I know well what lies beyond my sleeping refuge, the nightmare I build my own world to escape

b a c k

In my field of paper flowers
And candy clouds of lullaby,
I lie inside myself for hours
And watch my purple sky fly over me

1 - ago - 2026

I was on some kind of mission in a place I don't know, inside some tunnels. Everything was made of unbreakable stone except for certain spots you had to discover. It looked like a normal building wall, but there was one part that could be broken through, almost as if it had been filled with dried-out plaster or something, and it broke easily. Kind of Backrooms-ish, I guess. There were several of us. A girl had gotten lost.

I kept receiving messages telling me to get to work and answer the orders for the shirts, because apparently nothing was an excuse. Some woman wanted shirts for three schools.

We started chipping away at a wall and heard some of the people who were missing on the other side. We knocked that section down and made a hole between the two sides. My clothes dresser was there—the one my mom had bought for my baby clothes, which I use nowadays. We had to start passing clothes through, and it was as if zombies were grabbing the clothes and passing them to us from their side. In the end, we had to get our people back, and when one of my teammates, Nate, seemed to manage to grab one of them, something happened to him and he couldn't save him.

Then we were at my house with all of them. There was this guy I didn't know, but apparently I used to have sex with him and had stopped. He was leaving through the back door, and I told another girl that I was now having sex with someone else and that now I could actually finish, unlike years ago, basically mocking him.

I was in my room trying to sleep, with the door open. A brunette girl and that fucking guy who seemed possessed—Nate—started having sex right in the doorway, lying down somewhere I couldn't quite tell where. I don't know what exactly happened, but somehow I could FEEL him finishing inside her, and I heard him say, "You could be my daughter," implying that he was actually much older than the original Nate. Then he said he was going to father eight children with her and five [the numbers were weird/inconsistent], implying that she had been contaminated. She ran into the dining room in panic, and he followed her. I grabbed my phone and ran.

I went to open the kitchen door that leads to the back patio—the door right next to my bedroom door—and he was approaching me slowly, almost pausing between steps, carrying a broom (???). It was as if moving was physically heavy for him.

I ran through the backyard and toward the front patio. There I thought, "Okay, I actually respected this one. That was fair," basically meaning that I respected this enemy because he was genuinely cruel no matter what. It felt like a memory, and I was running forward, but everything was moving slowly, as if movement itself had become heavy. In the middle of the front patio, an old man, apparently a doctor wearing a white lab coat, grabbed me and we struggled. He was completely calm. I don't think he even turned his head toward me when he grabbed me; he just kept looking somewhere else, as if he didn't even need to look at me, or as if he had that kind of arrogance. I reached the gate, and Nate arrived and the two of them started struggling with me, trying to drag me back inside. I managed to get out and ran toward the path on the right.

I ran away from the house and they followed me. They couldn't quite catch me, but they stayed very close, and once again their movements were heavy and slow. I went along the road, keeping to the path on the right. I passed through an area where there were people, trying to stay around them because I figured that if there were other people there, they wouldn't be able to grab me. Some areas were extremely dark because of all the trucks carrying cargo, while other parts, closer to the right-hand path, were completely white with fog and smoke. (I had dreamed about this foggy part once before, but it was around 7–8 a.m. in that dream, and I was coming back from the right-hand path toward home.)

I reached the right-hand path and went into a tunnel-like passage that led to a travel station. It was a long wall with an archway cut into it as an entrance. Part of the inside had no roof.

I hid beside the entrance to see if they would come in. They didn't. I went inside the station, thinking about going somewhere else to be safe. I was going to Quilmes, but I thought I should go farther away, somewhere like Lobos or something. I thought about how I'd left with only this phone (which doesn't have a SIM card or mobile data) and no money. But apparently I was calm because I had money in other accounts (???). I had no idea how I was supposed to use it, but whatever.

I ended up in some kind of hotel, where my mom came to visit me. She had just returned from a trip with my aunt. I told her she better not have gone back home with that guy. Basically, in the dream she was supposed to already know about Nate and know that she shouldn't go near the house. She told me Nate wasn't there anymore, that nobody was there.

I asked her to go to the little room so we could talk because I didn't want to discuss it in the dining room. The little room was like the front room of my house. She said she didn't want to stay there because it was cold, and I told her I would turn on the heater. (I got distracted and never did.)

Then we had to eat the food she had brought, although somehow a woman and her daughter had also helped prepare it, even though I had no idea who they were and they were just there in the living room. The woman had medium-brown skin, kind of like someone from northern Argentina, but she was very thin. They were sitting there and looking upward, as if they didn't want to bother anyone.

We went to eat, and they turned on the heater underneath the table. I looked at the food and it was basically all fish, and I thought maybe the parasite could get into the food through the fish.

Suddenly I was back at home with my mom. It turned out that the place where we'd been eating at the hotel had the exact same layout as my dining room, connected to the front room in the same way, so it had basically turned directly into my house. I secretly went into my room, trying not to let them see me from the back because Nate was supposedly there. It was as if he couldn't enter the house.

My light was off. I started looking for things that would be useful to take with me. My guinea pig, Gordo, was there eating (the whole thing had shifted into the present day, as if it were August 1st). Then I looked through the window and saw Stella coming out of the house behind mine, talking on the phone. I mentally cursed her out because she was on his side.

