Interlude: Dream Theater – Disconnected Perspective

At first, It was not darkness.

It was weight.

A heavy veil, pressing across the bones, across the eyelids, across everything that once carried the continents of the mind. The hum of the world faded. The light dissolved. Silence breathed. Pulsed. Waited.

Foggy faces arrived, one by one, slowly, then all at once.

Some smiled, some wept, some blurred at the edges, carved from smoke. A book opened itself in unseen hands. Sleep hovered on a train. A whisper brushed a neck. Movement turned away into fog, never far, never near.

It had no order, no mercy.

A kiss became a wound. A wound bloomed into a garden. A hand stretched, transformed into a wing. Laughter echoed hollow and endless.

Sense of time collapsed. Years, decades, notions of waiting—all dissolved into a single heartbeat. There was no before, no after. Only the weight of lived fragments, and the certainty that nothing—no eternity of silence, no false paradise—could erase them.

Beneath the fog, one truth lingered: Pain had been worth it.

Every scar a thread. Every loss a tether. Love—whatever shape it had taken—remained a compass that could not be broken.

Drifting deeper, memory and possibility merged.

Voices came next. Not words, just echoes. Laughter that might have been one, a sigh belonging to another, a low voice speaking—not to anyone, but through everything—memory pulling inward, resshaping the current.

Name came and went, a faint bell at the bottom of a well. Syllables stretched, melted, dissolved. A murmur without owner.

The body let go first. Limbs, lungs, each unfastening itself as though never needed. Thoughts unraveled. Drifted, like paper embers in the dark, until even the memory of fire was gone.

No I.

No she.

No witness at all.

Only the trace of something vast, faceless, a ripple in an ocean that distinguished nothing from nothing. Erasure was relief. Silence, so deep, it felt like light.

For an instant, fragments cracked like glass, scattering faces, voices, moments. Each spun into infinity, unmoored. Only faint awareness remained that something had once been.

And then even that dissolved.

Only the dream.

Deep slumber.

But even there something was present. Shapes that were much blurrier than the first ones, but which told a story in fragments. A story that was almost discernible but which escaped and dissolved when the restless mind tried to focus.

The shapes bled through—faces without weight, gestures without bodies. A tall shadow appeared, holding a tiny fire. The flame flickered, ridiculous and illuminating all. Fingers reached and dissolved, the fire slipped inside, where no heart beat.

A girl emerged, eyes like mirrors, lips moving without sound. An endless corridor stretched, doors opening into the same room: an unmade bed, a half-full glass, a presence just departed. The corridor folded in on itself. The girl remained, blurred into a constellation of tears, yet somehow content.

Twin rivers appeared next, flowing in opposite directions. Currents pulled toward light and shadow. Between them, the form stretched thin, caught in a wind of contradiction, torn apart and held together.

Voices hummed in unknown languages, understood without comprehension. Words of loss, joy, inevitability. A faceless choir sang inside skulls unowned. Each note a fragment, dissolving individuality into collections of memory, patterns only the dream could read.

In that moment, understanding did not arrive as thought. It pressed, as if the river of being itself bent around a single truth: death was an illusion, the return was the current and coin of the existence.

Dissolution happened. Boundaries blurred. Every love, every wound, every silence poured together, converging like water becoming water again.

Somewhere at the far edge of the expanse, shapes appeared, unclaimed by recognition: a man, a child, turning once as if waiting, and then vanishing into the sweep of absence.

The forest appeared without arrival. Trees stretched beyond measure, ribs of some enormous, sleeping thing. Light fell not in rays but in streams of green liquid, trickling and pooling, exhaling glass-breath. Within a clearing, a small body remained.

A girl. Tangled hair, bare feet, arms cradling a weight too great. A book, bound in dark leather, corners softened by uncounted touch. Pages glimmered with inner illumination.

Sound emerged, not language, not song—something older, bending around itself, twisting through air like branches in wind. The chant was lullaby and dirge, fragile and relentless. The forest held it. Leaves froze mid-shiver. Birds paused mid-flight, painted on invisible glass. Even form itself, felt here, moved with the rhythm of the voice.

Movement toward the child dissolved in resistance. Roots shifted underfoot like veins, alive, unwilling. Only observation remained.

Pages turned. Glow increased. Melodies fragmented into impossible syllables. Eyes vacant, inward-turned, holding depths beyond measure. Recognition and fear were indistinguishable currents.

