Alex stumbled into his apartment, dropped his bag, and plugged his phone in to charge. The routine was automatic.

  He needed food, researching complex topics on an empty stomach made everything feel like nonsense.

  He fried eggs and noodles, cracked open a soda, and ate while standing at the counter. First, sustenance. Then, he could power up his laptop and dive into whatever rabbit hole his brain was craving.

  ‘After all,’ he thought, chewing slowly. ‘What do I even hope to find?’

  Full and weary, exhaustion finally caught up with him. He’d run on maybe three or four hours of sleep after last night’s abrupt awakening and subsequent spiral of research. The emotional whiplash had left him feeling hollow.

  “Apparently... not enough sleep... for someone my age,” he whispered to the empty room, already sinking into the mattress.

  He needed a nap. His eyes left no room for argument, they slowly closed, and the world dissolved as sleep pulled at him. However, his mind was a traitor. It replayed the last few hours on a blurry loop. Snippets of web pages on lucid dreaming floated behind his eyelids, mixing with the lingering, impossible feeling of the night before.

  He wasn’t falling asleep to rest, he was surrendering to his unconsciousness. As the heavy silence of the apartment…usually comforting, swallowed him, his final conscious thought was a quiet, stubborn hope.

  ‘Maybe this time I’ll see something.’

  Then, nothing.

  *****

  The dream began not with a transition, but with a presence.

  “Hey, you ready?” Her voice was melody itself.

  Alex turned, and the air left his lungs. Standing in a shaft of light from a wide classroom window, her hair was a cascade of lavender and silver, each strand catching the sun in an ethereal glow. Her eyes were a striking violet, wide and luminous, holding a gentle calm that made his chest ache.

  “Uh… yeah,” Alex managed, his tongue thick in his mouth. Her smile hit him like a physical force, a gravitational pull, gentle and inexorable. Her skin was porcelain-smooth, a faint blush warming her cheeks. A small, star-petal hairpin nestled in her bangs, matching the subtle accessories on her collar.

  She wore a sleeveless white blouse with delicate purple stripes, a lavender tie fastened with a star-shaped clip. The look was elegant, soft, and utterly dreamlike.

  “Come on! Let’s go!” She grabbed his hand. The touch felt electric as she pulled him into a bustling hallway of uniformed students. His world narrowed to the warmth of her palm against his.

  “Hey, slow down!” Alex laughed, a wide, unguarded smile breaking across his face as they wove through the crowd, nearly colliding with others. “We’re going to fall!”

  “No, we’re going to miss it!” she insisted, tightening her grip. Her hair bounced with each step. She glanced back, and her smile washed over him like sunlight. “We’re here!”

  She shoved open a heavy door, and they spilled onto the roof. The world opened up in a breathtaking expanse. An endless blue sky hosted three celestial bodies. To the west, a brilliant golden sun kissed the horizon. To the east, two crescent moons hung side-by-side, one subtly larger than the other. Below, an expanse of vibrant flowers stretched to the edge of the world.

  “See? I said we’d make it,” Alex said, breathless, leaning against the safety bars.

  “Look…” she whispered. The wind played with her hair, her violet eyes gleaming as she watched the sunset. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” She seemed lost in a peaceful daze.

  Alex watched her for a long moment, the curve of her cheek, the peace on her face. He then turned to the view, and a profound serenity filled him. Here, at the top of the world with her, nothing else mattered.

  “It is,” he breathed.

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  “Uh… I need to tell you something.” She turned slowly. A telltale blush stained her cheeks. She tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear, her movements uncharacteristically fidgety.

  “What is it?” Alex asked, his own heart beginning to race.

  “Uh… well…” Her voice was softer than he’d ever heard it. She took a shaky breath, her eyes meeting his for a heart-stopping second before darting away. “It’s just that…”

  Her lips kept moving, but sound vanished.

  A strange detachment slithered into his mind. He was still there, on the rooftop, watching her. However, he was also elsewhere, a spectator observing a boy and a girl from a distance. The duality was dizzying.

  “Is this…”

  …a dream.

