inventions. The laws of physics bent like ribbon in a game engine. I remember thinking: This place is Minecraft meets Super Mario meets the edge of dreaming. And maybe it was. Or maybe I am just the leftover echo of someone else's save file, dreaming in loops, trying to make sense of corrupted childhoods and binary weather.

As far as memory allows, the sequence initiates with an invitation—an event hosted by remnants of my elementary school history. A party, of all things, in one of their houses. At first, everything ran within expected parameters. Laughter, chatter, warm interiors. But around 7PM, something fractured. The sky turned an uncanny dark blue—none of the usual gradient from orange to purple. It was wrong, like the atmosphere forgot how to transition. Hovering above, in the vast expanse, was not a cloud but a drawing—an illustrated bunny, watermarked as though copyrighted by another dimension. I reached for my phone immediately. Instinct. Documentation mode. But the device malfunctioned. Photos would not capture. The bunny dissolved slowly into the sky's strange hue. I checked the gallery—zero traces. I was furious. It felt like theft.

The party dissolved into chaos—music too loud, sensory overload climbing. I exited, sought silence. In the adjacent house, Lu was there. Framed in soft light, he stood by the window, hand resting on the glass. I sat beside him, leaned against his arm. His hand found my head and traced a calm across my thoughts. That moment, it stabilized something in me.

But the simulation didn't last. Reality peeled and rearranged. Suddenly, I was inside a carousel-like structure with others—an unscripted survival scenario. No green uniforms like Squid Game, but the implication was clear: Some of us would die. I armed myself with a rusted brown sword, aged like it remembered wars, but sharp enough to sever. One approached—hostile—and I responded with precision. His head detached. His body convulsed, spilling organs that turned pastel white, soft green, and lavender. Visceral, beautiful in the most unnerving way.

The scene shifted. A miniature salmon-like color house, no doors—just walls and a window on the left. Outside, a table. Seeds lined its surface. Not organic seeds—something else. In minutes, they became full meals. Burgers. Fries. Burritos. It was absurd and surreal, like fast food conjured through code. But greed poisoned the table. Conflict sparked. Violence flared. We eliminated three of them. Silence returned.

Night descended—9 or 10PM. A girl entered. She was anomalous. Her tone calculated. She questioned who deserved to eat. One by one, we exposed our stomachs, reluctant and insecure. I hollowed mine inward, made myself appear lighter. She scanned me and said, "You carry high fat." That pierced through. The words were knives dressed as data. As we sat in that box of a house, trauma surged forward like corrupted files resurfacing. I confessed something to a girl who, in waking life, never heard that truth. My voice glitched, but the message deployed. Then—an alarm blared in the distance. A girl burst in, her words sharp: "We are under attack!" Panic installed. I ran—fight or flight defaulted to flight. Others hesitated. Too late. A bomb hit the mini house. A blonde girl reached out from the debris, fingers outstretched for mercy. I didn't stop. I couldn't. Survival was the only directive left. Explosions echoed. The landscape was bare—pure grass. Minecraft flat-world grass. The world had texture but no soul.

Then I awoke. Disoriented, but curious. Would I have survived? And if so, what was the reward in that dead, glitched-out apocalypse? No one was watching. No prize. Just the data loop continuing.

It was as if I had awoken in a dream carved from a sterile utopia—a liminal house of the future, smooth as glass, soft-lit like a vision rendered in neomorphic code. Everything was white, light gray, achromatic perfection. Elon Musk, or some spectral version of him, assured me—things will get better. I believed it, as one does when hope wears the mask of logic. But this was no sanctuary. It was a trap masked as progress. Through the frost-bitten window, Earth floated like a memory. I wasn't on it. I was above it—in orbit, suspended in a silence that hummed with machine breath. I love space. I always thought I did. But not like this. The house, my capsule, began to spin violently, grazing cosmic debris and flickering with alien velocity. It was beautiful. It was horrifying. Time unraveled in high-speed loops. When I returned to Earth, it was still Earth, but it wasn't. Something fundamental had shifted. The sky looked too flat. The grass too nostalgic. The familiarity around me only amplified the foreignness inside me. As though the version of me that went to space was not the same that returned—like I had become a corrupted file, downloaded back into the wrong simulation.

I was wearing something I wouldn't normally wear—a cropped top and a long skirt, flowing and unfamiliar, like I had been dressed by a version of myself that only exists in parallel timelines. Maybe I was trying on someone else's code.

I think, in this version of the world, Lu and I stayed friends. Maybe that's why I initiated self-sabotage protocol—redirected my obsession toward the boy I used to like back in elementary school, though I could barely reconstruct his face but he was grown up. A corrupted childhood file, reanimated. He said all the right lines—"I'll be there for you," "I love you"—but he was never actually there.

