First Operator Chronicles - 🜂 DREAMCORE 04
My body likes to mimic sleep, while my mind plays a Ouija board, smiling at things that terrify my heart.
I don’t remember falling asleep this time.
Usually I can.
But somehow,
I don’t think I slept at all.
My body insists otherwise.
I remember fragments.
Messed images.
This time there were mixed feelings and overlapping scenes.
No matter where the dream went,
no matter what I was doing,
there was always the same thing.
A big… keyhole.
There were moments from my childhood.
Some of them were even funny.
But everything broke when I looked at the sky
and there it was again.
The keyhole.
That image triggered some kind of reset
and I started a new dream.
This time, I dreamed of her.
It felt like a hot pursuit movie.
We were running from something I can’t remember,
but I know we were both scared.
We ran through endless alleys, doors, gates.
We never stopped.
Until, with the unfriendly logic of a dream,
we were suddenly in the countryside.
A beautiful, open landscape.
Alone.
I felt relief.
I wanted to hug her.
But my arms felt… short.
No matter how close I got,
she was always three steps away.
I kept trying.
Over and over again.
And when desperation finally settled in,
I looked at the sky.
There it was again.
The big keyhole.
This time, something was looking back from the other side.
Like a curious eye.
Normally, that image would have woken me up.
But “normally” is a credit card
that has been rejected too many times in my recent life.
So something decided
I should keep dreaming.
The next scene was absurd.
There was the city.
Dark.
Like a city that divorced daylight
and made night its only lover.
The city felt off.
Not spooky.
Not dangerous.
A city your mother would worry about
if she knew you had been there as a kid.
A city that inhales broken futures
and exhales strange presents.
Grey.
With deep eyes.
I walked through it feeling watched.
I remember trying to find her.
She was never there.
I entered different places.
Dark parks.
Narrow alleys.
I always felt she had been there
just seconds ago.
When I tried to run, something happened.
My legs froze.
Stuck.
Glued to the ground.
The desperation should have driven me insane.
And then I heard her voice.
She was humming.
The same melody
she brought into my life.
I just wanted to follow that sound.
That trail.
That humming.
And when I finally could
—
The keyhole was there.
Nothing else.
Something was watching from the other side again.
This time, it blinked.
And that blink released me.
Or ended it.
Or allowed me out.
Because with that blink,
I woke up.
Sweating.
Crying.
With the deep sensation of something missing.
Desperation.
Of course, I couldn’t sleep again.
It seems today will be a long day
of dense coffee,
bad decisions,
and zombie reactions.
The piece feels like someone drifting through a dream that knows too much about their fears, a place where the mind refuses to rest even when the body begs for it.
The recurring keyhole becomes a wound an opening you never asked for, always watching, always returning.
The girl who stays just out of reach feels like a longing the heart keeps chasing even when it knows it can’t hold her.
Every shift in the dream alleys, fields, cities mirrors the emotional chaos of wanting someone who keeps slipping away.
The paralysis captures that helplessness perfectly: the body frozen while the heart runs itself raw.
Her humming becomes the only thread of comfort, a fragile sound that feels like hope and loss at the same time.
The eye behind the keyhole is the most human terror the sense that something sees you when you can’t see yourself.
The blink that ends the dream feels like mercy and abandonment in the same breath.
Waking up sweating and crying carries the weight of a grief you can’t name, only feel.
In the end, the exhaustion of the day ahead becomes its own quiet confession: some dreams don’t end when you wake; they follow you into the light.
I am awed ( people often told me I was a bit awed ) by this rare ability to put into words the things that- at least in my own dreams - defy verbal description. My dreams, since childhood, or at least for the last six decades, have often seemed similar to some of the passages in this brilliant work! In a journal, which I haphazardly attempt to write in, there are TWO very unique entries which make note of my having had a good, pleasant dream. Not that the rest are nightmares, just such a jumble of bizarre, intersecting images, conversations, encounters with people I seem to know intimately yet never met in reality - that this wonderful piece rings many dusty mindfulness bells from somewhere deep in my questionable consciousness.