[ WP ] You had one dream about someone you have never met or seen before in your life . You make it your life goal to try and find them .

Have you ever had a dream where everything seems normal, and yet at the same time there's that sense of grinding *wrongness* that permeates it all? Nothing you can put your finger on, there's just the sense that at any second something is going to go badly, irretrievably wrong. Imagine watching a video of a man eating cereal. A pretty mundane domestic scene, right? Now imagine the soundtrack is going full on horror-movie, with scraping strings and that sense of building dread. You'd know something horrible is going to happen. 
 
 In my dreams, I am that man. I ca n't hear the music, because I am not the audience, but on some level I know it's there. I go about pretty normal things, shopping, talking with friends, but there's something moving behind the scenes that always makes makes me anxious. Like, dentist-chair anxious. 
 
 One night I found myself on a desert road. Not full blown sandy desert, but that kind of low level scrubby-undergrowthed badlands you see if you just drop a Google Streetview pin on some backroad in rural Utah. The road led off to distant mountains in one direction, and off to the horizon in the other. I knew - I just *knew* that nothing good was waiting in the mountains. I could feel those Hitchcock string sections in my blood, their bows drawing their grating tension against my bones. 
 
 I turned to face the distant horizon, and I ran. I ran for hours, but the mountains grew no more distant, and the lurking dread grew no less. I woke in a sweat, and could not get back to sleep. I was a zombie that day. 
 
 I did n't think much of it, until I had just the same dream two weeks later. This time, as I ran, I saw a figure walking towards me. They were unhurried, walking with the even plod of someone who intended to keep it up all day. I saw a distant tilt of their head as they saw me, but their step did n't falter. 
 
 As they grew closer, I could make out more details. A man, a few inches shorter than me and at least twenty years older, his face lined and his hair greying. He seemed somehow in sharper focus than any of our surroundings, although the desert around us was far from blurry. He narrowed his eyes as he drew near, and nodded towards the mountains that lay at the end of his path. 
 
 `` You're going the wrong way, you know.'' His voice had a trace of an accent. Eastern European? I opened my mouth to reply, but could n't get anything out. He smiled as he swept past me, not breaking his stride for a heartbeat. 
 
 `` You'll figure it out,'' he called back to me. `` I'll see you in the mountains when you do. Or beyond them, if you're slow.'' 
 
 When I woke that night, I resolved never to go back to that unearthly desert. I found websites talking about lucid dreaming - the art of remaining in full control during your dreams. It sounded a bit wishy-washy a lot of the time, but what did I have to lose? I tried all the exercises they set out, teaching myself to recognise when I was asleep, and how to take control without breaking that bubble-membrane of immersion and waking myself up. And in small steps I was astonished to find that it worked! If I found myself going about the shadows of routine daily chores in my sleep, I could shrug off the course my brain had set for me and do whatever I wanted. I flew, I walked through walls, I redeployed myself to anywhere I wanted. 
 
 A week after I finally cracked it, I found myself back in the desert. No problem I told myself. A blink of the eyes and I'll be in a jacuzzi under the stars, or anywhere else I wanted to be. 
 
 Blink. 
 
 Desert. 
 
 Blink. 
 
 Desert. 
 
 Blink, blink, BLINK! 
 
 Desert. 
 
 I woke up panting again. Whatever that place was, I could not control it, not the way I had wanted to. 
 
 The following night I resolved that if I could n't escape it, I would have to confront it after all. I found myself in a dream, in some confused hybrid of an elderly relative's house and a department store, and after gathering my nerve, I blinked and took myself to the desert. 
 
 The mountains were there before me, as they always were. And this time, I walked *towards* them. Maybe if I confronted whatever waited there, I could be free of it. Or failing that, find that man who had passed me on the road, make him explain. The irrationality of that thought did n't occur to me. In the wash of dream-logic, it seemed to make perfect sense. 
 
 Frustrated with my progress, I tried to blink myself further along the road. Of course, nothing happened. That was n't how things worked here. I was growing increasingly sure that this was n't a dream. Not really. Not quite, anyway. The man who had passed me, he was like me. Another dreamer, in this place beyond dreaming. Whatever progress I made here I had to earn, one step after another. 
 
 I was almost at the mountains when I awoke. 
 
 The next night, as soon as I was asleep, I willed myself back to where I had left - only to find myself back again in the middle of the desert, facing those towering, foreboding, and above all *distant* mountains! I could have screamed with the frustration of it. 
 
 The same thing happened again, and again. I could n't make any damnable progress! 
 
 The desert and the mountains, the man who had gone before me, they all began to haunt my waking life as much as my sleep. I scoured the internet for anything that looked similar to those peaks, but could n't find anything. Convinced now that the man was a real person, a dreamer sharing my dream and not a part of it, I tried to search for him. But what could I search? European dream walker? I was left staring at a Facebook search bar, with no clue what to write. 
 
 I stayed awake for two days, so that I could sleep the longer. I made it into the foothills before I woke. 
 
 I stayed awake for three days, and talked a doctor into writing me a prescription for sleeping pills. I made it halfway up the mountain's slopes, that night. 
 
 Growing frantic with desperation, I noticed a warning on the sleeping pill bottle. Do not consume with alcohol. I read the instructions ten times over, trying to talk myself out of it. If alcohol made the pills more effective, maybe I could finally crest those mountains... but it would n't be safe. People died that way. No. I would n't. I could n't. 
 
 I did. Not right away. I tried again and again, everything I could think of. But nothing worked. I'd lost my job by this point, unable to focus. The only thing that mattered to me was getting through those accursed mountains, and freeing myself from this torment. I would get there. I would find the dream walker, and I would end this puzzle for good. 
 
 That night I finally reached the top of the mountain. And there, over the crest, I looked down on an entirely new vista. On the far side of the mountains stood a city, dark and shadowed. Whatever was calling to me was down there. A tower stood in the centre, and I knew that was my destination. 
 
 The image of the tower stayed with me even as I felt the edges of the dream tugged almost to breaking. Something was happening - something outside the dream. My body was being moved, I was dimly aware. Strong hands gently lifting me. I did n't care. It did n't matter. 
 
 I set forward towards the tower that awaited me, oblivious to the frantic actions of the paramedics.
