It always began the same way. With a breeze.
The air was soft, carrying the scent of bread baking somewhere close. The sky was always the right shade of blue, the kind that made you breathe deeper without knowing why.
The streets were calm and sun-washed, lined with cafés where laughter drifted like music. The food tasted better there. Fruit was sweeter, coffee never bitter, every meal made for comfort rather than survival. People smiled sincerely, as though kindness were the only language anyone had ever needed.
No one hurried. No one aged. Days moved gently and nights arrived like a warm hand on the shoulder. Everything belonged exactly where it was.
He was not dreaming. He was living.
Until, suddenly, he was not.
The alarm split the silence. The sky dissolved into the white of his ceiling and the smell of bread became the dry air of his apartment. He stared at the wall for a moment, waiting for something to confirm that the other world still existed.
Nothing came. Only the noise of a city too awake to care.
He got up, dressed, and stepped into his day. Emails, meetings, small talk, faces. But behind every action lived a single purpose: to reach the end of it, to lie down again, to cross back into the other universe.
For years, he did. He drifted between both worlds like a traveller without a map.
Then the dreams began to change. Some nights they came shorter, incomplete. Other nights nothing came at all, only a quiet dark where no breeze waited and no light called his name.
He told himself it was exhaustion, that he would find his way back. But the road between both worlds was fading, and part of him already knew it.
One morning he opened his eyes and felt nothing. No colours, no warmth, no familiar sky. The door had closed quietly, without announcement.
He stopped waiting. He began walking longer routes home, talking to people again, noticing things he had let go unnoticed. The sound of rain on a real window. The smell of coffee that was not perfect but honest. The way evening light fell across a wall he had looked at a hundred times without seeing.
Slowly, without his noticing exactly when, something shifted.
He understood that no escape is free and no dream lasts forever. But perhaps that is not the loss it seems. The dream had shown him what peace felt like, and now he knew what to look for in the life he had been trying to leave.
It was there, in smaller doses, in quieter moments, asking only for attention.
He no longer searched for doors each night before sleeping. He simply closed his eyes, carrying the other universe inside him now rather than running toward it.
It had always been a mirror, not a destination.