This life is so full of confusion already that there’s no need to add chaos to chaos, as said in 8 ½. Chaotic like what I’m witnessing right now. Things in gray, the shades of tombstones, each thing in its own amorphous mass. My hands sweeping through the void were all that I could recognize. Strange and mysterious, one can’t use these words to refer to what one can encounter during dreaming. Especially when it’s a lucid one. Just like this. Everything seems plausible. No. Everything is real. And resembling an ancient bell, a sound thundered through me and the tension reminiscent of a bad omen wrung my insides. I trembled; a drowning, gurgling sensation suddenly seized me. Threshing about in the indescribable space, I violently flapped my arms and legs, desperate not for breath but an escape from something unknown. I wish I could go back the same way I came. But I do not know where this started. I felt the urge to hasten swimming or floating, can’t figure which. Else that which I couldn’t define chasing me would smite me down. I couldn’t tell what is; a nightmare in whatever form. Shivers gave me the immediate panic, hurricane’s hula-hooping and I was caught inside. I had to move fast; otherwise, I would have gyrated infinite twirls and ended up exsanguinated with an extreme case of cognitive misfirings and a hell of a nervous breakdown. With my trembling hands and quivering legs, I forced myself to swim just to avert this disaster made nail-bitingly ominous by an imagined heavy metal guitar thrashing.

Then a door. Instinctively I pushed it open. I entered floating. Then the amorphous mass illuminated shapes for the first time. This time I could tell where I had been blindly floating along. Below me is a pale, medieval corridor. With my pace, I couldn’t get a good look to describe the whole place. Just glances enough to describe it surreal, wearing colors of lifeless shades, a barren space the exact opposite of psychedelic dreamscapes. It was merely a long corridor filled with… countless doors, corners full of twists and turns like a movie with a complicated plot, polemical, tragic, and dystopian. I tried to straighten my gaze and concentrate amid the foggy blanket of darkness where the straight line ended, but like with counting stars, it only had grown endless, as though it had its own life and its only aim was to lead me astray. Dismayed, I turned left. Then another left. I remembered I had to hurry. Chills dictated me to turn right next. Then I ran across another door. Pushed it open, and revealed another. And another. And another. The clammy, steamy breath of the monster after me I could already feel at my nape, like casting horrific magic potion, the liquid rubbing down my skin whispering sweet deadly nothings. Until I stumbled upon another door. Its flashing neon lights said Fire Exit. When I pushed it open, it disclosed an innocent, unfulfilled pursuit. My first ever unfinished story.

I flipped the pages one by one like a long-lost friend, not sensing a slightest trace of haste. This scene enveloped me with a new dimension of time. Been a while since my fingertips burned as I flipped pages of a notebook. Then thunder rumbled.