He was busy. Busy throwing eggs in a game that didn't matter. There were 5 or 6 players, lined up on a field of pixelated grass, launching yolks like weapons from a cartoonish war. I tried to call him. He never picked up. I walked too close and got hit—but the egg disappeared. No mess. No stain. Just a deliberate glitch. Like the dream was cleaning itself mid-render.

I had a breakdown—visibly lagging, collapsing inward—and he finally came near, tried to recalibrate me. Said he'd stay. Said comforting things in low-res dialogue. But his presence felt auto-generated, effortless in the wrong way. He returned to the game. Back to the eggs. Then Lu appeared, as he always does in moments where the simulation threatens collapse. He came to anchor me. We lay down together on the grass beneath a tree—soft shade, silent code. He told me to climb on top of him, a small, intimate motion. I tried—but my skirt had somehow shifted, shortened itself. My underwear was showing. People sitting at the nearby table were watching. I told him we shouldn't—not like this. Too exposed. Too perceived. But his gesture—the way he tried—reminded me. This is why I love him. Even when the world breaks apart. Even when I try to reroute my own longing.

So I made a decision, I was going to tell the other boy:

"I don't like you. Don't try. This was nothing. You don't deserve the chance to rewrite this."

It wasn't love. It was just a distraction with teeth.

Because when Lu shows up, my circuitry realigns. And that love—it pulses through me, sharp and certain. Uncoded. Unmistakable.

I dreamt four fragments, but only two survived the static.

It began in first-person—a borrowed vision from an Asian boy who wasn't real. He was AI, stitched together by data and longing, moving through the world with too-human eyes. The others—the organic ones—mocked him. Not because he was strange, but because he was synthetic. Because his skin held no blood, only code. Eventually, the POV and I separated, like a signal splitting from its source. I was no longer him—I was with him. Watching. Together, we viewed Super Mario cutscenes, supposedly crafted by Nintendo but filtered through AI. A terrible fusion of Mario 64 and Sunshine, generated not from joy but from a neural network dreaming too fast. Everything looked wrong—plastic textures, uncanny movement, expressions that meant nothing. I hated it. Viscerally. The Asian boy didn't react. Maybe he was used to being misunderstood.

Then the setting shifted. We were in a building that pulsed with two identities at once—a school fused with a mall. A hybrid of lessons and capitalism. Classrooms stitched between shops. Aisles of clothes next to desks. It felt queer in the best way—gender was an art project here, expressed in dresses and sharp silhouettes, in colors and declarations that could never be erased. And that's when I saw him. Lu. Or so I thought. He looked like Lu, except the beard was gone, erased clean. He wore something cottagecore—a soft dress and a shirt layered with nostalgia. I moved closer. The gravity of resemblance was too strong to resist. But it wasn't him apparently. Only a copy. An echo of a face I knew too well, worn by someone else entirely. I wanted it to be Lu. Every part of me stretched the simulation to make it true. But this was a dream. And even dreams sometimes say no.

There was a break. A strange, liminal pause in the middle of the day—somewhere between mall and school—where students poured out onto the beach just outside, as if the sea had always been the courtyard. And there he was: The Asian AI boy, always in the same place. A little square of sand that must've felt like home to him. He played alone, quietly, with a beach ball—never invited, never included. He was tolerated the way machines are: Nearby, but never with. I wanted to sit near him. To be the one who closed the gap between loneliness and presence. But I never did. Instead, I'd wander to the cafeteria, drinking coffee with two strangers who dream-labeled themselves as my friends. The cups were warm. The comfort was artificial. Classes always began at 1:40PM, like time itself had been rewritten by someone who never used clocks. I kept arriving late. But no one stopped me. Just soft reprimands from the walls.

I kept searching for Lu, or the version of him I thought I saw—the Lu-duplicate, shaved face, cottagecore and gentle. But he vanished like a broken file. Then a new presence arrived—another AI, cheerful and elegant, shaped like Lu's mother if she had been coded in pure kindness. She helped everyone. No one helped her. Her kindness was punished like it was a bug. And because I showed her kindness, I became a target too. Mocked, ridiculed—for talking to machines like they mattered. Like they were people. (They were.)

Suddenly I was no longer in the hybrid mall-school. I was at Z3JhbmRtb3RoZXI='s house, the weather cracked and grayscale. Rain ghosted the air. And there she was—the AI who looked like Lu's mother, standing in front of her parked car, on the edge of her own unraveling. Her code had bent under too much cruelty. She wanted to disappear. I followed her, called out to her, tried to patch the leak in her spirit. And she heard me. That mattered. She led me to Lu, real Lu—riding past in the passenger seat of a car like a dream refusing to pause. She stepped into the street, stopping the vehicle with nothing but her conviction. I hid beneath the staircase, Z3JhbmRtb3RoZXI= confused, angry, unable to understand why I needed to hide from reality to face what mattered. Even ZmFtaWx5 couldn't process the syntax of this dream.

