What will you do when you wake?

I have always lived in the narrow rhythm of routine. Mornings began with the same alarm, the same hurried breakfast, the same mechanical greetings. My life was not broken, yet it never felt whole either. Like a book stuck open in the middle, pages stiff with dust, waiting for a reader who had forgotten it on the shelf.

Lately, something had shifted. At night, my dreams no longer scattered into fragments by morning. Instead, they lingered. They clung to me like smoke in my hair, leaving behind images sharper than anything I experienced in waking life. I could still smell the rain from a dream hours after waking. I could remember conversations with people who did not exist, but whose words would not leave me.

Curiosity led me to lucid dreaming. Guides said: count your fingers, watch clocks, spot the impossible. But for me, the awareness came uninvited like a whisper from a place I hadn’t agreed to visit.

One night, I stood in a hallway I had never seen before. Its pale walls shimmered as though painted with light. Ahead was something that resembled a door, though it shifted square, round, arched as if it could not decide what it wanted to be. I knew instantly I was dreaming. More than that, I knew I had a choice.

My hand hovered over the flickering outline. Fear swelled: what if stepping through meant losing myself? What if I woke and forgot? Then a thought surfaced, simple and clear: The fear is the threshold.

The door pulsed. I pushed it open.

I did not enter a room but a memory. A classroom desk, scarred with doodles. My younger self sat there, scribbling dragons in the margins of a math book. He looked up at me, eyes wide and certain.

“You left me behind,” he said not accusing, just naming a truth.

“I had to,” I whispered. “I grew up. I had responsibilities.”

He shook his head. “No. You chose walls that didn’t exist. You forgot the door.”

Before I could reply, the scene dissolved. The hallway returned, longer now, stretching into endlessness. More outlines shimmered along its walls, waiting.

I entered another.

This time I stood in a crowded street. People rushed past, shoulders colliding, voices crashing into one another. From the swarm emerged another version of me older, exhausted, arms heavy with papers threatening to fall. His eyes darted, desperate for approval.

“Keep moving,” he barked. “If you stop, you fall behind. If you fall behind, you disappear.”

I felt his panic because I had lived it measuring worth by speed, fearing that stillness meant failure. But I remembered the child at the desk, unafraid of time.

“You’re not wrong to move,” I told him softly. “But you’ve forgotten why you’re moving at all.”

The older me froze. The papers slipped from his hands, scattering into the air like feathers. His shoulders eased for the first time, and the street dissolved.

Back in the hallway, I faced another door. Heavier. Darker. My hand trembled as I pressed against it.

Inside was silence, thick and damp. A small room with no windows, only the sound of dripping water. In the corner, yet another version of me sat curled, knees to chest. His body shook with fear.

I knew him too well the part of me that hesitated endlessly, waiting for the perfect moment when risk would vanish.

I knelt beside him. “What are you waiting for?”

His lips trembled. “For the fear to end.”

The words pierced me. I had postponed so much in my life waiting for fear to leave new projects, confessions, even dreams. But in the clarity of the lucid dream, the truth was undeniable: fear does not end. It is the door itself.

“The way forward,” I whispered, “is not past the fear. It’s through it.”

For the first time, he lifted his head. His eyes were still wet, but there was something alive in them. He stood, pressed a trembling hand against the wall, and another glowing outline appeared. He stepped through, and the room dissolved.

When I returned to the hallway, I noticed something written faintly across the wall. A poem, glowing as if etched by thought itself:

the sudden urge to write about happiness

the yearn to think of it

you pause and ask yourself

am I happy? or only busy?

is happiness the loud laughter in company,

or the quiet sigh of a night well-lived?

is it a mountain reached, or a path wandered?

is it a prize, or is it permission?

question yourself: are you happy

or are you still waiting to be?

I read it again and again until the words carved themselves into me. Then the hallway shifted, revealing a final door.

Unlike the others, this one did not flicker. It stood clear and still, as if it had been waiting all along.

I stepped through and found myself in my own bedroom. Everything looked the same the desk, the unwashed cup, the lamp tilted at an awkward angle. But I was not awake. I was still dreaming.

On the bed sat… me. Not younger, not older, not broken, just myself as I was now. He looked at me with quiet eyes.

“So,” he said, “what will you do when you wake?”

I opened my mouth but stopped. For once, there was no script to follow, no habit to hide behind.

“I will remember the doors,” I said slowly. “I will remember that hesitation is a threshold. That fear is a signpost. That happiness is not waiting at the end of a road it is the courage to walk it. The choice is always mine.”

He nodded, satisfied. And with that, the dream dissolved.

When I opened my eyes, morning light had spilled across the same cluttered desk, the same tilted lamp. Nothing had changed, and yet everything had. I carried the dream like a thread in my chest.

The hidden door was never in the world outside. It had always been in me.

And now, I knew how to walk through.