always falling

‘You have to go off the cliff,’ the dream-speaker said. ‘We’re going to make you, and you know you can’t escape.’ The dream required me to escape and emerge back at the precipice, escape and be chased back there, escape and then turn around, understanding that I had to go off the cliff.

To go off the cliff meant an endless fall that always threatened to end. The rocks beneath grew nearer and then receded, then terrifyingly close and then distant again. And as I fell, the other dream-speakers were there as if waiting at vertical mileposts, there to mock and humiliate me and remind me of all the reasons I had to go off the cliff.

Hell, then.