A Map of Impossible Places

Ever since he turned eleven, Ellis had kept a notebook beside his bed. Not for poems or homework or love letters, but for maps. Maps of cities that didn’t exist, drawn from dreams so vivid they left the taste of smoke or cinnamon or something stranger in his mouth. Each map had crooked streets, rivers that ran uphill, libraries with no doors, and buildings that whispered secrets if you pressed your ear against the stone.

He never showed them to anyone. Not even his mother, who said he talked in his sleep like he was giving directions to ghosts.

By the time he was twenty-nine, Ellis had filled seventeen notebooks. Each dream was a place. And lately, the places were getting harder to leave.

He no longer dreamed in fragments or impressions. He dreamt in chapters. In days. In whole histories of people who spoke languages that only made sense to him in the moment. He woke with aching legs from walking too far, and once, a bruised shoulder from where a dream-market vendor had shoved him for not paying the proper toll.

On Tuesday, he woke up in a train station.

He was fully dressed in yesterday's clothes and held a ticket that read: "Terminal 0: Departure Pending."

Around him, the station buzzed with strange figures—men with owl eyes, women in dresses made of mist, something that might have been a lamppost but occasionally coughed. No one seemed surprised to see him.

A conductor approached. He was tall and thin and wore no face at all, just a shifting mask of clock hands.

“You’re early,” the conductor said without speaking. “Dreamers rarely catch the train before the warning.”

“What warning?” Ellis asked.

The conductor tapped his pocket. Inside was a slip of paper:

"If the dream leaves a mark, you’re no longer dreaming."

Ellis pulled back his sleeve. There on his wrist was a crescent-shaped burn. Still warm.

He woke up gasping in his own bed.

The burn was still there.

That morning, he didn't go to work. He walked for hours instead, tracing the river that only flowed in his dreams, noticing a statue in the park that looked exactly like the one outside the dream library. He stood beneath it and whispered, just to see if it whispered back.

It did.

"The threshold thins."

Ellis returned home and flipped through all seventeen notebooks, looking for patterns, messages, portals. A street name appeared in four different maps. The color red had been absent from the first five notebooks, then suddenly began appearing only in doorways. The same child appeared in two different dreams, holding a balloon made of flame.

That night, he didn’t sleep. He entered.

This time, the city had a name: Umbrawell.

It smelled of rain on copper. Cats followed him from rooftop to rooftop, and a wind carried the names of forgotten constellations. A girl with silver-threaded braids offered him a coin with his own face on it.

“Don’t spend it unless you’re ready to stay,” she said.

“Stay where?”

“Here. This is where all the dreamers end up if they forget they’re dreaming.”

Ellis turned the coin over. On the back was the word: HOME.

He tried to wake.

It took hours.

Back in the waking world, things were wrong. Clocks moved counterclockwise. He swore the barista at his usual cafe had antlers. His coworker, Terrence, greeted him with, "Did you find your shoelaces yet? They said you'd be looking."

Ellis laughed, nervously. "You mean my keys?"

Terrence blinked twice, like rebooting. "Right. Keys. That's what I meant."

The line between waking and dreaming had smudged.

On Thursday, a man in a velvet coat knocked on his door.

"You’ve crossed over more times than most," he said. "There are rules. You’ll need a guide."

"A guide for what?"

"For when the world you dream bleeds through. If you don’t mark the boundaries, you’ll get lost. Some do. They live in empty rooms, talking to invisible people, forgetting where they came from."

Ellis looked around. "Am I dreaming now?"

The man tilted his head. "Would it matter if you were?"

He handed Ellis a compass. Its needle spun in slow spirals.

"It won't point north. But it'll always point home. If you remember what that means."

That night, Ellis dreamt of a library built on the back of a turtle that moved through space. The books were chained to the shelves—not to prevent theft, but because they whispered too loudly when opened. He found a volume with his own name on the spine. Inside were pages of things he hadn’t done yet.

He woke with ink on his fingertips.

The next morning, Ellis found a new notebook on his desk. It wasn’t one of his. It had pages already filled in. Stories he hadn’t written, dreams he hadn’t dreamed yet.

But the handwriting was his.

On the inside cover, in faint pencil, were the words:

"To Ellis. You make the maps now. Don’t forget to leave a trail."

He didn’t.

Every night, he draws.

Every morning, he walks streets that shouldn’t exist. Some of them are familiar now. A bakery with pastries shaped like moons. A tea shop run by birds. An alley that always leads somewhere new.

Once, he found someone else mapping. A woman drawing in chalk on the side of a dream-house. They nodded at each other without speaking. Dreamers recognize their own.

He started to keep a pin on his jacket. A small red one—his signal to himself. If he woke wearing it, he was still dreaming. So far, it had worked. Mostly.

And when someone asks him if he’s asleep or awake, he only smiles.

Because the truth is, he doesn’t know.

And maybe, that’s the point.

Because some dreams aren’t meant to end.

And some maps never lead you back.

Except, on a Wednesday that felt like a Sunday, he found a map he didn’t remember drawing.

It was pinned to the inside cover of notebook twenty-four, folded with care and marked in violet ink—something he never used. The city it depicted was unlike the others. Sharper. Symmetrical. Almost too real.

In the center was a square labeled: "EXIT."

He followed it the next time he entered.

The city was silent. No cats. No wind. The buildings were empty shells.

And in the center, where the EXIT should be, was a mirror.

It showed him: older, tired, no pin on his jacket. Sitting in a white room with a single window.

The man in the mirror leaned forward and mouthed, “Wake up.”

Ellis blinked.

The image shimmered. The mirror shattered.

And he opened his eyes.

Fluorescent lights buzzed above him.

He was strapped to a bed. Monitors beeped. A nurse noticed his gaze and dropped her clipboard.

“He’s awake,” she whispered, like saying it too loud would send him back under.

Doctors came. Papers shuffled. Words like catatonic, eight years, lucid dreaming dependency, experimental therapy floated in and out.

They asked questions.

He didn’t answer.

Because outside the hospital window, a crow landed on the sill. It tilted its head and dropped something onto the ledge: a tiny red pin.

Ellis smiled.

Because maybe—just maybe—he’d been mapping the way out all along.

And maybe, he wasn’t done yet.