Floating in an endless ocean, you awaken from a dreamless sleep. A groggy blur paints over your vision — it's dark. You sit up and look ahead, then to your sides. It all just extends out and fades to black. You slump back down for a moment, lulled by the sense of stillness.
You force yourself up and begin to look around. A few careful steps turn to a lazy walk, the rhythm of your footsteps disappearing into the dreamlike haze of a half-sleeping mind. Fighting the weight of your eyelids — something. Shape and structure. A wall. A door. A window with the curtains drawn.
You pause for a moment — it's hard to make out details. The door and window are set in blue frames, curtains outlining the latter. A long, drawn-out yawn escapes you.
You stagger back a little. It's . . . Nothing. Not just dark like waking up in empty space, like wading through a thick fog, far from anyone. Dark like the final ray of a star fading into eternity. A freezing void, an immense absence stares back at you.
You inch closer to the door, your face stinging from the freezing cold, eyes welling up. Standing at a precipice, as if the world ends beyond the threshold, you shudder and wipe your eyes. Can you —
There's nothing for you, there. There's nothing there.
The window and the door quickly begin to fade away behind you. Finally, the wall itself is gone. The comforting darkness again envelops you, taking you in its embrace. You sink, with each yawn, further down, away from the world, overwhelmed by fatigue.
After some time, you wake up to just the faintest impression of an image
from a dream. Golden domes . . .
Unfocused, wandering a little longer, you find yourself faced with another wall, a couple of lights barely illuminating parts of it. Your eyes glaze over the empty space between them.
Regardless of how ambiguous the space, you're still able to just trace your hand on the wall and —
A switch on the wall. Flick it. A small light on the floor turns on.
Next to the light, a metal hatch in the floor. On the hatch, a handle. Next to the handle, a lock. You try pulling, but it doesn't open.
As you get up, you hear a sound like a metallic impact, somewhere.
The thin layer of illumination was barely helping, anyway. If you're to find something, it'll be pure luck regardless.
You hit your foot on something. That something . . .
Solid metal.
A handle? A hatch, you suppose. A raised bit with a hole — a lock. The hatch doesn't budge as you pull on the handle.
As you get up, you hear a sound like a a switch being flipped, somewhere. A dim light can be seen in the distance.
On the way, you catch a passing thought — How did you even get here? Where is here? Everything seems so formless and foreign. Forget about a key — was there ever even a lock? It's hard to . . .
You squeeze your eyes closed hard and open them a few times.
The most normal sensation so far. You might spend an eternity just standing around wherever you are, in this barely waking dream. Keep moving, don't stagnate.
As you walk around, the dense sleeplike atmosphere presses down on you, depresses each thought, seeps into every glance and step you take. You hear a stray knocking sound once in a while.
Some time passes. The senses blur, as does any sense of progress — you feel like you're literally going nowhere.
"Looking" may be a generous expression. You have other senses, surely?
The sound echoes. Alas, lacking the finer points of being a bat, you're little better informed, save for the musical entertainment.
A little, but not as stupid as being "literally"
nowhere, as you'd so eloquently put it.
. . .
A space. A door. A window. Possibly a hatch with a lock.
Sleep and waking. Waking dreams and the slipping of time.
You try and stay awake, but the overwhelming thickness
of this dark prods at your senses, leads you away and. . .
You lay down.
Sleep and waking.
A view of water and of a shore stretces out before you into the distance.
The waves push. . . and they pull. . . They undulate with a hypnotic rhythm. Back and forth. A calm. . . calm place. You are stranded with no way out. Nowhere, nowhere at all.
The humming of the wind mixes with the sound of water beating against the shoreline at your feet. You might expect to hear a seagull, if you didn't feel so certain that there's nothing at all in this empty universe. Nothing but you, forever.
The humming of the wind — what's that? . . .The humming of the wind mixes with the sound of water beating at your feet.
Peering into the pitch black nothing of the night sky, the water ahead reflects a moonless light.
Past the water —
Awake, again. You blink. Hard. Something's off. Your heart beats faster than before. Uneasy. Anxious. Decidedly awake. You feel space itself pulsate under your feet. Around you.
This place. You were exploring, before, but it didn't feel this way, then. It was like in a dream. The dark. It's so dark, but somehow it feels. . . less substantial. Thinner.
Bizarre. Why are you here? It's been so strange, but you barely questioned it. In the corner of your vision, bright lights bounce across the space, impossible to ignore.
Spotlights . . .? From far above, somewhere. In the center of their focus. . . some kind of pedestal. You look around, but it doesn't seem like there's anything else, anymore. When you shout, there is no echo.
You try to think of something hopeful, but the phrase "like a moth to a flame" is all that comes up. If there's a center of the world, it's right there.
Nothing happens. You take a step sideways and yet keep facing the lights and the structure in the center. Radial symmetry. The world may as well be a single line passing from an infinite nowhere to the origin that is the pedestal.
A switch. A strangely large one, at that. The whole thing stands at least a couple meters tall. Foreboding, but not much of a choice.
This doesn't feel right at all. You turn around and take strides to get away, though assured you'll not get anywhere. One foot in front of the other until you're all but running. Nothing forward, and the lights keep shining from behind you.
What? You're certain you must've covered at least a couple
hundred meters. This doesn't make any sense.
What choice do you have?
The world shakes apart with a massive sound and a feeling like falling in every direction. Vertigo spins you around. Shaken, but somehow alive, to your side, a familiar sight: The blue door and window that had previously lead nowhere.