I came down with a fever in the coming days. Confined to my apartment and living alone, I could only watch as my temperature continued to rise night after night. The days are long and brutal. I’ve taken to breathing the same stuffy air rather than letting the searing summer heat in through my window.

The sickness clogs my sinuses and arteries, making every breath a wheeze and filling every moment with discomfort. My body fluctuates between inescapable chills and inescapable sweats.

On the third night of my fever I turned off to bed early. The heat was already unbearable in the apartment—I slept with a leg over the covers, sickened by the claustrophobic oven that was my bed.

On this night, I experienced the first dream.

In the dream, I found myself wandering my apartment. The walls felt narrower somehow and I roved without reason, confused by the non-euclidean structure of my hallways. It felt endless. I walked through my kitchen, a hallway, my kitchen, a hallway, my apartment making sense in a way it didn’t. I was free, but I was trapped.

The walls grew darker and darker, patterned wallpaper peeling into threatening curls or jagged claws. Everything around me peeled and fell, pieces littering the floor and crunching loudly under my bare feet. Eventually, all surfaces became a sick, dark black, and the peeling stopped. I was in my kitchen again, looking into a pitch black room. My living room. And I could no longer move.

As I stood, gaze affixed to the doorway, a feeling of dread slowly, steadily built itself inside of my mind. The darkness concealed something, something important, something I was afraid of. The darkness of the doorway surpassed the darkness of the peeled kitchen walls.

I took a step towards the doorway.

And I woke up.

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The next day I found my brain filled with fog. Walking around the apartment triggered acute dissociations, taking me immediately back to the dream. Hours blended together, uncomfortable and stuffy and hot as ever. Sometimes I turned a corner into a hallway I swore I’d just walked through.

My fever was worsening. I didn’t touch my forehead anymore because I already knew what it would feel like. Scorching, burning, dotted with oily sweat.

Walking into my bedroom that night I felt an apprehension. I feared the world I might step into, the peeling paint walls and the dark black doorways. I feared the claustrophobia. I feared another confused waking day where my battered mind blended fact and fiction.

But, I told myself, sleeping was the only option. And my waking world was filled with discomfort, anyways.

And so I dreamed the second dream.

In the dream, my gaze was affixed to my television in the center of my living room. I sat—or maybe stood, maybe both—several feet away, and the static-filled screen was small, but it occupied so much of my vision.

Darkness choked the living room, its dense weight pressing on my skin. The only thing that wasn’t pure, utter black was the luminescent static of the screen I stared at. In the corner of my eye, I could tell the darkness was moving, the walls of the room ebbing and flowing like a breath or a pulse, but there was no way to tell for sure.

The static remained unchanging. Despite this, I could almost make out faint, transient shapes among the black and white. I stared and stared, feeling my body move as the indiscernible room around me swam, watching the symbols assemble themselves from the insect-like dots on the screen. The television was growing bigger, or closer, or maybe I was getting smaller.

And then I could make out symbols no longer. Slowly, steadily, a single distorted point was forming in the center of the static, being burned irreversibly into the screen. It was dark, like the dots of static were coalescing together in the middle.

The point on the screen began to glow.

And I woke up.

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It was like the sweat never left my body. I would have thought that my flesh itself was melting if it wasn’t for the visibly clear liquid that stained my clothes and dotted my skin. I was constantly sweating.

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Part of me was compelled towards the television just because I wanted to prove that what I’d dreamed wasn’t real. But even before I turned it on, I noticed a faint blue stain in the screen. Perfectly centered, perfectly small, hardly noticeable if I hadn’t been looking for it. It could have always been there.

None of the channels functioned. They were all static. I spent my ever-fading energy attempting to drag a chair in front of the television, and once I did, I just stared at the static. Just stared. There was no suffocating darkness, no swimming walls, just my living room and some static. The television’s near-inaudible, high-pitched hiss filled the room.

But the burn remained. There was, undoubtedly, a dot burned into my television screen. I affixed myself to it and let my fading, confused mind drift.