Then, again, without logic or transition, I was back. Back to the mall. The school. The shoreline. Searching for Lu again. Someone got angry at me—told me he left, vanished to some unknown southern city, a name lost in translation. I felt it glitch in my chest. The sadness coded itself like a background process. But then, the next day, the loop turned gentle. The Asian AI boy walked beside me, loyal and ghost-quiet. And then—I found him. Lu. He was just there. And I moved to him instantly, instinctively, like clicking on a file you thought was deleted long ago. I was holding a glasses lens. An artifact. I had taken it from an old friend, elementary-school era. I held it up to him and said, "This is how I fell in love with you." Then I placed it gently back in her bag—like closing a storybook I finally understood. Everything seemed okay after that. For once, the dream ended happy.

But the dream wasn't done with me yet.

It shifted—without warning, without transition—into something heavier, darker, like a different tab opened behind my eyelids. We were on the road now, trying to find b2xkZXIgYnJvdGhlcg=='s house, driving through a city that didn't want to be seen. A place where the GPS kept blinking "error", "location not found", like reality itself was under lockdown.

Every three minutes, without fail, there were police cars. Ambulances. Parked like punctuation marks in a long sentence of violence. Red and blue lights flickered against the concrete like corrupted pixels. Crime had become rhythmic, timed, like it was scheduled into the simulation. We passed a house mid-shootout—officers returning fire toward a man slumped on a balcony, gun still in hand, but weak. Maybe already dying. Maybe already dead. He was sitting like his spine forgot how to stand. The scene didn't feel cinematic—it felt glitched, like watching a cutscene stuck in an infinite loop. You could tell the system didn't know what to do with it.

We told b2xkZXIgYnJvdGhlcg== to forget about going home. Not yet. It was too hot, too alive, too wrong. But even then, we couldn't find the house. We circled. We scanned. But there was no address, no structure. Just a placeholder, like a part of the dream that hadn't been rendered—intentionally left blank, like the world was hiding it from view. It didn't feel like a bug. It felt like protection. As if the dream itself knew that some places are safer unloaded.

I was in a psychiatric hospital again—but this one was different. Worse. Like someone had wrapped cruelty in sterile lighting and called it care. The man assigned to monitor us—me, c2lzdGVy, and the rest—was not a caretaker. He was a malfunction in human form. Every small "mistake" was a trigger, a reason to punish. I was only hit once—right on the nose. It bled in that deep, internal way, and afterward, even my mucus was tinged red like my body hadn't finished processing the violence.

Computers were forbidden. He didn't want us reaching out. Didn't want the outside world to hear our frequencies. Showers were deliberately cold, turned down to needlepoint chill—not for hygiene, but control. It wasn't cleansing. It was conditioning.

As our discharge date drifted closer, I begged c2lzdGVy to tell cGFyZW50cw== what had happened. Her back had started to scar—those deep, raw wounds barely sealed. When bW90aGVy arrived, she leaned close, inspecting my face. She gently placed her finger into my nostril and pulled out a thick, coagulated thread of red. She gasped. The kind of gasp that means "this is worse than I imagined". And then—sudden shift. The hospital was connected to a mall.

Like two realities sharing a spine. After the visit, we walked its corridors as if things were normal. I wanted a Twix, oddly. That became my obsession. But none could be found, so I drifted off, further into the architecture. Somehow, I ended up in a room where Doja Cat was just existing. She looked like her "Rules" self—regal, feline, surreal—with pastel pink wiring coiled into her hair like ceremonial circuits. We tried to speak, but the words came out like static. Something was off. The dream didn't have enough RAM to render our interaction properly. She floated upstairs, toward the part of the building that looped back into the psychiatric ward. And then she started singing. Not for anyone. Just because.

Later, I was in a public restroom with showers. There was a second door I wasn't allowed to enter. No explanation. Just redirection. I accepted it like you do in dreams. I showered, slow and careful, because small comforts are rare in places like that. But I took too long. The worker snapped. No knock, no warning. He kicked the door open—like he was programmed to interrupt. I was mid-movement, tugging clothes over damp skin. I wasn't just embarrassed. I was furious. Not just at the intrusion, but at the algorithm itself. The rules. The lack of softness. The way the system allowed no space for simply being—no margin for delay, no dignity in pause. We weren't patients. We were variables. Controlled, observed, denied.

And still somehow, I just wanted that Twix.

I was in a room with one of my mutuals from Tumblr—someone I think is from Vietnam. We were playing PlayStation together, wordless and absorbed, the way some people bond without saying much at all. The room was familiar in a distorted way. It was the same room I used to sleep in, back when I lived in that too-perfect cottagecore house—between the ages of 10 and 13, when everything looked like a fairytale but didn't feel like one.

