“Life is but a dream.” What if that’s true? What if we’re all just the dreams of something else, the quivering nightmares and ecstasies of something else – that may not even be human or human-like by our understanding – that tosses fitfully in its sleep?
Further, what if those dreamers are merely the dreams of something else? And they something else further yet, on and on until one reaches the source, who may have conjured the whole of time as we understand it in one lazy afternoon nap, merely by passing through dozens or hundreds of proxies?
What of our own dreams? Are they “alive” in this way, too? What of the dreams within dreams, and so on? When does it end?
What happens when a dreamer awakens? Some might argue, if this were the case, that’s what death is; the consensual reality made when the dreamers one tier above us wake up. But what if that’s not the case? What if death is just another part of the dream – or nightmare – and none of us have been exposed to the awakening of a dreamer, yet? Or, if we have, we were completely unaware of it?
After all, what happens when you wake up? Most of the time an incredibly vivid dream is tatterdemalion rags by the time you make it to the bathroom, pour your first cup of coffee or light that first cigarette; a handful of lingering images or feelings by the time the Pop-Tart comes out of the toaster, and forgotten entirely by lunchtime. If the dreamers above us wake, what if those people who are their dreams merely… vanish? No trace, no indication of what happened… potentially not even a memory of it?
Maiax is shaping up to be the next serial piece I work on, once “Layers” is finished. It may be pushed back a bit, if I decide instead to work on “Riptide” or Ex Inferis, but it’s coming. We’ll see how it works out.
Insomniac Nightmares 
Thanks for the share!