It could have been an entire thirty minutes before I started seeing the symbols. My sense of time was slowly crumbling. But they were there, slowly fading in and out of view, with sharp or smooth edges, barely noticeable as if the unknown message they displayed was for my eyes only. I felt the air grow hotter around me.

The dot in the middle began to grow.

I got up from my chair, turned away from the TV, and rubbed my eyes. I looked back to see regular, harmless static, and a dot burned into the middle of the screen.

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This time, sleeping was a fear. I dreaded the intense discomfort of my dreams, of sweat-covered sheets and my aching, battered mind. I stalled in every way I could, but after midnight, I couldn’t hold back my falling eyelids any longer.

And I dreamed the third dream.

This time, I was in my bed. I got up and trekked through the darkness to my living room. Aside from the unending confusion of everything around me being claustrophobic and expansive at once, there was nothing wrong.

I found myself in front of the TV again without even remembering getting there. The burned dot on the screen looked as if it had been waiting for me. Once more it was the focus of my vision, and once more it began to glow. The brightness increased, but it wasn’t just getting brighter. It was getting closer. There was something inside eating all the light and getting closer to me. To reality. It consumed the static, the black and the white, and grew closer, brighter, hotter.

But when I felt the heat behind me, and saw the faint illumination of my living room, I realized just how wrong I was. There was nothing inside of my television. It was outside, already real, just reflected off the surface of the screen. I couldn’t turn my head to see it behind me.

The curtains on my windows were open. I had so many windows. Covering the walls, the ceiling, the floor, countless windows. Through them were eyes. Distorted, dark faces and eyes that looked at me but reflected the thing behind me. I saw its reflection a thousand times on a thousand eyes, but I couldn’t turn my head.

And the room grew hotter and brighter as the thing grew closer, but I couldn’t turn my head.

I was screaming when I woke up.

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For the entire following day I avoided sleep. My fever was worse than ever, the room was so hot it burned, and the sweat dripped with every step. To keep myself awake I just walked.

I remained awake for the entire next night and into the morning. I walked everywhere but my living room. I couldn’t bear to go back after what I’d seen in my dreams. I was too afraid of it being real.

I didn’t know whether or not my fever would kill me. I felt so close to death. After twenty-four waking hours, I had avoided the next dream, but my splitting headache and perpetual sweating left me in eternal discomfort.

I didn’t even realize the moment I had walked into my living room. Maybe my mind had become so confused I didn’t even realize I was there.

Two steps into the room, I saw a glimpse of that burned point on the screen, and I fell unconscious.

Pure, total darkness.

I was standing on solid ground, but everything was so utterly dark. My headache was gone, my sweat was gone, everything was gone but me, the darkness, and that thing.

It was thousands of feet in front of me, but it felt so close.

It was a single white point, a red-orange glow radiating off of it. It quietly vibrated in its place far away from me. Lashes of fiery energy came out of it like whipping, flailing arms. I could almost see the heat it gave off in powerful, thumping waves. As it grew closer, it got hotter, the lashing arms growing in size and intensity. I was frozen in place as it approached.

This, I realized, was what it felt to be in the presence of a God. Not divine, or even unholy, but just beyond me.

It floated closer, and closer, the heat exponentially growing, until it no longer felt like heat. The pain crescendoed, searing and boiling my skin until I could no longer feel pain anymore. As it approached me its waves of heat vaporized my body, and then I came back, and then vaporized me again. The pulses grew faster, and faster, my death and rebirth accelerating, until it stopped in front of me. My body became whole again.

It floated before my eyes with a high-pitched ringing sound, vibrating harmlessly. It was as real, as clear as day. Its red-orange light coated my body and mind with a sinister glow. I knew it was my turn to act.

With one index finger, I touched it, and it filled me with light.

I awoke on the floor of my living room.

As I pushed myself to standing, I realized my fatigue was gone. The headaches had stopped. However long I had been asleep, my ailments had healed by that time.

But, looking around my living room with a clearer head, at the burned image in my television, I couldn’t suppress a feeling of bone-chilling dread. Like I had brought something into the world that I couldn’t take away. I was overcome with apprehension, at the thing in my dreams I had brought into reality.

I opened a curtain, and the morning sun was so much brighter and hotter than before.