I was having this dream in which I was totally engrossed in eating some kind of steamed chocolate pudding drowned in lots and lots of thick chocolate-flavoured sauce. Slowly but surely it became too messy to handle  – it started spreading everywhere and sticking to everything. It was all over my hands, my chin, the sleeves of my jacket, my shirt, my trousers, you name it. It was in my hair, in my ears, up my nose. I could hardly breathe. It was sticking my fingers together – it was gluing them together in fact so that I no longer had hands but just a pair of seal-like flippers. I was flapping these flippers freakishly in some kind of slow-motion grotesque horror show, trying to scrape the super-sticky chocolate sauce from my eyes, nose and mouth. I was slowly but surely suffocating. The dream was starting to turn bad on me. It had started off OK but it had quickly turned very bad indeed.

I woke up choking, gasping for air. My lungs felt as if they were full of cold phlegm. Phlegm that had congealed into a solid mass. My lungs were full of dead man’s phlegm. I could vaguely see that my skin was covered in a fine penicillin mould; my whole body was green with it. My arms and legs were waving slowly to and fro like stands of seaweed. I was at the bottom of the sea, crabs nibbling at my pale, lifeless flesh. Shrimps played in my hair, which drifted languidly in the undersea currents. The weight of the sea above me was immense. I could feel it slowly but surely crushing me…

I woke up again. The last time it hadn’t been real. It had been a false start. The last time hadn’t been good but it hadn’t been real either. This time it was. After a few minutes of lying in bed I realized that the alarm on my phone hadn’t gone off and I had overslept. I was going to be late for work again. The first dream – not the dream about waking up – had been very real. It had been disturbingly real – I could still taste chocolate sauce in my mouth. Not very nice chocolate sauce mind you, but still. I wonder what that dream symbolized I thought, reluctant to get out of the bed. Perhaps the sticky pudding represented life, it occurred to me after a while, and because of my appalling uncontrollable greed it had all turned to shit. Everything had turned to shit.

As I drove to work later that morning I could feel my mood starting to dip. My analysis of my dream had been all too accurate, I realized. It had been right on the button. It had been too close to the truth for comfort – that was my life in a nutshell. Everything was always turning to shit for me and it was always my fault. It was my fault every time. A terrible feeling of demoralization swept through me then. What was the point, I wondered? I hated my bloody job and I was barely earning enough to cover the rent. The years rolled by relentlessly and nothing ever changed. What the hell am I doing with my life, I asked myself. What the hell am I doing this for?

Just as I was thinking this the alarm on my phone went off and I woke up for a third time. None of this was real, I realized. It was all just an iterative sequence. I was stuck in a therapy box reliving the bad bits of my life over and over again until the message I was supposed to learn finally sunk in…

After a while I remembered that the therapy box was a dream too. I was in the Husk World and nothing was real. If I tried very hard I could make it seem real for a while but then after a while everything would always revert back to some kind of out-of-focus shifting movement like a sea of dried-out grass stalks blowing this way and that in the wind. There was also a faint rustling noise coming from somewhere, sometimes louder, sometimes quieter. That’s all there was to the Husk World. It was a kind of minimalist affair. The Husk World was the worst of all possible worlds. To be a husk in the Husk World is the worst of all possible fates. The faint rustling sound was my own voice – it was trying to tell me something but it was impossible to know what. It was probably nothing important…