What is the first thing that comes to mind?
Well… technically the mind, I guess. And how difficult it is to comprehend. The human brain is so complex that it can’t even understand itself. Which is just wild, if you think about it. I can’t put into words the difficulties that sends my mind into. As soon as I consider it, my brain starts to feel like it’s warping and twisting around in discomfort to avoid that idea, like a time-warp sort of thing.
What’s strange to me is that, at different stages of exhaustion, sometimes if it gets really bad, I can just start spilling. Like, I worked twelve hours straight yesterday, and was up from six till almost ten-thirty, and towards the end, although my brain felt really foggy, the philosophies on life that I began to spout, regardless of what exactly they were or what prompted them, weren’t total nonsense. They were just little nothings, little sound-bites that actually had significant truth in them when I thought back on them this morning. Of course, now I can’t remember what they were. But they existed.
And yes; I slept last night. Hallelujah. After school from eight-thirty to three thirty, followed by work from three-thirty to six, and then immediately going to a dinner party from six-thirty to nine on Friday, a twelve-hour work day yesterday really got me tired enough to sleep. And I had weird dreams.
It started as our family being royalty on a very small-in-diameter, enormous-in-height island that was part of an archipelago of sorts. We were somehow deposed or replaced by — I think — our steward. We ended up swimming from island to island in this little archipelago, searching for help from the other island kingdoms around us. Somehow we got to something like the mainland, where the only building I noticed was a massive mall. It was at least eighteen floors, cement, with some neon and electric signs, etc. In the excitement of the mall, I believe we entirely lost focus on our actual problem, that of being deposed and betrayed by our steward, and I somehow ended up on the sixth-ish floor, alone. I passed a store that was totally dark inside, no clerks or cashiers, and also no gate over the doorway. The only light came from the dim lightbulbs of the walkway that went all the way around the mall, with railings against the overlook that plummeted straight down to the first floor. This level seemed almost abandoned, since half the lights were totally out, and half the remaining ones were on their way to lightbulb Valhalla. The whole level seemed to stand in a dim grey cast, with a faint sepia saturation. And this one store was utterly pitch black where the dim light from this hall did not reach. Logically, I decided to go inside and wander around.
It was a little bit like the toys and athletics section of Walmart was combined with a sporting goods store like Big 5. The floor was covered in that thin carpet, that seems to cover a thin rubber mat of some sort, that most stores have — it was a middle-toned heather grey, more dark than light. Turning displays were arranged in neat, militantly straight rows down the room except for down the center, which came straight from the door. Everything was dim and black, the displays were silhouetted in the dark, and I don’t know why I didn’t run. It was, after all, a dream. We’re not particularly logical in our dreams. I gravitated towards the right side of the room and wandered along the wall up the store towards the back, my eyes flicking around curiously. And then, behind me, came footsteps. I glanced back, eyes wide and fear gripping my chest. There were two boys, about my age. One, shorter than the other, was African American or some other black ethnicity, with bright neon orange and green glasses that I noticed even in the dark. His hair was cropped close to his head. The other, the taller one, was white, with longer dark brown hair and a maroon-red baseball cap on. He was taller than me, and the other boy was shorter than me. I acted quickly, grabbing one of the turning displays and jerking it down behind me. It stopped them, and instead of running, I stopped on the other side of the fallen display.
“Don’t follow me!” I said, pointing threateningly at them. The black boy laughed loudly and looked at his friend, who smiled a little and glanced from him to me. Those were the only three words that were distinctly spoken the whole dream — and they were disregarded. Eventually those boys probably said something along the lines of ‘We just want to be friends, come talk. We can even sit in the light if you want.’ Me being the apparently naive character I was in that dream, I agreed and all three of us stepped back to the center of the store, where there was a long leather couch. I sat down on that, and the black boy apparently disappeared while two other boys replaced him. I never really noticed what they looked like — I think they were basically just shorter copies of the brown-hair boy, with paler shades of brown and blonde hair in very similar cuts. Those two just wandered around on my peripheral and looked at the displays, while the first boy and I just sat and talked for pretty much the rest of the dream. But before I woke up, I noticed one last strange feature about him. His eyes were — incredibly unusual. They appeared to be just flat brown irises at first, nothing particularly abnormal except that they were maybe a bit bigger than usual. But then he looked down and that angle let me see that the corneas of his eyes were absolutely massive. Normally, corneas don’t look too big, about the size of a contact or smaller; but on him, they looked like clear bubbles, like a glass globe. I thought for a moment in the dream that his eyes were fake. And then, he looked up. And his flat, patternless irises had the word ‘eye’ written, in something like my own handwriting in thick black strokes, about fifty times across them.


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