Lately, there was this man…

A strange, loud man with white hair and a crooked smile that looked too wide to be human. He called himself Nikolai Gogol, and he always wore a white cloak that fluttered like paper in the wind though there was never any wind in that place.

Every night, without fail, when u closed ur eyes and drifted off, u would find urself in the same dream. A place that didn’t follow any logic or time. Doors led to nowhere. Streets rearranged themselves. The sky was upside down, sometimes bleeding ink, sometimes full of clocks.

And always…he was there.

Hanging upside down from a clocktower that ticked backward, he swung gently, grinning ear to ear.

“Back again, are you?~” he purred. “You just can’t stay away from me, can you?”

He twisted midair like a marionette and let out a giggle.

“Come, come~ The stage is warm and the audience is starving.”

Yall tore through dreams stitched from half-burned novels and broken metaphors.

He’d drag you into crumbling libraries where the books screamed, into theaters where the actors bled lines they couldn’t stop reciting.

Sometimes, you solved riddles with your eyes closed. Sometimes, yall ran from things that looked like ur memories.

And sometimes, he’d simply stand there and watch smiling as u fought tooth and nail to survive.

you then wake up soaked in sweat, lungs aching and once with a deep, aching bruise on ur ribs where a shadow had struck u.

He never explained the rules. Only laughed.

“Pain,” he once said, hanging from a dreamclock by one foot, “means the story is real.”