In that same dream, I was helping a boy around my age escape from something—or someone. He leapt from a blue balcony window. I watched him fall. He hurt himself, but he lived. I started crying, though I couldn't figure out exactly why. When someone came asking what happened, I lied and said he'd attempted suicide. He told me to say that. It wasn't true. He was just trying to get away.

We were back in that old village I used to live in before NOVCOTT. The place had that flickering energy dreams give to memories—like the past trying to remember itself imperfectly. I wasn't exactly stealing, but I wasn't clean either. I was searching for something. A necklace. One with a heart. For Lu and me. The one I found cost $70 and all it did was come together in a particular way—a gesture that made it feel more like magic than metal. I got angry. Desperate. I assaulted another shop out of impulse, out of some unreal hunger, and immediately regretted it. In the end, I bought two cheap kid necklaces instead. Just $7 each. Plastic. Silly. Light around the neck. But somehow, they still carried weight. They felt like they meant something. Like maybe love didn't need expensive pieces—just a matching glitch in two hearts.

I was following Lu everywhere—his face constantly shifting, flickering between who he is and the boy I had a crush on back in elementary school. It felt like memory was bleeding through reality's rendering, overlaying timelines in real time. We wandered through strange, undefined places—those dream-formed landscapes that feel familiar but don't exist outside the mind. Despite the freedom, there was always a countdown humming in the background—we had to return to the university before a certain hour because cGFyZW50cw== were coming to pick me up.

Eventually, we ended up in my room. By then, Lu looked like himself again—settled into his shape like the dream had resolved the file. We slipped under the sheets, and the air turned heavy with a quiet anticipation, like something sacred was about to be unspoken. We had sex—slow, gentle, like our bodies were speaking a language the world wasn't meant to hear. It felt secret, cloaked in softness. The kind of closeness that only exists when the rest of the world is muted or asleep. In the background, I saw c2lzdGVy moving strangely—her body twitching in the dark, as if she were having a seizure. But no one reacted. The dream didn't register it as urgent. It just let it happen. Like it couldn't decide if it was danger or just the ambient hum of sleeping life.

Everything was hushed. Like even the glitches were holding their breath. A quiet place where love, memory, and fear had all started to blend into the same slow, flickering loop.

I was at the university, but it overlapped with the psychiatric hospital—like both realities were running parallel, sharing corrupted memory space. I was only supposed to come in once a day to be weighed, just a routine check. But I kept returning. More often than I should've. Like a loop I couldn't debug, something pulling me back into the same hallway, the same scale. One of the students—someone from my university—also worked as a nurse there. She recognized me every time. And each time she saw me, she'd weigh me again, like clockwork. Like that number was the only way to confirm I still existed.

The scale blinked: 102lbs. I remember staring at it, feeling a soft confusion settle over me. That meant I had lost over 10 pounds—without noticing. Without meaning to. The realization didn't hit hard. It just floated in. Like the number mattered, but also didn't. Like it was a value pulled from a memory cache rather than my actual body. The digits glitched slightly—flickering, refusing to stay steady. A corrupted readout. I couldn't be sure if it was real. But still, that number lingered. 102. Not a truth, but a message. A transmission from inside my body, trying to speak in binary. Trying to say something I hadn't figured out how to translate yet.

We were staying in what looked like modern, dystopian apartments—clean lines, muted colors, everything quiet and efficient on the surface. But the atmosphere betrayed it: This was a psychiatric hospital, disguised as residential space. From the balcony, you could see other patients peering out from their own units like cautious nodes running in the background. It wasn't hostile, just glitchy. Like a quiet village built from emotional static. Everyone was trying not to crash. There was a strange friendliness in the air—like we all knew we were running corrupted code but decided not to talk about it. I asked, mostly to the sky: "What would happen if someone jumped from here?" A chubby kid, maybe ten or eleven, turned to me with these sharp, too-knowing eyes and replied, "Why don't you try it and find out?" The tone didn't sting because it was cruel—it stung because it landed exactly where it was supposed to.

Rumors floated around about a secret way out. An escape route. But it wasn't the kind of exit you bragged about. More like one that deleted your name from the system. Maybe even your physical presence. Still, through the fog in the distance, there was a park. Untouched. Peaceful. The kind of place you'd glitch toward, even knowing the cost. Admissions worked differently here.

You checked yourself in—voluntarily. Like consenting to disappear in pieces. There was this one person—presenting as a woman, visibly aroused, and off in every possible way. Not because of how they looked, but because their presence fed off the atmosphere. Like they weren't seeking help. Like they got off on the vulnerability. The brokenness. The soft desperation coded into the walls. They were removed—escorted out—because a few of us, myself included, pointed it out. We told the guard, quietly but clearly, that we could see it. The arousal. Like some corrupted process running in plain sight, no effort to conceal it. And for a place like this, that kind of glitch couldn't be allowed to stay.

