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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/ILiveInAClock on 2023-07-06 19:30:02+00:00.
In my waking hours, I inhabit a small, mundane town nestled in the heartland of an Eastern European country, and endure a life of uniform greyness. The architecture is aged, the pace of life slow, and the landscape painted in broad strokes of grey. My life is much the same — as monochrome and monotonous as the town itself. There’s comfort in its predictability, but it’s a monotone existence, void of excitement or surprises.
Yet in the silence of the night, when I surrender to the lull of sleep, I become the protagonist in an epic tale of an entirely different life. The first few times it happened — more than fifteen years ago — I dismissed it as an oddity, a dream more vivid than others. But over time, the dreams grew in intricacy, in consistency. They formed a parallel life, astonishing in its richness and detail, that existed only when I closed my eyes.
In my dreams, I am no longer a forgettable figure in an unremarkable town in the middle of nowhere. Instead, I am an influential CEO living in a stately mansion nestled among the sun-soaked hillocks of Beverly Hills. I navigate a world of dazzling elegance, steering luxury vehicles, hosting effervescent galas, and dining with the elite of Los Angeles. This dream offers a kaleidoscopic contrast to the grayscale of my daylight existence — it is vivacious, electrifying, and teeming with life.
My dream life, so full of color and vibrancy, is not a simple succession of pleasant scenarios. It presents me with real challenges and dilemmas, making it all the more believable. I face the pressures of my CEO position, handling high-stake negotiations and sometimes even suffering setbacks in my business. I celebrate the victories, mourn the losses, and deal with the rollercoaster of emotions just like any other person.
Every night when I go to sleep, I travel to this alternate reality. It’s not your typical disjointed dream world, filled with chaotic, unrelated events. No, it is a world meticulously crafted, where narratives interweave into a harmonious tapestry. During the first several years of my dream reality, I attended college in it, experiencing late-night study sessions, campus parties, and graduation ceremonies. Everything played out in detail, to the point where I could almost touch the worn-out books, smell the stale beer at parties, and feel the anxious excitement of standing on stage to receive a diploma.
Over the years, this phantasmal world evolved. I met people there, formed bonds, and established friendships. To my shock, the characters remained the same. They had lives, ambitions, and troubles. I knew their favorite songs and their deepest fears. I remember comforting Jake, my dream best friend, after his breakup, and celebrating with him when he got his dream job. And it wasn’t just people. The world had places — parks, restaurants, museums. All consistent, all revisited, all unnervingly real.
Then I met the love of my life — Sarah. Beautiful, kind, and incredibly smart. We fell in love in this dream world. I remember our first date, our first fight, our make-up. I remember our wedding, the ecstatic tears, the shared laughter. It was an emotional whirlwind that I would wake up from, aching with a longing I couldn’t explain. In this nocturnal life, we even had two children — Lily and Daniel, their faces as familiar to me as my own reflection.
My relationship with Sarah has depth and complexity. We have disagreements, misunderstandings, just like any couple. But we always find our way back to each other, and this continuous cycle of love, conflict, and reconciliation makes our connection feel even more authentic. The moments of tender intimacy between us, the quiet conversations in the dead of night, the shared smiles over our children’s antics — they are so vivid that I can recall them even in my waking hours.
But when dawn breaks, I return to the familiar drudgery. A mundane job, an empty house. The sunlit glamour of Beverly Hills gets replaced by the dull panorama of my small town with its identical, decaying post-communist panel blocks. Here, Sarah is a phantom. The love and warmth of her arms are replaced by the cold emptiness of my bed. Here, Jake does not exist either. Nor do I have children who rush to welcome me home. The dichotomy is tearing me apart. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to discern which world is truly real, and where I truly belong.
There are no inconsistencies, no discrepancies in either world. By day, I pay bills, chat with colleagues, and feed the cat. By night, I attend Lily’s school play, go on dates with Sarah, help Daniel with his homework, and engage with business partners. I have a therapist in my waking world, but how in the world does one articulate an existence so uncannily coherent within the bounds of a dream?
