Cave Canem

A decade later, an autumn draft jolts you awake from your dream. Your heart, no longer amenable to these shocks, reminds you that waking up is not always guaranteed. As you go to ensure that the remaining warmth doesn't leave you, the window greets you with a sight of a bright cerulean sky, red brick and the pumpkin-coloured trees.

This sight felt like it was from the dream, of which you struggle to recall the details. Was it a lumberyard? A watchtower? A ravine? Both nature and at the same time a room filled with loud and boisterous friends. One was carrying a megaphone, another a radio, and as you arrived someone offered you a glass of juice.

Although you can't remember their faces, their laughter still rings in your head. Despite the noise, someone caught your eye as they were putting up a striking painting of an eight-pupiled person on the walls. You asked them who the artist was, but the person never spoke. Instead, they wrote the name on a piece of paper and flew away.

In that slight edge between dream and reality lies not awekening but a brief duality of experience. Wakefulness is not a state of being as much as it is a state of mind. A dream once woken will remain a faint, dissapearing memory, but as long as you do not wake up, it is your reality. But after that small glimpse that happens in the lightest moments of our sleep, a seed of doubt enters our mind. It leads us to worry about the authenticity of the moment we are experiencing. Soon, the very machine that is fabricating our reality becomes occupied by a cyclical process that can never terminate. Well, that is unless you wake.