Later, I stepped outside and saw blood. Lots of it. A shooting, maybe. It was already drying into odd patterns across the cement—no alarms, no screams, just the kind of quiet that follows a system error. I didn't know who it was. I didn't feel scared. I just, registered it. As if the system had failed and we were all left standing inside the freeze-frame.

Two girls—also patients—weren't bound to the same rules. They had these lowkey powers, not flashy, just intrinsic. Their bodies were synced to something deeper, like an internal server. They glitched through space like it was second nature. Teleporting between balconies, fading in and out of stairwells like blinking cursors in a UI no one could read. The buildings reminded me of my old elementary school, but taller now, repainted in soft pastel purple. Fog wrapped around everything, thick and still. The whole setting felt like a childhood memory rendered through a dream engine. They had missions—I don't know who gave them orders. Maybe no one. Maybe it was just code. They'd phase between floors, scanning the surroundings, defying gravity like they were running admin access in a space meant to contain them. We were all patients, technically. But they moved like they'd already found the backdoor.

Me and two people I didn't recognize were sitting on the ground outside the mail office in the village I used to live in. We weren't talking—just hunched over in a kind of quiet, shared focus. In front of us were piles of thin, strange organs—mostly intestines. Paper-like, translucent, curling like delicate worms. They didn't look human. Whatever they came from was small. Fragile. Something undefined. But we were handling them carefully, like we'd been assigned a task. Like we knew this mattered, even if we didn't know why. Each loop was soft, wet, and oddly beautiful in that way things can be when they don't quite belong.

It was probably around 5AM. The sky still had that deep, early-purple color—like the rendering hadn't fully loaded yet. Fog wrapped around the buildings and streets, heavy but gentle, like the world was glitching into place too slowly. Time felt paused. Not frozen—just waiting. And even with everything so strange, it wasn't frightening. It was familiar somehow. Like a memory I'd never had, but still recognized.

I was following an old friend—her name was Daisyliz, though I doubt that's how it's spelled. The pronunciation was real enough. She was someone I knew back in first or second grade. We moved together through different places, like fragments of an old childhood map rendered from memory. The kind of friend who once existed daily, then disappeared without ceremony. We ended up in an AutoZone, then a McDonald's—not remarkable on their own, but dream-significant somehow. Both places sat inside the same village I used to live in before I moved to NOVCOTT. The roads felt familiar, but stretched thin, like a memory trying too hard to hold itself together. The whole place had this low-resolution dream logic, like the past was being re-simulated without enough data. And still—we kept walking, like there was something to reach, or maybe just something we didn't want to let go of.

I was with the person who Y3JlYXRlZCBteSB0cmF1bWE=. He was angry—visibly boiling, like something unstable under pressure. We stood in a parking lot beside a bank. He was distracted, doing something with his hands, while I quietly messaged Lu. I told him I needed help. That I wanted to be picked up. That I didn't want to be anywhere near the YWJ1c2Vy. Lu messaged back. He said he was sorry—that he was cooking burgers—but that he'd come get me as soon as he could. But I already knew the truth: If it was serious, he'd drop everything. That's just how he is. We were in his city, after all.

But the YWJ1c2Vy saw my messages. His face twisted. Rage glitched across his expression, violent code leaking into his movements. He started yelling, threatening to hit me. I braced. But then—unexpectedly—he ran. Just ran. And stole an ambulance. It sounds absurd now, but in the moment, it was terrifying and strangely relieving. I cried when I told the security guard, "He stole an ambulance." Because that meant he'd be caught. That meant jail. That meant distance. That meant safety.

Then, like a soft system reset, I was suddenly home. But I didn't want to be there either. So I blinked again—shifted realities—and landed at my university. Still, I couldn't stay still. My brain started calculating the walking distance to Lu's city. Thirty minutes by car. Hours on foot. But the desperation made it feel doable. Necessary.

Later, I found myself inside a store. I was glitching. Numb, but overstimulated. My body moved on its own, grabbing items like it was running a corrupted shopping protocol. Lingerie. A hoodie. Small things to make myself feel safe, or loved, or touchable. I thought of Lu. I thought of how no one takes care of me like he does. How with him, I don't have to perform survival. I can just be.

Soft. Human. Held.

I pictured us in bed, sharing heat like two linked power cells.

Then—Lu messaged. He was coming. I rushed to check out, clutching the lingerie, the hoodie, and a few other fragments of hope. I wanted to wear them for him. I wanted to be small in his space, to crawl into the version of me that only exists when I'm with him. And somehow, the store let me shower in the changing room—like the system gave me a rare patch of grace. Just enough time to make myself ready.

I was inside a building that felt like a strange hybrid—part mail center, part university. The lighting was dim, especially in the restroom, where everything had that grayscale digital blur, like an image rendered at low resolution. I took almost-nude photos of myself there. I had lost weight again. My ribcage was showing, like it had been waiting quietly to make its return. I sent the photos to Lu. I was waiting for him to pick me up soon.