The borders of these two worlds are beginning to dissolve, and the dream world is starting to leak into the waking world. I woke up this morning, reaching out for Sarah, feeling a chill running down my spine when I grasped nothing but cold sheets. Yesterday, I called my colleague “Jake” and was met with confused silence. I recently started seeing the people from my dream world in my waking life. I’d turn a corner and see Sarah, only for her to disappear when I blinked. I’d hear Lily’s laughter, echoing in the silent hallways of my office. These apparitions were unsettling, but nothing compared to the day Jake appeared in my living room, his face contorted in a silent scream. I reached out to him, only to feel an icy chill where his body should have been.
Worse, the mingling of my two realities has recently escalated into a nightmarish ordeal. It’s as if whatever is normal in the dream world leaks into the real world but translates into something horrifying and overly grotesque here. After one particularly comforting dream, where I had dinner with Sarah and the kids, I woke up to an unnerving scene in my real kitchen. The countertops were smeared with an unidentifiable dark substance, and the air filled with a foul odor that made my stomach turn.
On another day, after a dream in which I was involved in a minor car accident in Beverly Hills, I woke to find my real car dented and scratched, as if it had been in a violent collision. A chilling sight met my eyes in the driver’s seat: a pile of shattered glass mirroring the dream accident, reflecting the morning light in a thousand tiny prisms, a haunting echo of the crash in my dream.
As for Jake, I once dreamed of him suffering a minor burn on his hand. In reality, I awoke to find the charred remnants of a familiar silver ring on my doorstep — the exact ring Jake always wore in my dreams. The implications filled me with an icy dread that pierced the marrow of my bones.
With each passing day, my waking life grows more haunting, becoming a grotesque mirror of my dream world. The vibrant allure of my dream life is now a source of dread, each night’s sleep promising a fresh horror upon waking. Yet, the pull of my alternate life — the love, the happiness, the success — is irresistible, leaving me in a constant state of fear and anticipation as I surrender to sleep each night.
My waking world is also starting to feel more fleeting than my actual dreams. It’s as though I’m becoming a ghost in my own life. I’ve started questioning everything — my sanity, my existence. I am at odds with my own consciousness as if I’m trapped within the labyrinthine folds of a dream within a dream.
This parallel existence unfolds as I slumber, a life that demands my full attention. My bed has become a portal to a world where I am successful, loved, and content, a stark contrast to my waking life. As days pass, I find myself yearning for the night, for the familiarity of my other life. I fear I am slowly drifting away from this world, inching closer to becoming a permanent resident of the world my dreams weave.
Tonight, as I tuck Lily and Daniel into their beds in the dream, Sarah kisses me goodnight, and I can feel the softness of her lips, the warmth of her body next to mine. I smile back, finding myself torn between happiness and an undefined dread. And then, I wake up to the harsh shrill of my alarm clock, the other world already starting to fade like mist in the morning sun.
Yet, it leaves an indelible imprint on my psyche, fragments of memories, and emotions. I can still hear Lily’s laughter, feel Daniel’s small hand in mine, and see the love in Sarah’s eyes. I live the entire day in a daze, lost between worlds, longing for the night that will deliver me back to them.
The most unsettling part is not living this double existence, it’s a growing doubt, the horrifying thought that gnaws at me every moment — what if the world I wake up to is the dream? What if the life I am living by the day is the illusion, a figment of my subconscious mind, and the life I live at night is my actual reality? For all I know, the nightmares happen in my real life, not in the realm of my dreams.
The fear is tangible, yet there’s a strange allure to it. I am poised on the precipice of an abyss, one foot already hovering over the void. I cannot discern what is real anymore, whether I am awake or ensnared within a dream, and to which world I truly belong. As the cycle of day and night continues, my day-to-day life in this small town seems increasingly distant, a mere illusion. My dream life in Beverly Hills, conversely, feels alarmingly tangible, as if within my grasp. …
Content cut off. Read original on https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/14sj7w4/at_night_in_my_dreams_i_live_a_parallel_life/
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