I wake up screaming but I’m still asleep inside the nightmare,
the bedroom walls are breathing and the shadows have developed teeth.
My hands are someone else’s hands doing things I can’t control.
The mirror shows a face that used to be mine
before it learned to split.
I run down corridors that fold back on themselves like intestines.
Every door I open leads to rooms I’ve never seen
but somehow recognize
from memories that aren’t mine or maybe are from lives I haven’t lived yet.
And there’s something following that sounds like my voice calling my name wrong.
This is the terror that lives beneath sleep,
where physics breaks and logic bleeds,
where you’re awake inside the dreaming
and the dreaming won’t release its teeth.
You can’t scream yourself free from this,
can’t wake up when waking is the trick,
just falling deeper into layers
where the nightmare builds its architecture thick.
The thing that wears my mother’s shape keeps asking me to come closer.
Her mouth opens too wide and there’s another mouth inside that one,
speaking in frequencies that make my bones vibrate wrong,
telling me things about myself that I’ve spent years trying to forget.
I’m in my childhood home but all the rooms are wrong.
The kitchen leads to basements that descend forever into wet darkness
where something waits that knows my name from before I had a name.
And it’s been patient it’s been counting down the years until I’d return.
My teeth fall out in handfuls but they keep growing back as something else,
as keys or insects or small accusations that crawl away across the floor.
And everyone I’ve ever loved is here but they’re all slightly wrong,
their eyes don’t blink in sync their smiles extend past where faces should end.
I try to tell them this isn’t real but my tongue has turned to meat
that won’t form words just makes sounds like drowning.
And they all laugh in perfect unison while reaching out to touch me
with fingers that multiply the closer that they get to skin.
This is the terror that lives beneath sleep,
where physics breaks and logic bleeds,
where you’re awake inside the dreaming
and the dreaming won’t release its teeth.
You can’t scream yourself free from this,
can’t wake up when waking is the trick,
just falling deeper into layers
where the nightmare builds its architecture thick.
Then I wake up for real this time or maybe not I can’t be sure,
the bedroom looks correct but something’s off about the morning light.
And I’m afraid to check the mirror afraid of what might check me back,
afraid the nightmare never ended just learned to look like waking life.