Who are you?

Gradie’s chest dropped as the darkness revolved. When it stopped, the gas station returned. He saw himself laying on the floor. Cold linoleum pressed against his face and malt liquor ran down his back. The girl kneeled over him. Warm thighs pressed into his side, hot breath on his cheek. Her fingers dug into his chest as she shook him. Slowly, the sensations faded, replaced by firm ground under his feet and a strange weakness of gravity. He looked around.

The gas station was the same, but the world outside shifted under his gaze, like the kaleidoscopic tunnel vision after a concussion. Overpasses, shopping centers, parking lots, and highways all shuffled sickeningly. A molten reality. He felt he was going to fall out into it. When he looked away in a panic, the sleeping him and the girl were gone.

There was a noise from the back room like a door closing on the other side of an empty gymnasium. He knew, somehow, that he was meant to hear it. The sudden knowledge made him certain he was dreaming, and filled him with a desire to wake up, or to force the dream to its conclusion.

As he walked down the aisle, the chip bags and candy labels winked at him hazily like Christmas lights, and the fridges hummed like things alive. The pressed wood door at the back had a laminated paper sign taped to it that said, “employees only”, and an aura of life-shattering importance. He turned the handle, ready to wake up, but when he stepped through, the dream remained.

The hallway was like someone had taken the interior of the gas station and smeared it in a straight line. Dusty linoleum, rough ceiling panels, flickering lights, all stretched out ahead of him. A liquid piece of the universe. Even the buzz of the lights seemed warped, as if they had forgotten how to sound.

At the other end of the hall was a door borrowed from a high-end hotel. Dark wood and brass fixtures. He took a step towards it and it rushed to meet him. Another step brought him right in front of it. When he turned back, the door he had come through was miles away. It all seemed normal, to be expected, as if he was the one out of place. He opened the door in front of him in a hurry.

A long, carpeted hotel hallway stretched out towards pinholes of distant shadow in either direction, with a million doors on each side. He listened for another sound to tell him where to go, but there was only the same buzzing white noise. It occurred to him that he might be stuck here forever. Looking back, he couldn’t even remember which door he had come through. After a brief panic, he reminded himself that he was dreaming, and one of the doors jumped out at him.

It looked just like all the others, but he knew with that same instant knowledge that it was different. He imagined they were on the other side and it changed into his old bedroom door, off white with a dark bronze colored handle. It opened with a sound distilled from memory.

It was a large sleek lobby of mirror glass and matte steel, lit by two story high frosted windows. An electric, musical sound, like some lost sibling of wind and rushing water, echoed across the smooth marble. The hallways before had felt buried under a million miles of nothing, but this new space felt connected to a boundless energy, as if crafted of pure possibility.

They stood next to an elevator on the other side. The man smiled and waved, and the woman glared at Gradie like he had walked in on her changing. She didn’t take her eyes off him as he came over.

“So, what’s the game?” she said. Her gun and armor were gone, and she wore a black robe that defied the ambient light.

“What?” Gradie said.

The man put a hand on her shoulder. She brushed it off and got in Gradie’s face.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

He was scared for a moment, until he remembered he was dreaming. He grabbed her by the waist and pulled her into a kiss.

She hit him with a flurry of hooks from each side so fast they fell on top of each other and he went down in a daze.

“He’s not with them,” the man said calmly.

“What are you talking about? You believe this act? People don’t just waltz out of a Hardworld!”

The man helped Gradie to his feet.

“She didn’t hurt you.” Gradie realized it was true and his head cleared.

“Sorry,” he said to the woman. She ignored him and faced the man.

“Don’t buy it.”

“I’ll handle him. You can go.”

She opened her mouth to say something, but turned on her heel and stepped, gliding weightlessly, to the elevator. It opened as if on command. She glared at Gradie as the doors closed.

“My name’s Michael,” the man said, holding out his hand. He was almost fat, and well over six feet tall, with a baby face and smoky grey eyes. He wore the same clothes as he had in the gas station, minus the weaponry. Gradie shook his hand.

“I’m Gradie.”

“I remember. We’ve never met before today, right?”

“No.” the guy looked familiar and Gradie tried to place him. He noticed.

“What is it?”

“Trying to remember where I saw you in the real world.”

“Oh. You think you’re dreaming?”

Gradie laughed at the idea that this might not be a dream. He still had the cop’s brains on his shirt.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

“All right, well, you can either stay in your dream, or follow me.”

“Where are you going?”

“To a place we call the Otherworld.”

“What is it?”

“It can’t really be described, only seen.”

Gradie remembered reading that if you encountered a dream guide, you could learn about yourself by following them. He was trying to decide if he wanted to learn anything about himself when Michael went into another elevator. He held the door open and smiled.

“All right, fuck it.” Gradie walked in and the doors shut.

As the elevator moved, gravity left him and he couldn’t be sure if he was rising or falling. Somehow, he knew that whatever life he had been a part of in the gas station was slipping away, like the elevator was taking him from himself. Michael watched him, waiting for something.

“You know, dreams are more powerful when you believe they’re real,” he said. “Can you try to believe that what you’re about to see is real?”

Gradie tried to guess what a dream guide crafted from his subconscious would want to show him, and came up blank.

“Depends on what it is.” The elevator stopped, and he felt he was finally about to wake up. The doors slid apart with a ding.

The roof was unspectacular. Manilla cement squares with cigarette butts in the grout and a waist-height wall at the center of a massive downtown. For a moment, Gradie’s brain told him that’s all it was. His brain lied.

Shimmering buildings budded off at angles, branched out like trees, floated slowly across the sky. Ships, houses, and other unnamable shapes flew from place to place and popped in and out of existence. Light moved in beams, orbs, and holographic iridescence, as if commanded by an invisible hand. The sky was filled with things floating, appearing, disappearing, constantly changing form and color.