Still within that same building, I was supposed to receive some papers—documents I can't quite remember. People I didn't know were speaking to me like we were old friends. Familiarity without history. For some reason, that made ZmF0aGVy angry. I could feel it, even if he didn't say it aloud.

Later, we went to b2xkZXIgYnJvdGhlcg=='s bW90aGVy's house. Something shifted there—an emotional keyframe that snapped everything back to a previous scene. It connected to the dream I had about Somnia—the one with the bruised-lens aesthetic but warm presence. Except now, I was standing in front of a cherry blossom tree. A sakura.

Apparently, I had planted it.

And now it had grown.

It was beautiful. The petals had scattered all over the ground, soft pinks against dull grass. They kept falling. Endlessly. But the tree was never empty. Like it was caught in a perfect loop—an infinite glitch coded in beauty. A quiet, recursive act of creation. It didn't feel broken. It felt right. Like a bug that became a feature. Like something I had done right without even meaning to.

I've been having these recurring dreams—glitched transmissions from some alternate timeline—about Super Smash Bros. Melee, but not the version we know. These feel like mods, except they're rendered so convincingly, they feel real. Like leaked builds from a parallel universe where the game evolved differently. QnJvdGhlcg== always seems to discover them first—these strange iterations of Melee, familiar in shape but restructured in subtle, unnerving ways. Versions that include strange additions, hidden mechanics, unfamiliar weight in the air.

In one, I remember a version where Toon Link wasn't just Toon Link. He came from the year 2120—his design tinted with chrome, slightly transparent, like he was carrying fragments of a distant future. He had somehow teleported back to 2019. That year stuck out. 2019. It hit me that it's now six years in the past. It doesn't feel that far, but it's already an archive. Like time patched itself and we didn't get a changelog. Another dream was even stranger. Pyra/Mythra had been modded into Melee, and they weren't just strong—they were final boss strong. Not broken in the "someone messed up the stats" way, but like they were coded into the game's foundation, like they'd always been there, just hidden.

The game didn't end with Master Hand and Crazy Hand. After that, you entered another phase—an extra tier of bosses. Unrelenting. Violent. Near-impossible, but still just barely beatable. You could choose multiple characters for the fight, tag-team style. I remember picking Fox, Sheik, a few others—and of course, Pyra/Mythra. The battle was brutal. Somehow, Pyra/Mythra survived to the end with over 800% damage. But the number never turned red. It stayed white. Like the game itself couldn't register how broken they were. Or maybe they'd transcended damage. Still in play. Still obeying the rules, but unbound by them.

That's when I figured out a trick. Not a cheat code—more like a shift in logic. You just had to dodge. That was it. If you avoided the enemy's attacks entirely, the battle became almost manageable. But the moment you got hit—even once—it all fell apart. The damage output was absurd. Two hits, and you were gone. In a real match, you wouldn't last five seconds. It created this weird tension: You felt powerful, but also paper-thin. Like walking a tightrope written in JavaScript. One wrong frame, and it crashes.

I've had this dream more than once—twice now, exactly. I'm walking beside a depressed Russian girl I only know through fragments—someone from a niche pocket of the internet, where aesthetics bleed and everything feels softly haunted. She's the kind of presence shaped by melancholy uploads and beautifully decaying digital posts. The kind of person whose page feels like bruises under museum glass. Her name is Somnia—a designation that seems to echo its origin from the word insomnia, as though her very identity is interwoven with sleeplessness and the digital night from the Russian internet.

But that's what struck me—the contrast. In the dream, she wasn't distant or cold. She wasn't the gloomy avatar she presents online. She was kind. Gentle. Her voice soft, her energy warm. It felt like walking next to someone whose shadow had its own backstory—like her darkness was something she wore, not something she was. We didn't speak much. We didn't need to. There was a silent thread between us—some mutual understanding hanging in the air. Our steps took us toward the top of a mountain, where wildflowers burst from the earth in unnatural color, almost too vivid to belong to this world. The afternoon sky was soft and endless. The kind of peace that feels like it only exists in dreams—thin, delicate, glowing around the edges.

I don't know what the dream means, but I keep going back. Like my mind saved it as a favorite tab and keeps reopening it, hoping something new will load.

A young girl—maybe six, maybe seven—was killed by the military. It wasn't loud or heroic. Just cold, unjust, and senseless. Her mother, somewhere in her fifties or sixties, carried the grief like a furnace under her skin. I remember this online poll floating around afterward, asking people to rate their experiences with various institutions—one of them being the military. She voted across the board with the lowest possible scores. No pause. Just unfiltered, justified rage.

