Work Text:
The cursor blinked at him from the empty search bar. Blink, blink, blink—a steady rhythm.
Wifies could feel his fingers move as he typed:
how do I know if I'm dreaming
He added a question mark. He hit enter.
The results were the same as they'd been the night before. He was pretty sure none of them were lies. One link dubiously claimed instant success with lucid dreaming; another spoke about different kinds of psychosis. He hovered his mouse over that link and did not click… just as he'd done the night before.
Wifies blinked.
Time had moved on without him. He was in a discord call with Squiddo and didn't remember joining it. He didn't remember much these days, except when he remembered everything.
“And what?” Squiddo asked.
“What?”
“You stopped. You stopped speaking. What were you gonna say?”
“Oh.” Wifies frowned. “I don't know. Sorry.”
“No, that's alright.”
“Hey Squiddo?”
“Yeah bro?”
“Do you remember waking up?”
. . .
Pause. Take a moment. Listen. You're sitting at your desk in front of a screen, hands on your mouse and keyboard. But what if I told you…
It's all a lie.
Can't you feel the sun? Look around. It's a beautiful day. There's no body at a desk; your mind is here. This is more than a game.
This is real.
You can feel the sun.
You can feel the breeze on your skin.
Watch the grass and the wildflowers stir in the wind.
Listen to the birds.
Don't think about how there's no birds in the game;
there are if you only look.
Open your eyes.
OPEN YOUR EYES.
THIS IS REAL.
. . .
Wifies could remember falling asleep every night for the past three weeks, and every morning… he cannot find a single memory of ever waking up. He just finds himself living his life, going through the motions, eating breakfast or taking a shower or rushing to his morning classes…
He's got to be about twenty dreams deep. He's got to be dreaming. It's the only logical explanation.
His days go by in a blur. They mean nothing to him. He never feels fully present at any point. Sure, he's aware he's talking with classmates, he's grinding out homework, he spends time hanging out with friends. None of it feels real.
That's because it’s a dream. He'd figured that out by day four. Now, it was just a matter of proving it, and waking up.
He just wished he knew why playing Minecraft, of all things, made him feel… real.
And not the him that sits in the chair and controls a little blocky avatar. No. It's way, way weirder than that: it's like he… he enters the game, and it isn't a game anymore; he's in the Minecraft world and it's all real. It becomes his reality.
Three weeks ago was the last day he remembers waking up in the morning. That day, he and Squiddo had a recording scheduled for yet another sketchy horror mod that Squiddo had found in some obscure discord server—although this one hadn't been explicitly horror; it was based on an ARG that Wifies knew he was familiar with and now he couldn't remember.
It had been relatively tame. Nothing had tried to kill them. There had been no jumpscares. The only thing that had happened with the mod was a series of subtle, gradual changes to the world and the occasional message left on a sign, or flashed across the screen.
This is real.
It had been a little cheesy; a little cute. A solid attempt, and that's it.
Until… well.
Wifies knew, intellectually speaking, what dissociation was. That day had been his first personal experience.
Disconnect. Static in his body. Tinny ringing in his ears until he couldn't hear anything any more. Distant—everything was distant. He was distant from himself. He was disconnected. He wasn't in his body. He-
Sometimes, when he logged off for the night and laid in bed waiting to sleep in his dream, he wondered if he hadn't simply been dissociating through every day since. But that was far less logical than it all being a dream; for one, it didn't explain the…
the memory gaps…
Right?
Maybe the dream was just the safest option. Maybe he was too afraid to consider-
Was it real?