Nightmare

It’s half past 12, and I still haven’t fallen asleep. Everyone else around me thinks what I saw was a lie, but I know that it is the truth and the reality. I cannot live with these restrictions; I am scared to go to sleep because I don’t know if my dreams are mine anymore. They may not be, yet how is that possible? How did they get such a grip on my mind and the way it works? I am sure it is not just mine, but everyone’s. It might sound like a myth, but it was what I saw. Thirty-five years—that is how long I worked for the government—and I thought I was doing a service for the people. Yet they now use my work against us. All my studies of the human brain are now simply a guidebook for them to control us.

Now, with all this control they have over us, I wonder whether the dreams we dream are even our own. Or are they just something we see because they want us to see it? Do I only wish for the car because it is shown to me in such a way that it is correlated with success and meaning? Do I only wish for the watch because it has been shown to me as a sign of wealth? Have I lost all non-material meaning and justification in my mind? Have these things that make us humans simply become something of the past? Are we now all just animals looking for objects? Are we so easy to tame? I perceive that this is what happens when some of us have unquestionable power over the rest of us. This is what would happen if our freedom was taken away.

Yet we have easily been sold this lie. Maybe this thought that I am having right now is a lie too—that they want me to think that I am crazy and that all of this is unreal. So that no one will ever end up believing me. So maybe I will go to sleep, hoping that I don’t have any dreams and that there is nothing for them to use against me. Yet, that is something I may never be able to control at all. since that is everything they have taught me. Then my eyes closed, and I fell into a deep sleep.

When I woke up, the same car and the same watch were right in front of me, and my life was exactly how I imagined it to be. And I thought to myself, This is all so real; maybe this is the reality. Everything before was just a nightmare.