I slept in my own bed again that night, probably for the last time ever. I hadn’t even had the energy to return to the bar after sorting out stuff in my apartment after my late shift, so I’d sent Evelith a message that I wouldn’t see her that night. It was still a bit strange to use my phone for actual communication with humans, but I’d probably get used to it again. I was rather exhausted so after a minute or so I was asleep already, plagued by weird and confusing dreams yet again.

The first things I saw were screens from educomputer and school-programs, just like I had seen them as a kid, but now I could see they were blatantly telling me nonsense. Diagrams and meaningless words flowed into each others and blended together, and merged with the background to form a kaleidoscopic vortex. I closed my eyes but the patterns were still there behind my eyelids.

When the psychedelic chaos had cleared up, I stood in some kind of alien temple or maybe a town hall, surrounded by ancient robots who were getting me ready for my wedding. A robopriest in black had two rings, one for me and my bride, which wasn’t even a robo-wife but an oldfashioned semi-humanoid metal shape. ‘She’ hardly had a face and was much less human than Ol-H1-AZ even, but held my hand tight with 3 cold metal fingers and somehow expressed a scary hungry desire through ‘her’ LED-eyes. No words came out of my mouth when I tried to scream. I could hardly breathe the air of this in-between world, and certainly not fill my lungs with it. But willpower is a much more powerful thing than most people realise, so air or no air I screamed nonetheless when her face came closer to mine to ‘kiss’ me.

The robots completely ignored my scream and went on with the ceremony, while I called out from the top of my almost empty lungs to anyone who might be able to help me: Evelith, Leste, and even Berla, but nothing happened while the robot brought her face to mine, but everything dissolved and I found myself in a bar, dancing with Ylati, the strip-dander from the Ecstasy Nirvana who didn’t seem to like me at all in the real world. But this was a dreamworld where she was almost naked and where se also tried to kiss me. Again I screamed no!

She started mocking me for my refusal. I released myself from her arms, pushed her away and started running. The music in the background changed into a faster version of Lestes post-drum’n bass that completely made me go crazy. Could I use any of these doors? All signs here were written in a completely alien alphabet, so I had no idea what they said. The door I tried turned to be some kind of a portal, and there I found myself running through The City for endless ages. There was a soft rain, and everything was black and white, and sometimes even blurred by low-resolution snow as in an ancient TV. Every now and then the whole background flickered. I didn’t know anymore where I was going, or even what I was running from but I had to run on.

After lifetimes of running I bumped into the wall. An enormous wall that was higher than the highest building that I’d ever seen, with a strong force field blocking even the flow of air above it. I clearly couldn’t go further, but I just had to run, because ‘they’ would get me. This blocked my brain. Something was closing in on my and I couldn’t go anywhere. The city flickered, and my view changed several times from black and white to shades of grey and flashy colours, and suddenly I realised that I wasn’t alone. And that it was way too late to run now.

There she stood. The goddess Amaya herself, Acosmias sister, and exactly as portrayed in the statues. A naked inorganic body, black as empty space, armed with the spear that had just killed the personification of ‘the world of illusions’ in her left hand. She beckoned me with eyes that seemed to have black holes in the pupils. “Come and see the light of the darkness. There is nothing! Let go of all the illusions of life!” she whispered telepathically in my head without moving her lips.

I was both utterly terrified and deadly annoyed with this new development. What was up with all those stupid naked women in my dreams lately? And why did people even portray such a dark idea with a naked woman? Oh yes, I surely understood that people liked the female figure if they were attracted to women. I was theoretically attracted to women too. But the entity in front of me didn’t look like like someone one could be attracted to in a sexual way. To embrace her would be to surrender to a fate worse than dead, you could see that in her eyes. And yet the original statue of the form that had materialised here in front of me had clearly been made by someone with a lot of interest in female bodies who expected his viewers to do likewise. And she knew that, and even tried to use it on me somehow. I felt the sucking energy that tried to envelop me. I closed my eyes and tried to find an antidote for the incoming call of non-being to join me.

“Life is Reality! You are the lie!”.

My desperate scream rang hollow in this fake world. She came closer with a mocking look in her eyes, her arms open to embrace me; but for some reason stopped. I looked away from her, trying to think of something to do next but nothing came. She flickered a bit, and then we both stood in an empty space with no background, and she was gone. I let out a sigh of relief.

Suddenly Evelith stood next to me in a place that looked like the backspace of the Nirvana ecstasy. She wore a long red dress, and looked rather concerned. “You’re flickering and almost fading. You need to recharge!”. I fell into her arms, and wanted to cry that I was a human, but the world vanished before she could answer me and instead of sinking in her arms I sank into unpronounced dimensions of nothingness.

Time had no meaning, and neither had place. but after a while I noticed that I had arrived somewhere, so I opened my eyes and was not in my bed, but in another dreamworld. Grey aliens were dancing with the killerbots around a fire, but I could see silhouettes of trees in the background. A group of children came from behind the trees and zapped away all of the killerbots with some remote control device. The aliens ran away while the children took over the dance. They wore strange clothes, and had real flowers in their hair, both the girls and the boys. They made a circle around me and the fire and began to sing.

‘Kalmose! Kalmose’

‘Kalmose dirko!’

‘Vitlon jab vitlon jab elah.’

‘Mado far elahi, Mado jad elah-on’

‘Kame dirko, kame dirko’

‘elahi jab la, elahi jab la’

‘Vitlon jab vitlon jab la’

‘la-el mus vitlon! la-el mus wul vitlon’

I had no idea what they were singing, but it felt like their dance cleansed the place of all the negative energy. The leader of the children, a girl with long dark hair in a green dress, seemed familiar to me, and suddenly I realised that I had seen her in another dream, as the eldest kid of Berla. She looked at me and almost pierced me with her stare, and seemed to invite me to join the dance, but I couldn’t move my legs.

Their dance became wilder and wilder. I felt that I could move a bit so I tried to join them, but I was already fading away like a shadow in the intensifying light. Everything flickered around me until it went black.