A man walks along a hallway, through a crooked path, narrower and deeper. 

No light penetrates into the place. It is pitch-dark. There is very little indication for you to know what time it is. It feels like you have lost your presence, only a couple of minutes into the walk. However, you shall discover the depth and the narrowness it holds. It is not that the hallway where you walk carries the depth, but that this hallway will bring out the deepest feelings in you. The greed, the sorrow—all that rules over the human psyche—will disappear; this place will exceed these sensations, pulsating into a situation where pain becomes beautiful and the realization of vanity is worthy. You grow closer to nothingness-absence becomes the only presence. Here, your mind is in control of the atoms that surround you. Imagination fails you; the surreal becomes the real.

A man ventures through the hallway.

His mind is full of thoughts. The walls he has persevered to create throughout his life cages him within. He thinks, “If I rule me, I cannot rule the world. Moreover, if I rule the world, I cannot rule me. I know I am a ruler—there is no disputing that. If I rule me, they say I am a loser, a coward—and my rule is undermined.  If I rule the outer world, I am well aware of my pretensions. There is no condition that will satisfy the outer world and my world. And there is no breaking the walls that separate these two worlds, because perhaps these walls have never existed. Perhaps the separation exists only within me, then. Does this mean that there is no possible way in which I can rule me? My own thoughts are contradicting.”

He crosses the hallway and reaches the city road, where he can see people moving, time moving. “Is it time that makes people move or is it people who make time move? Either way, this is just rubbish. I have to attend a seminar in less than an hour. If I become late, my career is finished.’

The road is dusty and misty. Every time the vehicles rush, clouds of dirt arise and dust surrounds the road. The trees aside the road look 

exceptional, not meant to be there, bizarre with the concrete and the city. The contradictions inhabit the city: the roads seem alive, but the trees are dead. The sky is clear, though. The navy blue canvas feels free and vast. A couple of clouds, here and there, seem to exist only because the people walking beneath them want to find some difference in the indifference of the sky.

 The man stops a taxi and says, “Can you take me to Gorakh road in about…twenty minutes? I will pay you more than is needed.” The driver replies, “If you want me to take you to a place an hour away in 20 minutes, I can agree, but I will not promise. Get in.” The man gets into the taxi as the driver says, “So, the work must be an important one, then.” 

“Yes, it is,” the man replies. But did he really utter those words? He feels déjà vu flowing through his veins. He feels some incident from his past hitting his brain, as if he has already lived through this before. Every part of this life is new, he knows, but his mind insisted that this had already happened. The man took out his phone and checks his schedule, making plans for the seminar in his head while the taxi driver drove past horns and dust. This taxi could collide into another any minute now. At the end of less than 25 minutes, the man reached his destination. He thanked the driver and paid an additional amount of money as he’d promised. Then, the driver went his own way and the man his own.

The sun is glaring and blazing, brighter than ever. The sky is clear and the roads are almost empty. Near the seminar hall, the man saw a huge mass of people and vehicles. When he got to the seminar, the man felt lighter, as if his dreams were becoming lighter. He knew what he had to do and he know how to do it. An aura of enthusiasm surrounded him. He approached the seminar hall with this very enthusiasm.

As he walked towards the hall, his feet give away. He feels the land tremble. The shaking is so vivid, so vivid. He knows what this is. People are hurrying out of the hall, out of the homes that surround it, out of offices, out of shops. The once empty roads are a stampede and the bulls are on their way, the bulls are on their way. The man is suspended in time, but then again, what is time, anyways? He becomes numb, wondering if he was dreaming, feeling vain within himself. Things were changing, but the man felt an even greater sense of the mundane that inhabited his mind. He contemplates his life, his career. The beauty lies in the struggle, he thinks to himself. All generalizations have stopped and there is no happening here-there is only the happened. His mind travels through a void where, once in a while, glimpses of his wife, his children, enter. This isn’t just hopelessness, he thinks to himself. This is more than that. There is a murderous malignancy here. “All I have ever cared about is erasing that stupid, stupid wall between me and the world. And now, the world agrees,” he says out aloud. 

I know what time is now. And I know whether people make time move or time makes people move…

The man wakes up from sleep and all he sees is darkness. The same void in which he saw glimpses of his wife and children, but the void is even more void-like this time. His body is pain, pressing, unconscious, until-

The man has died with his world. He lives no more, dreams no more, sees no more. And now, this man is God, an eternal power, a dream within a dream. We are simply but figments of his dream.