I am the ruler of your dreams. Since I don't want you to be destroyed, and neither are your dreams, because your dreams are my kingdom, I want to warn you about some things that are still unknown to you.

You see, as you walk around the World completely uncorrupted, I must show you by example the greatest danger that awaits you on your journey.

I present man's sacrifice; you will also be given his feelings.

At that exact moment, a young man dressed in black appeared in front of me with sunken cheeks and dark eyes. He immediately started pouring out a flood of words:

I haven't been sleeping at night for months, but as if I had been haunted repeatedly, I am waiting for the first light of day to close my eyelids and sink into the nothingness in which it is easy to live. That is nothingness without special requirements and needs. And even then, while I sleep, terrible scenes of someone's life unfold in my dreams. As if that someone begins his terrible life full of uncertainty and fear only in the morning when I fall asleep. I am also terrified of his fear, so I often wake up during the day and look around me without knowing to whom all this is happening, to me or the other person. I wonder if I was asleep or if it was the other sleeping inside me. In that respite between trance and sleep, I realize that by being awake for a moment, I am giving a break to that other dreamer, at the very least throwing him for a moment into the uncertainty of life so that his death, implanted at birth in his chest, would not eat away at his heart.

And while I'm awake in the empty nights of vigil and waiting, I can't forget what happened to me.

I can't stop thinking about what happened to me. However, there comes a moment when I will understand everything as if everything around me will suddenly become true. And just at that moment, I was overcome by some inner restlessness in which I realized, even without wanting to, that daylight was coming from somewhere and that I had to rest. Thus, thoughts remain vague again and again, like lights in the fog.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

At first, from intense thinking, bloody blisters appeared on my mind that burst, spilled around, and festered, hurt me more than the truth, than reality, and from the pain of what I dream of him while starving dogs tear him and eat him in the dark forest, where he is tied to a dried tree without a leaf.

Now, after so many months, there are no more blisters, but the thoughts keep repeatedly popping up. I wonder if they know that they will never be fully understood. Only now, they have also hardened, just like the worn-out sole of a peasant shoe.

It seems as if I am aware that nothing in my mind will change, and this gives me a strange fear that makes my body quiver, tremble, and be as uncertain as soap bubbles carried by the wind, and expecting at any moment a blow from something unknown that will shatter them forever and destroy.

Even my sweat has started to smell of fear. How do I get it all out of my head?

How can I forget her when the sound that I heard while caressing her flows through my mind, and I remember it as the happy creaking of her heart and her bowels, which, with their gentle movement, produced an unforgettable and never before heard among other people, performed music of immense happiness and joy behind which all meaning of life and existence is lost without it?

And yet, time flows, the future is ahead, the past is behind, and I can't grasp the present, so I have to put my feet in the footsteps of the present and continue.

Sometimes, I get scared, thinking that I have stepped in the footsteps of my future and thus hastened the race of life, which at such a pace must inevitably resound like a hundredfold echo in which I loudly hear:

"You are a loser in this race!"

So again, and so scared, I wonder how to stop. And believe me, I would be happy to stop if only I could not see, despite my countless looking back, some empty footprints that I could step on with my feet.

All the feet around me are filled so that I don't even see them, but only some other feet that are constantly stepping towards me, pushing me forward to my doom. They push me into even greater fear and uncertainty of a terrible, even more terrible future that I can't stop racing with.

And believe me, if only I saw something somewhere to grab hold of, to get out of these footsteps, at least I would stay hanging in the air until my hands hurt and until the past came across, into which I would then, exhausted fall.

Oh, how good it would be, from the past, right behind the present, to observe all these people in the present, and these people who rushed into the future, struggling and suffering without knowing what happened to them. And I just slowly trot after all of them, choosing the left footprints of which there are countless, and they are all free, one next to the other.

You learn the smell or the size of the feet, and thus, you follow them from before, seeing which ones would be easier, better, and more pleasant for you. You bypass a disease and jump into healthy footsteps when you see it. When you see death, you laugh at it, maybe mock it, and leave it unfulfilled behind, thus ending the World.

It could be a cure for me to forget my love, live other people's memories like this, and relive other people's thoughts, ordinary, small, and thin, even if unrealistic.