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He was lying in bed, covered in sweat.

Light poured in through his eyes and flooded his mind.

He was awake…

…It was awful.

Slowly, painfully, he rose from the bed and peeled the drenched sheets from his skin. He forced his aching muscles to cause his legs to move, to propel him forward and into the bathroom. Halfway there, he changed his mind and turned around.

The light is just too damn bright in there, he thought. I’d rather hold it in.

Stumbling through the hallway and into the kitchen required much more effort than he was accustomed to. Moving through the dreaming was so much easier than actually walking around. There was nothing to it. You just point yourself in a direction and will to move, and if the dream allowed you to, you’d move.

Out here, you actually had to find the agility to operate your heavy limbs. It was much too difficult.

Even if it meant he might end up in another nightmare, he would rather be asleep.

He chuckled to himself. Why should he care? The nightmares were never his. It’s not like it was his psyche being damaged, it was somebody else’s. Let them pay for the therapy, he was only along for the ride.

Drinking coffee was no easy task, either. He had trouble gripping the cup effectively without it almost slipping from his fingers. And he had to be extremely careful bringing the cup to his lips; it took him a full three- and-a-half minutes just to master the hand-to-eye coordination necessary for the maneuver.

And cigarettes tasted better in dreams, too. Dream tobacco wasn’t even bad for you. You could dream ten packs a day and not develop a single cough.

He chuckled to himself again.

His chest ached as he did this.

I should eat something, he thought. The doctor said my malnutrition was severe, I should take care of myself or I could die. (As if that would be worse than being awake like this.) Where are those aspirin?

He clumsily fumbled through the cabinets. Bottles slipped from his hands and fell to the floor when he tried to grab them. One bottle managed to shatter upon impact, spilling its contents all over the kitchen.

Good, he thought, now I don’t have to mess with the child-proof cap.

He clumsily grabbed a handful of whatever they were and gulped them down, followed three-and-a-half minutes later by a wobbly cup of spilling coffee.

“I hope those were valium,” he muttered aloud.

The sound of his own voice rattled loudly through his head and made him wince in pain.

He tottered into the living room and dropped down onto the couch. With great effort, he lifted his legs up and sat back in a reclining position.

He took a shallow breath and released a pensive sigh.

He hated being awake.

Moreover, he hated being alive.

Nothing he had felt for the last two years had been real. Every thought, every emotion, every experience had been imagined. And what was worse, it wasn’t even taking place in his own mind.

It was in other people’s dreams.

Maybe that’s my nightmare, he thought. Maybe I do have nightmares after all, and this one never ends. I’m in a coma in a hospital somewhere and this is one long, exhausting dream.

But he knew that wasn’t true. Being awake was too painfully real for him to imagine. His eyes were burning from the dim incandescent lamp across the room. The smell of his cigarette tortured his nostrils. Its heat seared his fingertips. The muscles in his chest struggled to push the stale air from his lungs and fought even harder to draw more back in again.

He could feel himself relaxing again. The small journey from the bedroom to the kitchen to here had taken away whatever strength his body had cruelly pretended to have. Soon he would sleep again. Soon he would hitch a ride on a dream.

Why it happened, he didn’t know. It just happened. It had been happening for a couple of years now. Whenever he slept, he had other people’s dreams.

Or rather, he joined them.

And he never entered the same dream twice.

At first he thought they were his own dreams. But he had never had dreams before — not one in his entire life — and when they started happening it scared the hell out of him.

And although the dreams were never the same, there was one constant that was always there…

He was always a spectator.

After the first few weeks, he became aware that he was somehow leaving his own mind and entering someone else’s subconcious. It was like astral travel, or an out-of-body experience, something like that. He had read a few books on the subject back when he could still read.

His body was throbbing now. His body couldn’t stand the waking world. It coughed and shuddered and longed to be asleep. His mind cried out to be linked with another in a daydream.

Soon, he told himself.

It wasn’t always nice, however. He knew that. This last one, the girl’s dream… that was no delight. And the helplessness was the worst part.

What he despised most about nightmares was being trapped within them. Once he entered a dream, there was no way out until the dreamer awoke. And trying to interact was futile. He had very little power, very little control over any aspect of the dream other than his own presence. He could move around within the dream with ease, but he couldn’t travel far. He was always linked to the dreamer by an invisible thread.

He was a passenger and a prisoner.

But not all dreams where so bad.

The nightmares were few and far between compared to the routine dreams and recollections.

Sexual fantasies were his favorites. He only wished he wouldn’t ejaculate quite so much during them.

Occasionally the voyage was downright strange. People dreamed of animals that do not exist, talking creatures that should not talk, and experiences that human beings from this planet should not be having.

There are a lot of creative people out there, he thought. A lot of insane ones, too. It’s a shame I don’t have an imagination of my own.

His eyes were closed now. His entire body seemed heavy and comfortable, even in its aching condition. Sleep was waiting for him.

And he was ready.

He hoped the next dream would be a good one. He needed a break. He was feeling rather nauseous from the last one.

The nausea suddenly left him as quickly as it had come.

The sound of the air conditioner faded.

He exhaled–

There was a sharp twinge behind his eyes

As his mind and his soul

leapt upwards

…and he was gone.

His body went completely limp.