Awakening

I woke up. My breathing had quickened, and there was a strange tension in my body. Lying on my back in bed, I could feel the warmth of the pillow beneath my head. My eyes were fixed on the ceiling, and I remained still in the silence of the room for a while. My heart was racing, yet I couldn’t figure out why I felt so uneasy. I took a deep breath and turned my head to the right. My gaze landed on the seemingly empty nightstand. Then, suddenly, I remembered something.

My book… The Blue Feather. Yes, I had been reading it before falling asleep. I remembered holding it in my hand, flipping through its pages, and even the last sentence I read echoed in my mind: “This world and everything in it is an illusion.” That sentence seemed etched into my brain. But the strange part was, the book wasn’t in my hand. Blinking, I examined the nightstand. Where was the book? It should have been there because I had placed it there before going to bed. I could vividly recall the weight of it in my hand, the texture of the pages between my fingers. But now? The book was gone.

I paused for a moment and squeezed my eyes shut. With a deep sigh, I tried to pull myself together. Maybe I was dreaming. Slowly, I opened my eyes again, but the nightstand was still empty. It was as if the book had vanished. The mere thought of it unsettled me. How could it have disappeared? I smiled to myself, thinking it was absurd to entertain such a crazy thought. Yet the feeling that I was standing on the edge of madness lingered in the corners of my mind like a shadow.

I sat up. I ran my hand over the surface of the nightstand, thinking maybe my eyes were deceiving me. It wasn’t there. Everything was in its place, except for my book. A wave of unease surged within me. I took a deep breath, swung my legs over the edge of the bed, and stood up. The usual calm of my room seemed somehow disturbed. My eyes drifted to the clock on the wall. It was early in the morning; the sky hadn’t yet brightened. The faint light of the moon seeped through the curtains, casting a pale glow in the room.

Where could the book be? I asked myself again. It was such a simple question. After all, something either exists or it doesn’t, right? I bent down toward the edge of the bed and glanced under the nightstand. Nothing. Then, slowly, I crouched down and checked beneath the bed. Empty. The book couldn’t have just disappeared. There had to be some mistake; maybe I really forgot to put it back after reading and it had fallen somewhere.

With that thought, I began to take slow steps toward the corners of the room. There was a wave of unease filling the room, as if something was wrong, but I couldn’t quite figure out what it was. My eyes drifted toward the mirror on the wall. A slight shiver ran through me as I looked at my own reflection. The reflection was staring back at me, but something felt off. I looked the same as usual, yet I felt as if I were someone else. The person in the mirror was me, but that “me” felt hollow.

I took a deep breath and broke my gaze from the mirror, refocusing on the room. I returned to the nightstand. My hand grazed the surface as if somehow it would summon the book back. But it didn’t. The book was gone, and the realization of this was tearing something inside me apart.

I sat down and began to think. Maybe I was dreaming. Yes, that was probably it. I closed my eyes and imagined waking up. I hoped to find myself back in bed, holding the book. But when I opened my eyes, everything was the same. Here I was, trapped in reality. Or maybe I really was still dreaming and hadn’t woken up yet. But everything felt so real that it was hard to accept that it was a dream.

What is reality, though? That sentence from the book floated back into my mind: “This world and everything in it is an illusion.” So, could everything I was feeling here be an illusion? Could the sensation of holding the book have been an illusion, too? It had been so vivid—the weight, the texture of the paper. How could something I remembered so clearly be an illusion?

It felt as though a void was opening up in my mind. I had lost the line between dream and reality. Maybe everything was just a dream. This thought unsettled me even more. If I was dreaming, could I wake up? Or was this real? If it was real, why wasn’t the book there? If it was a dream, why did everything feel so solid and tangible?

I started pacing around the room. My steps grew quicker, and the tension inside me rose in waves. I grabbed my hair with my hands and squeezed my eyes shut. “This is just a dream,” I muttered to myself. “This is just a dream.” But when I opened my eyes again, everything was still the same. The book was still gone, everything in the room was in its place, but it felt as if I had disappeared completely.

For a moment, I listened to the silence. The room’s usual quietness enveloped me, but I couldn’t suppress the storm raging inside me. Even the silence now felt foreign to me. Maybe I was truly going mad. If I couldn’t even find where the book was, was I on the verge of losing my mind?

A growing sense of panic brought me back to the bed. My eyes landed on the nightstand again. It was as though seeing that the book wasn’t there over and over was giving me the same shock each time. It seemed like such a simple problem, but the depth of it was suffocating me. What is real? What is illusion? And most importantly, which one was I in?

As these questions kept spinning in my mind, the feeling of tightness inside me grew. I didn’t want to sleep. What if I woke up again? Or worse… what if I never woke up at all?