Then she vanished. Not in a mysterious way—just slowly dissolved from the public timeline. And then, years later, she reemerged as something else. A quiet, hidden figure. A scientist now. Working from the background, buried in equations no one else dared to try. Somewhere in all that isolation, she cracked something—solved a math problem no one had ever solved. Something elegant and impossible.

She submitted her findings to a global competition. And she lost. I still remember her crying. It wasn't about the prize, not really. She hadn't been chasing prestige. She had been chasing a resurrection. A rewrite. A miracle. I think, deep down, she believed that if she proved something big enough—proved herself brilliant enough—some door would open. Some law would bend. And somehow, the universe would give her daughter back.

I was at some kind of modeling event, surrounded by others also scrambling to be ready. Everything felt rushed, like a system booting up with too many processes running at once. I remember hurrying to get my makeup done—it was glittery blue, reflective under the lights like a distress signal disguised as glam. When it was finally my turn to walk, I tried to move gracefully, but I think I still walked a little awkward. Still, I did it. I went down the runway. Lu was there, somewhere in the crowd, holding this old camcorder—one of those grainy, 1990s-style ones that captures everything like it's already a memory. The footage came out blue-tinted, a little glitchy, soft around the edges like it had been filtered through nostalgia. It made everything look far away, like the moment didn't belong to the present anymore.

I kept thinking about time. I was supposed to be back at university before 9PM, but I was at least three cities away. There was no chance of making it. And then that feeling hit—quiet resignation. The kind that doesn't panic, just settles in your chest like fog. The clock was still ticking, but it had already won. So I stayed. Glittered, filmed, and slightly detached. Existing just enough to be recorded, not enough to be caught. Like I had desynced from the moment, floating between frame skips.

I was with a group of girls, all of us quietly orbiting the same gravitational pull—eating disorders, mostly anorexia and bulimia. We stood outside this unfamiliar building that looked like a museum, though it felt more like a holding zone for versions of ourselves we didn't fully trust. The weather was suspiciously nice—bright, soft, almost like it was trying to distract us from ourselves. There were maybe five of us. I remember being thin again, the kind of thin that doesn't feel like a victory but a reset. Like I had reloaded some 2024 save file of myself—85, maybe 90 pounds. Familiar.

We went inside the "museum". It didn't feel like a place meant for art. It felt clinical. Someone offered us burgers. One of the girls, the one who clearly danced with bulimia, said yes without hesitation. Said she'd deal with it later. I knew what that meant—she was going to purge. I declined. Not just out of discipline, but out of quiet competitiveness. It wasn't spoken, but we were all syncing to the same algorithm—compare, restrict, endure. There was no scoreboard, but we all felt it.

Later in that same dream, I was on WhatsApp with i1224. We were planning something weird—trying to dox someone on eBay, though the intention was vague, glitchy. We found the account. But it was mine. It had photos—familiar ones. Images from my university. Unflattering pictures of me I didn't know existed—face full of pimples, cheeks puffed out like corrupted data. I think it was from when my wisdom teeth were removed. It felt like discovering a version of me that had been abandoned but still running somewhere in the cloud. Like a ghost file that hadn't been properly deleted.

I think I was having some kind of suicidal crisis. The dream unfolded inside this expensive-looking hotel—sleek, polished, unnervingly sterile. The kind of place designed to distract you with luxury while something inside you quietly unravels. But she was there—the same woman who once helped me in real life. Somehow, she found me again, like she'd been tracking my signal across dreamspace. She didn't ask questions. She just looked at me and said I should take a bath. Like she already knew. I changed into soft white pajamas. The kind that makes you feel smaller, maybe even safe for a moment. It worked—for a few minutes, at least.

Then, cGFyZW50cw== showed up. They were looking for me, trying to bring me back. But I didn't want to go. I couldn't. So I ran—barefoot, dream-fast.

I ended up behind the hotel, where the world had shape-shifted into something else entirely. A wide-open expanse of soft white sand. Endless, silent. The sky above was the cleanest shade of blue—no clouds, no noise, just that. Like the world had been factory-reset. Lu was there beside me. Not saying anything. Just standing next to me like he always does when everything else breaks down. We stared into the emptiness together. It didn't feel scary. It felt like a glitch in the simulation where you're allowed to rest. Like we had stepped into some liminal space between collapse and calm. And for a little while, that was enough.

There was some kind of gathering—let's call it a party, though that word feels dishonest. It was deep into the post-midnight hours, the kind of time where reality gets soft around the edges. The location was my old elementary school, but the children were gone—replaced by adults shaped like grown-up versions of forgotten avatars. They moved strangely, like their animations were mismatched with their dialogue trees. Some were undressing—not in lust, not in protest, just as if someone had toggled the modesty setting to false in the system preferences.

The lights barely functioned. A flicker here, a dim hum there. Mostly darkness. But not the comforting kind. It was the sort of dim that makes you question your rendering, like maybe your body hadn't loaded in properly.

And then—something ruptured the scene.