Then eruption. Figures tumbled into the clearing. Pale, stricken, mouths forming urgent shapes. Urgency made meaningless, words untranslatable, a tremor across the surface of the scene. Hands stretched, grasping, shaking, human grief and fury entwined.

The chant persisted. Glow expanded, consuming moss, climbing trunks, illuminating voids. Light became scream, forest became glass.

Silence fractured the dream. Echoes halted mid-syllable. Figures blurred, mouths frozen in the last shape of warning. The book closed. Sound like a door, yet heavier.

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More heavier.

Falling happened. The image dissolved, evaporating like boiling water.

Liquid red replaced all: a desert not of sand but of fine dust, floating thick like diluted blood.

A child moved there. Thin, fragile, ribs etched into each breath. Cloudy eyes, forward-facing even without seeing, forward as if direction could preserve existence. Nothing accompanied him but his shadow, hesitant, wary, itself afraid.

The sky pressed. Rings, immense, impossible, slicing the horizon, bending the world. Silence stretched across red dust. Motion became awareness without awareness. Hunger, thirst, and flight existed without bodies to carry them. Time did not pass; only the movement of the small, alone figure, threading the alien expanse, persisted.

Each step pressed. The red dust clung, unwilling to release. The horizon folded in impossible angles, rings slicing open slowly, a sky that threatened yet only observed. Existence became the act of movement, and movement became the measure of consciousness itself—dissolving, yet continuing, a river without source or mouth, carrying what once was and what never could be known.

Above stretched a sky that was not a sky.

The small figure moved below. No eyes lifted to the sky, there was no need of it. No recognition passed between him and the rings. Only the movement, patieent, unbroken, pressing forward through the red dust that clung and clotted like spilled blood. Prints formed and vanished, the desert itself reclaiming shape from shape.

Shapes flickered in the rings. Shadows pacing on invisible bridges. Far, unnamable, but heavy with attention. The thin one listened not upward but inward, as if sound and earth were one. Breath became resonance, a bell toll submerged, rolling across dust and marrow and planetary bone.

The Observer—formless, unclaimed, unnamed over its dimesion—wanted to call, to pierce the veil of distance. Yet there was no body. No voice. Only seeing, only the awareness of seeing.

The small figure paused. A turn. The cloudy eyes mirrored light that came not from sun or sky but from the rings themselves. Hollow and endless, the gaze cut through the dream's fabric, through watcher and watched alike.

The desert shuddered. Dust spiraled upward, stones lifted, ground quivered. Rings flared, singing a metallic hum that vibrated in every particle of the scene. Breath of bell, pulse of universe.

A hand lifted, reaching—not toward anything, not toward anyone, yet somehow touching everything. And then—fracture.

The red dissolved into black. The thin figure scattered like ash. Rings shattered into shards of light, falling soundless. Echo of the bell lingered, pulsing in the void.

The scene folded, a page turning in a book that had never been opened yet somehow remembered.

Now a girl appeared, young, poised. Hair curled short, catching dim chandeliers in a grand ballroom. Polished floors reflected impossible heights. Air smelled of polish, perfume, of yesterday bleeding into memory.

Dancing. Movements elegant, ritualized, mechanical, yet filled with resonance. Held by a tall form, guided through a melody half-remembered, from a life unnamed.

Then—rupture. Gunshot. Light fractured, sound tore the air. Smiles froze. Eyes widened. Horror etched itself in lines that should not exist. Air thickened, music stopped mid-note. Form dissolved, shadow and hair and splintered light condensed and vanished, scorched from recollection.

Observation remained. Floating. Only awareness of falling fragments, echoes of light and sound, traces of movement that had been, and would not return.

The room dissolved. Figures stretched, thinned, turning to smoke, to dust. Air became a cold vacuum, and only the echo of a single instant remained—the crack of a gun, horror frozen in wide eyes, the fleeting brush of lives about to fracture.

It slipped away. Folded into another scene, another fragment, known and unknown at once.

The edge of the world appeared: restless sea, molten silver sky, wind carrying salt and memory. A girl moved upon the waves, weightless, each step stirring water into crescendos beneath her feet. Butterflies or moths shimmered, fragments of sunlight, shifting with impossible rhythm. They circled, guided, protected, even as the ocean churned.

