Lush green all around, so lively it seems just a dream. You could swear time does not flow here, but every day you see your face in the mirror and you know it is not true.
There are sounds all around, all the time – nature never sleeps and it lives every moment to the fullest – but it is quiet here. This is the kind of silence neither the hum of the ocean nor the organ music can quell. This silence is the sound of loneliness.
Everyone is dead; and even in life they all were but ghosts, like yourself. All of them long gone, withered away, slowly killed by their longing. You still live. And sometimes, only sometimes, when sleep does not want to come and when you can hear the silence even despite the music, you wonder why.
They did not know how to dream. You do.
…
Dreams are like snow: bright, sharp, cold. Sometimes you dream the sun and cannot help but hope that this time it would not happen, but then there is the endless field of white, again. It is not heaven – it is death, another one you have been looking for, another one that did not want to claim you.
You wake, because the loneliness of the dream is fresh, and thus it hurts more. Arms opened wide, you welcome the darkness. The darkness of the oceans' bottom: soft, liquid, comforting. Besides, you have always loved the sea.
...
You do not offer them friendship, nor kindness, no, none of that. Politeness is all you can manage. They are just strangers, after all.
And yet, you cannot let them leave. Not because of safety – who could endanger you and your companions? And not to keep your existence secret – who would believe such a story, anyway?
No, there is another reason. As long as these strangers are here, you are a scientist, committed to your research, and there is even someone to discuss it with – almost like a two-person university, and it even has one professor.
This is the dream you are trying to conjure every day. You are a scientist, a researcher, and there is no past whatsoever, only science. Science is predictable, safe. The dream helps, even if only for a while.
But as long as this delusion continues, you can pretend that has never happened.
...
You listen. You watch, unseen. You dream the dream of their lives, and it is a beautiful dream. Difficult, because their life is filled with work and because of all the obstacles and adversities they have to fight, but beautiful. A dream which brings your faith in people back.
You live near, almost next to them, invisible. You begin helping them, but still stay in hiding. It is only a dream, and the inexplicable can happen in dreams. For them it is life, so they keep searching for an explanation, and sometimes it seems to you they suspect something. But wherever they turn in their search, there is no-one there. After all, for them you are but a dream.
…
Death, the last dream. One you have imagined many times, but you have never guessed it would look like that.
Because you can, you share your life with them – secrets do no longer matter. You are the last one these secrets do mean something for, and you are dying.
Now, seen from afar, your whole life seems but a dream. No, not the whole. Somewhere, long ago, you remember the sun. It had been real. Somewhere, long ago… the coming spring melts the snows away, and her hair smells of May lilac. And that too had been real. Somewhere, long ago… two pairs of children's dark eyes are staring into yours, equally dark. And that also had been real.
The island was a dream, though a good one. And the sea was a dream. And so were endless fields of snow.
You close your eyes, for the last time, and you open them again for the first. You cannot see anything yet, because the light blinds you – it might be the sun. But you know it is real, and not a dream, for the air around you smells of lilac.
Captain Nemo (c) Jules Verne.