Close your eyes.

What do you see?

A dream where you’re walking across water, that run slowly turning into a sprint until you can’t feel the cold water under your feet anymore.  You feel yourself levitating with each new step, each one bringing you closer to the sky.

You can taste the clouds; they’re much wetter against your tongue than you imagined.  They envelop you in a cool mist, fogging your vision until you peek above the foliage.  

You gape at the iridescent sky.  It changes shades before your eyes, as if you were turning a diamond to catch the sunlight.  The stars were up in the sky, bowing towards the moon, their allegiance as true as a loyal army.  They were nothing like the storybooks you read when you were young and naive. Now you knew that they were only balls of fire and gas, burning their lives out in the infinite sky, but in this dream, you were sure they were real living things waiting for you to reach out.

A nightmare where you’re in a tightly closed space.  No air moves here, locking the breath in your chest. You pound against the flawless transparent walls of your sanity, pure and untouched by the evil of the earth.  Each hit echoes and shakes your bones. You can see the other side; there are people you love and people you despise.

You spin around, your bloodshot eyes desperate to find a way out.  You claw at the walls as they seem to shrink closer.

You become an animal, becoming ever so desperate to be able to survive.  Your instincts gnaw away at your flesh as you let out a blood curdling scream.  The people on the other side seem to hear, but they only stare blankly ahead, as if you do not exist at all.

“Help me!” are words too simple to shout, but your tongue is tied.  Your limbs are bound from moving. You lay on the floor and wait for the room to devour you.

Both are lovely and frightening.  Both are games your head likes to play with you, a demented one sided obsession with torment.  

Yet both leave you breathless, your adrenaline going.  Breath fills your lungs to their maximum capacity. Your forehead perspires at how real it all seems.

You live to tell the tales.

But then again, they’re just dreams.  Nothing is real. They are too easily forgotten.

Then why do they shake you so?