It was too much, felt too real and too detailed to be a dream. He backed up towards the elevator in terror. Michael moved past him, smiling.

“Some dream, right?”

“Fuck you.” Gradie wanted to throw him off the roof. Somehow, this was all his fault.

“Think you could dream this?”

Gradie looked out at the writhing mass, then dropped his gaze to his feet.

“I must have.”

“Allow me to offer another explanation.” Michael stepped across the roof like the swirling madness around him was a gentle evening.

“Everything you see around you was made by someone willing it into existence. Do you see them?” Michael pointed and Gradie, despite himself, lifted his eyes from the lazy sameness of the concrete roof, back to the insanity above. He saw, as if Michael was guiding his sight, tiny shapes flying everywhere. When one zipped overhead, he realized they were people.

“All those people were once like you. Scared. Unbelieving. Now look at them. Masters of a brand-new kind of existence.”

Gradie closed his eyes and tried to wake up. He thought of his bed, his room, his life…

He opened his eyes, remembering how much he hated it, how every day he wished it would fall away, replaced by anything else. He looked back out at the city. It was as far from his life as he could imagine, and he saw it with fresh eyes. It was beautiful, and if he could be sure that it was real, it would be paradise. A real world of wonder and possibility, far away from his stagnant existence. But the idea that it was all in his head, generated as a defense mechanism against the unbearableness of his real life, was horrifying.

“I must be having some kind of break down,” he said.

“Well, while you’re going crazy, why not have some fun?” Michael said with the same gentle smile, like Gradie was making a mistake he’d seen a thousand times. In a landscape that seemed crafted of his own instability, Gradie found Michael a beacon of confidence.

“Like what?”

“Start small. Imagine something in your hand or in front of you, anything you want. Will it into existence.”

Michael pulled a glass of water out of nowhere.

“Want a drink?”

The water glinted in the light. Gradie counted the crevices in the glass. Its realness was just as terrifying as everything else. He hated it. Each bead of condensation, un-changing and permanent in their existence, mocked him. Without thinking, he pulled a Smith and Wesson 5906, the chrome archetype of all handguns, out of the air and shot the glass to pieces.

“Shit!” Michael jumped back in shock, shaking his hand, and started to laugh. Gradie smiled and fired fifteen times at the skyline. If the bullets had any effect, he couldn’t tell. Disappointed, He dropped the empty pistol on the ground.

“Now let’s try something else,” Michael said. “Imagine a door—”

Gradie hardly heard him, distracted by the shifting horizon of impossible skyscrapers and floating gardens, crushed between its impossibility and its promise. He’d had enough of watching. It was time to break out.

“I’m gonna destroy it.” He raised his hand to the skyline, ready to palm blast it all into dust. If it survived, then it might be real. If it disappeared in a cloud of fire, at least he could wake up.

“Start with the gun then,” Michael said.

“What?”

“Well, if you’re going to destroy an entire city, better make sure you can destroy something smaller.”

Gradie knew there was a trick in it somewhere, but stopped himself from trying to find it. In dreams, just the thought of failure would bring it about. He decided he would destroy the gun, Michael, then the city, in that order.

“All right.”

He looked at the pistol and imagined it disappearing. Nothing happened. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed like it would exist forever, stuck in his mind, a thought with a barb on the end.

“Relax. You have to believe that you’ll destroy it,” Michael said.

Gradie tried to picture the pistol disappearing in a puff of smoke, but it was hard to focus, as if the city was pulling on his thoughts. After a few seconds, a handful of white smoke popped into existence around the gun with a crack. When the smoke cleared the gun shined in the odd daylight, mocking him. Michael clapped his hands together.

“Well, so much for that. Guess the city is safe. Now—"

Gradie shot a hazy beam of light out of his hand into Michael’s chest. Nothing happened. Michael looked down at the ground.

“Oh, look.”

There were two pistols.

“Fuck!” Gradie put his hands together and summoned more glowing energy. He made it blindingly bright. It was a sun, real nuclear fission compressed in his hands, ready to destroy everything and return him to sanity. He closed his eyes and saw the city collapsing in the shockwave of a nuclear blast, the glass melting and the ground boiling, all the little flying people blown around like dust. He opened his eyes, squeezed the orb in his hands, and threw it at the ground.

It bounced off the gun with a clink and sailed off into the sky. Gradie watched it disappear.

“I think the fact that the first thing you do upon finding yourself in a land of dreams-come-true is try and destroy it, says something about you,” Michael said.

“Fuck you.”

“Also, did you notice that you closed your eyes just now? Can you do that in a dream?”

Gradie watched the city persist in defiance of his inability to comprehend it. One of the things he had categorized as a skyscraper shot off into the sky, lightning-fast, like he was looking at a monitor and some invisible cursor had dragged it across the screen. It was beyond disturbing.

“So, if this isn’t a dream, what is it? Did I die in my sleep?” He was ready to hear anything.

“It’ll take a while to explain, and I’ll need your patience.”

The horizon continued to shift and seethe. More tiny dots moved around like dust caught on his eyeball. Could it be real? Were they real?

“You said other people made this?”

“Yes.” There was silence on the rooftop. Gradie couldn’t begin to filter the noise coming from the city into distinct, identifiable sounds. Michael got closer to him.

“Would you like to see where they party?”

Gradie waited until he was sure he had heard correctly.

“Yea, all right.” Dream or not, might as well have some fun. A party had to be more bearable, more understandable at least, than whatever this was. He picked up the guns and followed Michael into the elevator.

“What do you think those are going to do for you?”

“You never know.”

Michael laughed as the doors closed.