He did not know whether he was Zhou, who had dreamed of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he was Zhou.
…there are no certain indications by which we may clearly distinguish wakefulness from sleep...it is almost capable of persuading me that I now dream.
Is all that we see or seem; But a dream within a dream?
Perhaps you've seen it, maybe in a dream.
You may think it all a mere bad dream...
He jerked awake with a slight panic. A tower of empty soda cans avalanched off the side of the desk. The harsh light of afternoon glared through the cracks in the shut blinds. A disgusting musk hung heavy in the stagnant air. Once the clattering of cans had ended, only the crackling hum of a bonfire could be heard, playing on loop.
The man stretched his face and yawned as he removed the headphones, though they left impressions in his tangle of greasy black hair and around his ears. One eye closed again, then the other. He sighed and slid his body along the desk, blindly reaching for the fallen cans. Unfortunately, one had bounced some distance, so he grumbled and staggered to his feet. Drunkenly, he stumbled toward it and placed it with the others before looking back at the mess in disgrace.
"Been a since I did that…" he grumbled. "…messed up my played time."
One of his Chosen Undead waited on the screen, staring blankly into the distance. A mere hollow without a player to guide it. He quit the game and headed for the shower. He rarely remembered his dreams, but the fragments of a nightmare clung to him like the trail of drool on his cheek. A good, hot shower would wash away both.
Yet the warm water only aggravated the flashes of blood and fire that oppressed his mind. The steam cleared his lungs of the noxious air only to replace it with half-faded memories of a nightmare fog. He exited and buried his face in a towel, trying to wipe away the thoughts with the water. Fortunately, a buzzing came from the bedroom. He hastily wrapped himself and grabbed his phone.
"Hey. No, I didn't do anything today. I just got up. I don't know what you were expecting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh huh. Talk to you later, Mom."
He dressed but only returned to his seat. This late, all his online friends were on, but he didn't feel particularly talkative. The backlog in one of the rooms stretched into the hundreds, but just thinking of playing catchup made him tired again. He sighed and flipped open the dating app on his phone. No matches; no surprise.
By now, his stomach was growling, so he wandered into the kitchen and turned on the oven. While it preheated, he headed back to his usual spot. He was still groggy and didn't feel like playing anything that would require a whole lot of effort. Plus, he'd be eating a pizza in half an hour or so, so he couldn't get wrapped up in anything. He stared at the blank screen for several seconds before his phone buzzed.
A message on the dating app! He quickly swiped it open.
Username KillerLag wrote, "Pathetic. You don't amount to much by yourself, do you?"
He stopped reading there. She wasn't wrong, but he wasn't about to feed a troll. He looked at his unshaven reflection in the screen. He had nothing better to do before putting the pizza in.
"I'm living my life the way I like," he began typing.
He wasn't able to continue. That wasn't true, was it? He wanted more but never knew how to find it. He looked at his reflection again. The man sighed and headed to the bathroom to shave.
That done, he rubbed his smooth chin and put the pizza in the oven, glancing at the clock. Circling back to the bedroom for the umpteenth time, he realized there was no place to put the cooked pizza amidst the mess. He sighed and began cleaning. Oblivious to the passage of time, he did a quite thorough job in vain, as his pizza was blackened by the time he remembered to retrieve it. As he pondered what to do about breakfast-lunch-dinner, his phone buzzed again.
"Let's have lunch somewhere."
This was… strange. In the end, he hadn't responded to that first awful message. There were manga characters that were bad at communicating, but he'd never expected to see this level of tsundere past the 2D border. If this was a prank, it was a strange one. Still, he didhave nothing better to do, and he might as well go out for lunch.
He cleared the message he'd been typing and instead sent, "Yeah, sure. How about that Mexican place?"
The drive was mindless, and he'd soon arrived rather early. To his great surprise, KillerLag was already there. Even more surprising, she wasn't a fatty using old pictures from before putting on weight. Rather, she seemed quite out of his league: well-groomed, athletic, and quite a bit taller. Yet as they entered the restaurant, he realized that he was quite literally going to feed a troll.
Well, these dates made for interesting stories at least. He tiredly ordered a quesadilla, butas they began to talk, hefound quite a bit to discuss. They didn't have the same hobbies but rather the same fundamental interests; nothing in common but everything to talk about. They spoke feverishly, chatting into the wee hours… of new ideas, of the higher plane. Perception wavered.
"Quesadilla. My delicious Quesadilla."
Someone whispered, "No, we shall not abandon the dream."
He reached for his phone. It shouldn't have gotten late this quickly. His eyes fluttered with tiredness, and with each time they opened, the scene had changed subtly. Spiders skittered across the walls, and the light of the Paleblood Moon shone through the windows. Its keening reverberated through his head.
Lordran. Izalith. Anor Londo. Oolacile. Drangleic. Shulva. Brume. Eleum Loyce. Yharnam.
The man smirked.
"How did you like my world?"
"Is that how you thank someone for saving you?" Quelaag replied, unable to keep a straight face. "Just be glad spiders have plenty of eyes."
The restaurant's other customers ducked for cover as the armored man raised his claymore and pulled a trigger. He struck the blade against the table, and the thunder of a church bell shattered the world. All throughout the darkened labyrinth in which the pair found themselves, mirrors exploded with the force of the sound. At the end of the hall stood a pale man, eyes opened wide and unblinking as if in a trance. His head was encased in a tall iron cage that drooped slightly as he tilted it to one side.
"Ahh, Kos, or some say Kosm... Did you hear their prayers?"
"Kos is dead, you idiot! And not like in the usual Cthulhu way. Super dead. Ghost-Eating Technique level of perma-death. Incidentally, now I'm wondering what god-calamari tastes like."
The lunatic tried to run from the hunter pair, but the woman quickly ran up the innumerable bookshelves like stairs and vomited lava over his head, blocking his path. Unfazed, he raised his hands to invoke the gods, but another toll of the sword severed that connection and more, sending ripples throughout the world that was little more than the dream of a god. The walls and floors began to shift and rearrange, and the cultist made use of a newfound pathway to escape.
"My bad-!" the armored hunter started as he began after the scholar.
His partner stopped him.
"These people are all-too-eager to speak with the gods. They hardly care to their patron's nature."
"Uhh?"
"Shh. I hear my flock."
With that, the pair did follow their prey leisurely. They found him pinned to the ground, his pant legs full of bloody holes. The countless dog-sized spiders that infested the lower levels of the building surrounded him, waiting patiently. Some of them had human heads instead of arachnid ones, but they were hardly more cognizant than their brethren.
"Holy holy holy, our Queen," they muttered and bowed low to the hunter woman.
She gestured, and the spiders ascended the walls, using their silk to drag their victim up on his ruined legs.
"No, don't- don't move me!" he shrieked as he rose.
He suddenly fell silent as he saw a horse-sized creep overhead. It didn't move toward him but dropped a silken bundle atop the cage he wore. The sack burst, and countless baby spiders poured out, running through the bars.
"Oh no! No! Not the spiders! Not the spiders!"
He shrieked wildly as they ran over his face like a fluid.
"They're in my eyes! My eyes!"
Soon, he could take no more and faded into the nightmare fog.
"Huh," the hunter said solemnly. "So that's what it's like to be Kirk."