Waves rose, alive and untamed, responding to motion that was both dance and surrender. She twirled, silver hair flying, steps tracing arcs in the storm. Beauty and peril merged. The first wave struck, then another, higher, wider, swallowing the horizon. She faltered, then rose, spinning, defying gravity that would not relent. The ocean gathered her, inexorable. Butterflies scattered, fragments of light lost to the tide.

Final movements became ritualistic, merging body and water. A fleeting smile lifted to the silver sky before waves consumed all. The sea roared; butterflies vanished into the storm. Observation hovered somewhere beyond the girl, beyond witness, knowing: not death, only surrender. Fragility and beauty dissolved in inevitability.

All rippled again. A figure emerged from haze, hair wild, posture twisted as if wind made of bones. Mouth opened—a howl tore through the dream, raw, aching, neither grief nor fury alone. The sound vibrated through every pulse of the observer, memory and chest alike.

Two smaller figures appeared, trembling. They ran—or drifted—through impossible liquid space, forms melting at edges, faces bleeding into red and gold swirls. Every step left streaks; the dream softened into flowing paint. Hands reached, yet dissolved, fingers slipping through color, until only memory of shape remained.

The air thickened, viscous with sorrow and rage, stretching, bending, folding into itself. Figures fragmented, merged, became currents in the liquid canvas. Presence persisted even as form vanished. Awareness floated, weightless, part of flow and observer simultaneously. Emotion, raw and persistent, left its imprint in the undulating, impossible dreamscape.

Ahead, two figures appeared. Impossible to name. Not human, yet not otherwise. They glided over tempestuous sea, grace effortless, presence unclaimed. Awareness followed without reaching, drifting along currents that had no beginning, no end—only motion, color, and the echo of what had been.

Waves crashed and foamed, yet the creatures moved as if the water were glass, bending and curving around them. Movements unfolded, fluid and unrestrained, a rhythm older than memory. Laughter—or something like it, a vibration carrying joy without sound—echoed across the churning waters, a current drawing the observer into orbit.

There was no fear. No tears, doubts or hesitation. Only motion, only the flow of bodies and water entwined, reckless and free. The desire to reach, to touch, only made edges fray, presence stretch thin, dissolve into the flow.

Understanding arrived without thought: these beings existed in a freedom long forgotten. Their joy was untethered, unbound by grief, memory, or consequence. Motion itself seemed alive, and in it the sea smiled.

For a moment, the current carried the observer beside them, lifted by the rhythm of a happiness never held. Then the dream blurred again, water darkening, swallowing shapes, until the laughter folded into the swell, echoing as if the ocean itself had learned to sing.

Release followed. Currents thick, luminous, ever-shifting, swept everything forward. Faces, places, memories, lives not fully owned—all flowed like tributaries joining a river unseen, yet always known. Voices sung in alien tongues, deserts stretched beneath impossible rings, wings beat and waves roared—merged into a single stream, indistinguishable from the water itself.

The observer ceased. Limbs, final thoughts, breath—dissolved. Floating weightless, untethered, slipping past moments touched and never remembered. Perhaps lives once known, perhaps others. Meaning was irrelevant in a river carrying infinity.

The river curved, deepened, pulling toward an unseen source. Darkness waited—immense, infinite, yet not empty. Within it, warmth pulsed, subtle and insistent, like an ember beneath ash, or a hand pressing gently against chest. Not sight, not sound, not touch—only resonance, telling presence: neither lost nor alone.

No resistance arose. No self remained, no fear, no desire to anchor in memory. Only river, only flow, only quiet surrender. Shapes, sounds, echoes disbanded. Time unraveled. Identity evaporated.

And in that place—beyond form, beyond life, beyond waking—the sleep claimed all completely. When the river ended, currents, lives, voices—all would be forgotten. Nothing would remain.

Only warmth persisted. A quiet pulse in the black, as if the universe itself cupped the Observer in its hand and whispered, Rest now. You have already lived. You have already loved.

Deeper still, the river embraced completely. Surrender was absolute. Presence no longer was.

***

Voices came.

"That was close," said a voice that sounded like a girl's.

"Sorry..." said another voice, but it was a boy's voice.

"It wasn't your fault. These fools can always fall further. Good you saw it though, Scotty."

"What should we do now?"

The girl's voice sighed, as if she were tired. And then her voice echoed, but with a tone that could not have been a child's. Cold, terrifying, and vehement.

"How long do you plan on sleeping?! Get your ass out of here!"

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