All my dreams feel real.
So vivid, so precise,
I cannot tell
whether I am waking,
or wandering through some secret doorway.

Everything is perfect,
one to one,
every color the exact hue it should be,
every shadow falling just as it does
in the world I call my own.

It’s like Inception,
where I can’t tell what’s real
and you’re still here,
and everything is perfect.
I hold onto it because I want to believe
this is the world we belong to.

Sometimes,
even within the dream,
I ask myself aloud:
Is this real?
Am I dreaming?
And some soft voice,
sometimes mine, sometimes not,
answers quietly:
Does it matter?

Because in those moments,
the sky holds its breath for me.
The ground feels no different beneath my feet.
The faces I meet
smile as if they’ve known me always.

But toward the end,
when the dream begins to unravel,
the walls grow thin,
and I feel it slipping
all of it
you, the light, the warmth.
I lose everything.
And somehow it hurts even more
when I wake up

I wake
carrying fragments
a street I’ve never walked,
a scent that fades too fast,
the echo of my own voice
saying things I didn’t know I needed to hear.

What is real, after all,
but the places our hearts linger,
and the worlds we can’t quite leave behind
when morning comes.