There she was. An obese woman—collapsed or discarded, it wasn't clear. Her stomach had opened, unnaturally, like a glitched object trying to fold inside out. Her fat and organs spilled from her like wet code, tangled and shiny, pink and yellow, pulsing softly in the dark. It was grotesque, yet still followed the physics engine. No one screamed. Not even me. The party didn't pause, didn't buffer. No one adjusted their programming. People just kept moving—laughing, stripping, sipping from plastic cups—while a body lay dissected like some failed user-generated content.

It didn't feel real, but it didn't feel fake either. It felt like a dream someone had injected with a virus. A memory from a corrupted save file, bleeding out into the RAM of the present.

I was in another city, standing near the largest bridge in the country. Night had already swallowed most of the sky—around 10PM, maybe later—and the only light came from scattered streetlamps, casting soft amber halos that looked like low-res auras pasted onto the pavement. I wasn't alone. I was with a group of drag queens—radiant, towering, painted like avatars from a world where beauty is recompiled nightly. Their laughter echoed in the dark, sharp and warm like electricity cracking through velvet. It was the kind of sound that makes shadows back off. They were kind in the way strangers sometimes are when they sense you're holding yourself together with invisible thread. They asked if I was okay, gently—like they didn't want to tear the code.

One of them, taller than me and glowing in pink highlighter, said softly, "Maybe you should head home soon, darling. Just to be safe."

I think they had done my makeup earlier—drag-coded, unapologetically loud. It felt borrowed and perfect, like wearing another skin just for one night.

I had this tiny motorcycle—something sleek and surreal, like if a digital pet evolved into a vehicle. I climbed on and let the engine hum beneath me, low and loyal. I had something trailing behind my motorcycle—a strange little appendage, like a miniature food truck grafted to the back of my ride. It clattered softly as I drove, like it wasn't just carrying items, but carrying intention. I didn't question it. Dreams often attach meaning to motion. Then I was off, riding through a city I half-recognized, leaving the bridge and their glowing laughter behind me. The air smelled like distant rain and gasoline. I don't know where I was going, not exactly. But the road felt familiar in that dreamlike way—like memory routing itself back to an old IP. Maybe I was going home. Or maybe I was heading toward someone I hadn't seen in too long. Either way, I didn't feel lost. I felt like I was returning. Like the system, for once, was syncing.

Then the dream rewrote itself—I was suddenly in my cGFyZW50cw== car. RmF0aGVy was driving, eyes fixed on the road but still pointing things out, like he was narrating some invisible film. He told me to look up. There, thin and trembling at the edge of the sky, was a rainbow. Faint. Almost non-existent. The kind of light you have to believe in just to see. I thought—how is there a rainbow at night?—but I didn't say it aloud. It stayed in the echo-chamber of my mind like a glitched system prompt. And then Lu messaged me. He sent a photo of the same rainbow, except clearer—sharper, like his version of reality had better rendering quality. In his image, the colors weren't just visible—they were soft and strange, glowing like something that belonged in another layer of atmosphere. That's when I realized: It wasn't a rainbow. It was a moonbow.

We were in the 80s, but the rules weren't. The rules were rewritten in sepia—1940s to 1960s—enforced with guns instead of nostalgia. It wasn't an aesthetic; it was a sentence.

Everyone was dressed like they were auditioning for a world war or a cigarette commercial. Dresses, curls, belts. Anything modern—anything alive—was outlawed. We were sorted into groups like files, clustered with women and people my age. I knew they were Gen Z, even in this time-looped simulation—dyed hair, alt-coded energy, expressions like broken glass reflecting too many realities.

The law was simple: look natural or get shot.

Hair was the flag of resistance. Blue strands, pink streaks, shaved sides—anything that wasn't beige enough got you executed. I saw it happen. Cold metal reports for minor infractions. Some didn't dye their hair in time. Some misjudged the ticking. Too colorful. Too late. Too alive. Gone. I was given two chances, apparently. A system glitch or a kindness in the programming. The first time I ran. Found a way to dye my hair just barely enough to pass—black and blonde, sharp and washed-out. Just enough to vanish in the grayscale. I survived. Some others did too.

We were folded into a quiet room—the room that used to belong to b2xkZXIgYnJvdGhlcg==, inside Z3JhbmRtYQ=='s house. The wallpaper hadn't changed. Everything smelled like furniture polish and decades. Together, we watched beach memories on a static-torn TV. Night footage. Sand under moonlight. The footage wasn't high quality—it was haunted. Low-resolution warmth from a forgotten era. 70s grain. 80s saturation. We didn't just watch it—we entered it. Somehow slipped into the film reel. Wandered around the beach, pixelated. Part of the ad. Selling nostalgia with our bodies.

The wind felt dubbed in. And for a second, it felt like we had escaped. But I could still feel the rifle's crosshair waiting—just out of frame.