It all started with the illusion of normalcy: a routine walk, alongside my wife, toward our favorite bakery. However, the surrounding scenery was an oppressive spectacle. The city showcased masterful architecture, a brutal and unlikely fusion between the grandeur of Neoclassical and the mechanical coldness of Dieselpunk.
The structures were imposing, formed by continuous metallic curves and millimeter-precise circular cuts. The environment was bathed in a harmonic lighting that blended the comforting warmth of yellowish lights with the piercing coldness of white and blue tones.
Why does the mind construct such perfectly calculated and beautiful scenarios, only to use them as a stage for our own psychological destruction?
To reach our destination, we descended a curved, monumental, and public staircase that resembled the hollow interior of a spiral gear. Climbing up the other side, we reached the bakery. The interior was a drastic and welcoming contrast to the metallic metropolis outside: a beautiful commercial duplex, modern in design, but essentially organic and woody. There were only four tables on the ground floor and three on the upper floor, creating an exclusive and safe atmosphere. Or, at least, so it seemed.
The Phonetics of the Unnamable and Ancestral Guilt
We went to the counter and I tried to order a specific bread. The problem was that the name of the bread escaped human logic. It wasn’t just a forgotten word on the tip of my tongue; it was an impossible sound, something that didn’t even seem to belong to our phonetics.
While I was trying to formulate the order, a nearby customer interrupted me to warn that something was out of stock. She used another word with an alien and disturbing sonority. When I asked what that meant, the gravity of the place instantly grew heavy. The expressions of everyone around melted into a profound, almost funereal sadness.
The answer didn’t come from a single person, but from all the mouths present in the bakery, speaking simultaneously in a macabre choir that scrambled the sound. From the midst of that cacophony, I extracted a single, enigmatic message: we, the “young ones,” had failed to care for the “great ancient tree,” and it was from that ancestral entity that the raw material for everything there was generated.
To what extent do we carry in our subconscious the weight of a guilt we do not understand, for mistakes made even before we existed?
The Collapse of the Matrix and Primal Fury
Before I could process the bizarre revelation, the fabric of the dream began to tear. The same customer who had warned me started to suffer a digital collapse. She was being “hacked” live, right in front of me, her form failing in a surreal glitch as she begged me for help.
While my attention was divided trying to intervene in that anomaly, my wife was distractedly talking to a couple occupying the middle table.
Then, I heard the sound.
It was abrupt. A dry and cowardly thud. I spun my body around with a jolt and saw my wife falling to the floor, in tears, overcome by a cry of pure pain and despair. The older man from the table had physically assaulted her, purposefully and gratuitously.
In that exact millisecond, reason evaporated completely. The veneer of human civility was ripped away. Modern biology gave way to the pure incarnation of the hunting instinct. What followed was narrated by my own mind like a visceral first-person horror movie: I lunged at that man and tore him apart. The retaliation wasn’t just violent; it was animalistic, grotesque, a physical expurgation of all the fury and hatred that the abyss of my mind was capable of harboring.
The Hemorrhage of the Unreal and the Void
With the aggressor neutralized in the worst conceivable way, I ran back to my wife. She was sluggish, her eyes emptied, barely responsive. I started to notice the clear signs of internal bleeding, but the oneiric terror decided to go further: right before my eyes, her skin began to split open on its own.
A deep, invisible cut was being traced on her body by an unseen force, turning the internal hemorrhage into an external one. In absolute despair, I tore my own shirt to use as a bandage, trying to staunch the blood, trying to close the wound with my bare hands.
But she remained motionless. Cold. Distant. Up to the point where I realized, with a hollow pit in my stomach, that she was no longer there with me.
I was swallowed by an indescribable despair. An avalanche of mental confusion, grief, hatred, and a tearing helplessness crushed me all at once. How terrifying is the fact that our brain can perfectly simulate the pain of absolute grief, forcing us to feel the death of those we love while our bodies lie motionless in a bed?
The Contrast and the Awakening
And then, as if the reality of that world were mocking my blood-covered pain, the scene changed abruptly. My friend and neighbor—who, in the waking world, has suffered from severe insomnia for a long time—appeared standing next to me. With a light, rested smile, he looked at me and shared that finally, after many days of exhaustion, he had managed to get a pleasant and refreshing sleep.
The grotesque contrast between the bloody tragedy in my hands and the casual peace on his face caused a violent snap in my consciousness. In that second, I realized the truth: the metallic city, the ancient tree, the murder, and the irretrievable loss of my wife were not material events. I was trapped in a “waking nightmare” inside my own mind.
I tried, with a choked voice and a shattered mind, to explain to my neighbor the carnage that had just happened. But before the words could take shape… the fabric of the dream tore completely.
I woke up in my bed. The real world was there, intact. However, my body was rigid, my muscles tense, and my chest crushed, carrying a dense sadness, a sense of loss and disorientation so real that they took long, silent hours to finally dissipate in the morning light.