The Dreaming Disease

Ever since I was a child, my imagination has been a force of its own—a raging, unpredictable storm.

I could conjure worlds with a thought. I could be anywhere, anyone. A traveler through time, a king, a wanderer in the most forbidden places. My mind never rested. It twisted reality, bent it into shapes that made the world seem like nothing more than a pale imitation of what could be.

At first, I thought it was just a child's overactive imagination. I loved the old horror films—the black-and-white ones, the ones where monsters lurked in the shadows, where Frankenstein's creation stumbled through the night, where vampires whispered in candlelit crypts. Those movies fascinated me, but they also felt familiar.

Because if I didn't watch them…

They would come for me.

The Longest Dreams

Lately, I've started to wonder if this isn't just imagination.

If it's something worse.

Doctors call it a condition. Some kind of neurological disease. I have seizures, they say. Moments where I black out and slip into what they assume are dreams.

But they're not dreams.

They're lifetimes.

When the episodes happen, I live entire existences. I grow old. I love. I build families. I see cities rise and fall, watch empires crumble into dust. I experience the slow decay of time itself.

And then, just when I've accepted that life as real—I wake up.

Nine years old.

Back in my small room, with my small bed, surrounded by toys that feel meaningless compared to the memories of a life I no longer have.

It's unbearable.

I've written this down in the hope that someone will read it—an editor, a writer, a person who can help me understand. Someone who can tell me that I'm not insane. I once saw a book called Ghost Stories to Read Before Death, and I wonder…

Am I already in that book?

Am I just a ghost, drifting between the cracks of time?

Because I don't know if this—this world—is my reality.

Or just another dream waiting to end.