False Awake

I first dreamed of the burning forest when I was eight.

The trees were tall and gnarled, their branches like clawed fingers tearing at the night sky. Fire danced along their bark, but they didn’t burn—they screamed. Faces twisted in the knots and rings; mouths open in agony. The air was heavy with ash that fell like snow, clinging to my skin and hair. I remember standing in the middle of it all, barefoot and unafraid, as the ground cracked open at my feet.

A voice rose from the flames and whispered my name:

“Lena.”

I woke up gasping. My sheets were soaked in sweat, and I found black soot under my fingernails.

My mother said I’d sleepwalked into the fireplace. But there hadn’t been a fire in months. The logs were cold, untouched. And I hadn’t gotten out of bed.

That was the first time I understood: my dreams weren’t just dreams. Something was wrong.

As I got older, the boundary between sleeping and waking blurred like wet ink. The dreams became more frequent, more vivid. Sometimes beautiful, like drifting above endless oceans or dancing with stars that hummed lullabies. But sometimes…

Sometimes I’d wake up with bruises. Scratches. A burn once, on my shoulder, in the shape of a handprint.

Doctors diagnosed me with parasomnia. Lucid dream disorder. They gave me pills that made the world soft and quiet, but even then, I’d see things. People in crowds who weren’t real. Hallways in my school that stretched too long. Sometimes, time would skip. I’d blink, and I’d be somewhere else. Hours lost.

I started keeping a dream journal to prove it wasn’t all in my head. I filled pages with details: names of people I’d never met, entire conversations, symbols drawn in chalk on crumbling walls. I wrote them down as soon as I woke up. Some were just fragments. Others… continued night after night like episodes of a show I couldn’t turn off.

And he was always there.

Mirror Man.

That’s what I called him. He had no name. Just a figure who stood inside mirrors, never speaking at first. Always watching. His suit was old-fashioned—charcoal gray, stitched like something out of the 1920s. His face was strange, wrong—not monstrous, just unsettlingly symmetrical. Eyes like silver coins. A smile that never reached them.

Eventually, he started to talk.

“You’re awake,” he’d say.

Not hello. Not who are you?

Just that: “You’re awake.”

It wasn’t until I was twenty-one that things truly broke.

I’d moved out by then, had a tiny apartment in the city and a job I barely held onto. No friends. No relationships. Who wants to hang out with the girl who forgets what day it is or stares too long into mirrors?

The dreams became more real than life. I’d walk through cities that didn’t exist, speak languages I didn’t know but somehow understood. My body began to forget what it felt like to rest. I slept eight hours, ten hours, sometimes twelve—and woke up exhausted.

Then one night, I followed Mirror Man.

It was the dream with the hallway again—endless mirrors on both sides, reflecting me infinitely. Only this time, he stepped forward.

“Do you want the truth, Lena?”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. My voice was gone.

“You already know it,” he continued, brushing soot from my shoulder. “This is the world your mind remembers. Not that place. Not that gray puppet show they convinced you to live in.”

His hand reached out—not through the glass, but from my side.

And I took it.

I woke up on the floor of my apartment. Blood on my lip. My mirror was shattered.

But I didn’t feel scared.

I felt awake.

And then the cracks started.

Not in the mirror—in the world.

I’d go to the grocery store and watch shelves rearrange themselves when I looked away. I’d pass people on the street and see their faces flicker, like static on a TV. Some days I’d sit in my apartment and hear conversations through the walls in languages I’d never learned. Sometimes they said my name. Once, I turned around and saw my reflection still facing away.

Reality was rotting at the edges. Or maybe it was never real to begin with.

One afternoon, I found a note in my dream journal.

It wasn’t mine.

Written in perfect cursive, it read:

“Stop denying it. This is your world. The other one was a cage.”

It wasn’t signed.

After that, I stopped taking my meds. I let myself drift deeper into dreams. They welcomed me like old friends. Mirror Man was always there, guiding me through places I swore I’d never seen before but felt carved into my bones.

There was a city made entirely of glass. A field of hourglasses, each one holding a memory I’d long forgotten. A library of silent books—when you opened them, they screamed.

In one dream, he showed me a tower with no doors.

“This is the place where the sleeping ones go,” he said. “The ones who choose to forget. You were one of them once.”

“Why me?” I asked.

He smiled. “Because you’re finally ready to remember.”

The next morning, I was reported missing.

Police broke into my apartment when I didn’t show up for work, didn’t answer my phone, didn’t respond to my mother’s calls. They found my place untouched—except the walls were covered in chalk drawings. Symbols. Maps. Equations no one understood.

My mirror was gone.

Shattered to dust.

Now?

Now I live in-between.

I walk the edges of both worlds, slipping through reflections, wandering through places where time doesn’t follow rules. Sometimes, I see people like you—dreamers still clinging to the waking world. You pass me on the street and never know it. Sometimes I try to whisper in your ear while you sleep.

Sometimes you even hear me.

“You’re awake.”

Maybe you’ll remember me. Maybe you won’t.

But if you start seeing cracks, if the faces around you begin to glitch, if your reflection moves differently than you do…

Don’t panic.

Just listen.

The dreams aren’t trying to hurt you. They’re trying to wake you up.

Because maybe you’ve been asleep this whole time, too.

THE END.