I kept gathering things, but I started picking up a bunch of pens and MP3 players, and then I thought I should only take what was important. There was no reason to take everything. I was looking at something on my phone, scrolling through a TikTok or Instagram feed. Something happened with a post or a categorization that was somehow useful in real life, like it could actually modify something in reality. It was some kind of feature that existed IRL. It started loading, and my mom called me to eat, I think. I don't remember who else was there, but I kept thinking she shouldn't shout any louder because they might hear her from the back. I was completely focused on that feature.

I eventually went over, something happened with the heater, and I was thinking that maybe Nate could realize someone was in the house because of the heat coming from the chimney. (Except that chimney actually belongs to the house behind mine; I don't have one.)

What I hadn't thought about was staying at home with my mom as if there was still danger and I still needed to keep running, even though Nate couldn't enter the house anymore.

4 - jun - 2022

I was in the living room at home, but in the middle of it was the bed.
My bedroom (in the back) was exactly like when it belonged to my uncles: the old wooden shutter completely up, and the outside door wide open. (It’s one of those dreams where I have everything open in my room, and it annoys me not having privacy.)
There were people outside (family).

I was under the archway of the living room, and there was a guy (I don’t know who he was), but he kept getting closer to me. I kept moving from one spot to another, walking past him on purpose.
I was angry that he wasn’t touching me.

When he finally does, I see in the distance (through the window of my room, which was visible), that something comes out of my aunt’s house. It was tall (about 2 meters), skeletal, just skin, with no face, nothing (similar to "Bichi").

It was heading quickly in my direction.
The guy was no longer there.
I hide behind the curtain.
The "thing" approaches quickly, walking tilted to the side, as if its head was too heavy. It leans in, whispers something I can’t understand, and then I don’t see it anymore.

I don’t remember anything else.

16 - may - 2021

I was in a weird apartment. I was running away from something, not sure if it was "things" or people, but I always left behind a baby doll.
"It’s going to get mad," I thought.
"Nah, it’s just a doll," I also thought.

At one point, I was washing that baby doll in the kitchen sink, and it stabbed me with something like a screwdriver on the side of my neck.
I was calm, but I was starting to have trouble breathing. My eyes filled with blood. Everything was blurry.
I tried to grab a small nail scissors to stab the baby doll, but I couldn’t find it.

I woke up, lying on my back, with the part of my neck that had been stabbed by the baby completely numb.

05 - 03 - 2017

Before waking up around 6 a.m. on March 5th:
I was with Marito at home, in the backyard at night. We looked up at the sky and saw UFOs, and out of them came the Martians from Burton. We went inside. Only the kitchen light and my bedroom were on. My dad was sleeping with the TV on, and my mom was in Córdoba.
From the dining room came a Martian—I don’t remember how it died—and another one had taken the form of Sandy, my dog who feels like a sister.

I grabbed Sandy and brought her to my room so nothing would happen to her. Calmly, I went to tell my dad, “Dad, the Martians are here,” and he, half-asleep, just said, “Okay…” I told him I’d close the door and that she shouldn’t leave under any circumstances.

The Martian-Sandy kept hopping on and off the bed, pretending to be the real Sandy. I took it out. In the kitchen, I grabbed the usual serrated knife and stabbed the Martian-Sandy, then sawed at its neck until it came apart—I decapitated it. It didn’t resist.
I was terrified it might be the real Sandy. When I looked back at my room, my real Sandy was still on the bed. I calmed down a little, but seeing myself decapitate my dog was horrifying.
I gathered the pieces into a bag. A dark figure told me to go wash my hands, and it followed me.
I headed to the bathroom because I also had to pee, worried about my mom being in Córdoba and hoping everything was okay. I woke up needing to pee.

29 - 07 - 2013

I don’t remember why I had returned after running away from that place for so long. I don’t remember what I had done before passing through that door. I don’t know why I felt so good; I knew nothing. I only knew I was there again, walking down the hallway, passing classroom after classroom, until I reached the penultimate one—the classroom I should have been in months ago, the one I had abandoned. I was late, an hour or an hour and a half. Everything was so quiet, and that was strange. When I arrived, I observed each person I had shared all these years with.

Everything happened very quickly after I found myself inside those four faded, scribbled-on walls. It was as if something had possessed me, taking total control over me. Confusing, fast memories that weren’t easy to interpret, of things that happened in—I don’t know how much time—but at the same time, I knew it hadn’t been long. Yet, seeing the new decoration of that classroom brought me the biggest smile, the most genuine and happy smile I had ever had. Was there anything more beautiful than seeing all those people collapsed on the floor in puddles of blood? Only I remained, with a knife I had brought without even realizing I had it, and what was left of my former classmates. Was there anything better? In that moment, that’s what I felt: happiness, relief… I had lifted a huge weight off my shoulders, I didn’t need anything else. I walked, smiling, enjoying that moment, feeling things I shouldn’t—but without feeling even a bit of guilt. I didn’t control myself, but I was fulfilling the most hidden desire I had, a desire I had once thought about but dismissed as nonsense, or a mere absurd dream, something totally impossible.

Nothing was left. There was no reason to stay there. I had slipped into the bathroom, hiding in the last stall. I don’t know why, but I felt everything had been planned. I felt fully myself, but at the same time, I felt I wasn’t the one controlling my actions—I could only watch how far this force manipulating me would go. I eliminated something that had haunted my entire life. By this point, I had already begun the final part of everything; all that remained was to wait, only that—waiting to stop breathing to be completely happy.