[ WP ] You ca n't distinguish between dreams and reality .

Vivid nightmares marked my childhood. 
 Some were recurrent, others were wild endeavours of terror that lingered like hoarfrost in my waking mind. In one I might be running through a maze of wooden fences, chased by something nameless - and in another trapped in a house full of rag-clothed beggars and robe-swathed sorcerers, who tear my living mind to pieces, cell by cell, until only one fragment of *me* remains, screaming and vibrating inside a prison of a single synapse. 
 But they did n't always physically leave me when I awoke. 
 Escaping such dreams was difficult, as voices would continue to whisper after I woke and my hands and arms would feel distorted - strangely heavy and large if I clenched my fists. Or disgustingly thin and brittle if I spread my fingers. Textures were either so rough they abraded my senses or so smooth they felt alien and repulsive. 
 My parents did n't know what to do. They thought I had simply slept on my hands but I would stand in my pyjamas, shaking my digits, crying and pleading with them to make it stop - all while their voice were twisted into mocking caricatures by whatever held my mind in that half-dream state still. 
 
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 I learned to guard myself; to never fall asleep in a strange place. If I did, the dream fugue could lock me up and disorient me to the point of a meltdown. Once I fell asleep in the car and was then abruptly woken and dragged into a shop by my parents. The radio in the store screamed sarcastic and wicked imprecations at me and my hands grew to the size of mountains as I clenched my fists over my ears and howled in shattered agony. 
 As my teens approached, things began to change. The bouts of alert, waking nightmares dropped away and my actual dreams grew more elaborate. I first began to notice continuity in highschool, where one dream would follow another as perfectly as if I'd stepped back into a frozen moment in another world. Plots and places became familiar and by my twenties, the world of my dreams seemed as complex and real as the waking world. 
 Here was the place I called'The Architect's Dream of Doors' - a wooden amphitheater of crooked, polished boards around which carved doors were littered. Each one led to another place in the dream world, each a shortcut to some unique realm. 
 Nearby were the Endless Plains, then the End-of-the-Dream Sea. Above was the Perpetual Battleground and Scaffold Hill. To the east The City sprawled alongside The River, and between the Mountain Village and the Northern Wastes was the Lush Jungle and the Marsh Lands. 
 These places were all as familiar to me as your own home, your own town. The continuity of memory ran between the dreams and into my waking life, merging and blending into an indistinguishable melting-pot of experiences that could not easily be winnowed from fantasy and reality. 
 *Were* my dreams just dreams? 
 In one I might find a bookshop that held paperback novels I'd always desired. Or was that a *real* memory from my trip into the waking city? Folded, overlapping, tangled recollections tricked me and pulled me hither and thither. 
 
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 It seemed to me that I spent more time in the dream realms than the waking. Days could pass in the Dock Town Islands where I would be hunted or hunting someone or something. Or I might spend a year in the Northern Wastes, fighting to free the bucolic Farmfolk from the clutches of the Orange King. I was a hero and pariah. Some sang my name with reverence, some with hatred. I had battled my way up from the bloody-and-black chequered halls of the UnderHell and walked the frozen stairs of the Ice Tube. 
 No longer did the Ash Pit or the Dark Faerie Palace hold terror; I was the master of this land, bar for a few remnants of madness that still held out against my mastery. 
 The'real' world became inconsequential. Where it began and ended I no longer cared. One city was the same as another. One river the same as all others. 
 All I know is that there is a place I have reached just *twice*, a place *I need to be*. 
 I call it The Good Place and it is hidden somewhere in the hills - real or imagined - and it sits in perpetual warm sunset, yellowed glass and heavy-grained wood making up the few rooms, bathed in a *peace* that can only be found a few times in a lifetime. 
 And so I roam, seeking this place, not knowing where it exists anymore, hoping beyond all hope that I can find it again before I die.
