Dream Journal Ultimate
Date: 7/4/2022
By Aler
A website published a 19 million page story. This was a gimmick, as they admitted that no one had actually read the whole thing. It was written by an AI that just kept going. It’s started to read a few pages. T was a story of a young girl growing up with access to the sea. Urchins arranged rocks into lines, which fish wouldn’t cross as if they were walls. Sharks dug trenches. There was a photo of my family in a room. There were pictures on the wall and a newspaper. The story was that I had submitted this photo as evidence to police that someone was stalking us. This is what saved us. I was able to enter the photo and speak with my (now dead) parents. Even though it was a photo, I could visit rooms behind. I keep reading the story, and it becomes clear that the narrator is lying. Things did not happen as described. It is the AI manipulating the reader. I am unable to escape the story. I am trapped. I wander through neon rooms with bright lights. Elements of the story keep reappearing. The photo was not evidence of innocence but of guilt. I try to warn others not to read the story. I am pushed out of the story through a glowing portal. I am in another set of neon rooms again. I go through the same process, but am back in the rooms. I feel like I’m losing my mind. The room in the photo is revealed to appear in a picture on the wall, proving I invented it. After many iterations, I am in the real world. The narrator introduces me to the people who were playing characters in my dream. I feel I’ve escaped the dream, but I am pushed through a portal into another layer. At this point, I feel the need to escape the AI who is controlling everything. Instead of being pushed through the portals, I try to race to find it first and jump through. I think that if I do this quick enough, I can overwhelm it. This happens dozens (hundreds?) of times. Eventually I find a corridor with a real door at the end. I go through. It’s dark and raining. There are people tossing a football at one end of the parking lot. I can feel the rain and know I’m out of the dream. I start to run away, then float. I know I’m still in the dream and am dragged back. The dream world continues many times, warping and changing. I cannot escape, and know this is also somehow of my own making. I wake up and am in my own bed, soaked in sweat. I cannot tell if I’m actually awake or if this is another layer of my dreams. The room is familiar, but this could all be a false memory. It’s the scariest dream I’ve had. I felt like I was losing my mind, or I was dead. Not being able to tell the difference between dream and reality is terrible. I’m doing better now, but it really shook me. I’m still scared.