  Both perspectives whispered in unison.

  Then, he was staring at his own ceiling.

  “Wh… what the…” Alex whispered. A slow, disbelieving laugh bubbled up from his chest. It grew, turning into uncontrollable, almost hysterical laughter that echoed in his small room. As suddenly as it came, the laughter died, leaving a crushing silence.

  “Damn it.” Alex gritted his teeth, pressing the heel of his hand against his forehead. “Was that really just a dream?”

  He sat up, studying his familiar room: the half-open wardrobe, the shelf, the clock blinking [17:32], the faint hum of his computer. It was all normal. And yet, none of it felt real.

  He slumped into his desk chair. The dream’s images pressed against the inside of his skull, a visceral weight on his heart. He felt a profound lack, as if he’d woken from his true reality into a pale imitation.

  ‘Why do I feel like this?’ It was as if he’d left a piece of himself behind on that rooftop. The girl, the sky, their laughter, it had all felt more authentic than the chair beneath him.

  ‘This is what they call living in fantasies,’ he reasoned, but the thought rang false. ‘No. That was real. Too real. And her… I felt like I’d known her my whole life.’

  His mind became a vortex, sucking in every half-remembered article, every philosophical musing on dreams, spitting them out again in a chaotic storm with no answers.

  Then, a memory surfaced: a conversation with his cousin years ago. She’d described a dream where she had a child, a baby she loved fiercely. Waking up, she was left with a devastating emptiness, longing for a child who never existed.

  “I guess this is the feeling she was talking about,” Alex concluded aloud. Back then, he’d nodded politely, dismissing it. At the time, he hadn’t taken the conversation seriously, despite having experienced those kinds of dreams before.

  However, now he understood. He could no longer write off his own experiences as “JUST DREAMS.” The questions were too loud, the longing too sharp. He had questions, and they demanded answers.

  He’d read about people who could still feel an arm after it was gone… phantom limb syndrome. This was like that, but for a feeling. A phantom life. It ached, a stupid, persistent echo of a place that didn't exist. Was Alex’s brain just that cruel? To cook up a perfect moment just to make everything else taste like ash? Or was it the opposite… a cracked-open door to something his normal, day-to-day mind was too busy or too blind to see?

  As the elusive thoughts warped around his consciousness, a central question crystallized in his mind, clear as the summer sky he’d just left. “What are dreams, really?”

  Reflections of the self? But what is the self? A collection of fears and desires? Or could dreams be windows to other realities? The evidence of his own heart argued for both. Science spoke of the brain's boundless ability to simulate. But what if it wasn't just simulating... what if it was tuning in?

  “That would be something,” Alex muttered, stretching. His stomach growled, but first, a shower. His mind felt heavy with fatigue.

  Under the stream of hot water, he tried to anchor himself. “This is real,” he said to the steamy tiles. “The water is real.” But the assertion felt hollow, a desperate chant. If a dream’s warmth could feel truer than this, what was the benchmark for reality?

  He toweled off, determination cutting through the doubt. This wouldn’t be another passing curiosity. He needed answers, even if the search was ludicrous.

  ‘At least it’s private,’ he thought, a wry smile touching his lips. ‘No one has to know… unless I actually discover something.’ For a fleeting second, he imagined a breakthrough, an award…

  He caught his reflection in the fogged mirror and froze.

  It wasn’t his reflection.

  Where his face should have been was only empty, clear glass, showing the wall behind him. His heart slammed against his ribs. A single, quiet sentence escaped him.

  “Wait. Am I still dreaming?”

  The world shattered. Realities collided. He was in his bathroom. In the same instant, he was soaring over an alien planet, a single massive continent adrift in a pitch-blue ocean. Stars streaked past as his vision fragmented into a perfect, silent void, no thought, no light, no self.

  From the depths of that nothingness, a voice emerged, synthesized and immense, speaking from nowhere and everywhere at once:

  “THRESHOLD ACHIEVED. AWAKENING MORPHEUS.”

  The question "What are dreams, really?" is no longer theoretical for him.

  What did you think of the first arc? Any theories about the system?