Yume Nikki Chapter 1

You are standing in a small room.
Without making the slightest sound, in this dim, lonely and small room......
You simply stand, absentmindedly, as if you have yet to learn how to move. 

With your childish braids.
With your clothes, that share the color of awfully fresh guts.
With your head down, making it hard to see your face.

You start to move your fingertips, slightly, as if you were trembling. You turn your head, the movement slow with fear. You take a few steps, walking awkwardly. Then, you look around you. Like a baby that was just born.

Soon, you start to investigate the room around you by yourself, gaining some confidence.
Approaching everything that catches your eye, feeling it, getting your face close, as if you wanted to ascertain its taste and smell.
It's as if you expected an impossibly amusing and interesting story to start here.
As if you were convinced that your actions would lead to some kind of reaction.

But even though you walk and move around, you don't have any influence on your surroundings. Nothing changes, as if it wasn't alive at all.

Isn't it just the same as if it were a dream?
Isn't it just the same as if it were empty?

You start to walk with new determination, set on finding something, some sort of purpose. You walk, and walk...
You look like an evil ghost obsessed with this small room.

Eventually, you come across a gla.s.s door that seems to lead out of here. As you stand in front of it, you keep glancing back at the room behind you, uncertain. Then, with some reluctance, you place your hand against the surface of the door.
And you walk through the smoothly-opening gla.s.s door, to the outside.

But--

This place is also empty.
It is just a cramped veranda that only leads back to the small room.
There is nothing. Not even plants where a little bird could rest its wings. It's completely deserted. Dead. 

There are barely any signs anyone ever resided here at all. There is only the bare minimum: a water pipe, the outdoor unit of the air conditioning and an empty planter, as if the previous inhabitant abruptly got up and ran away in fear one night, abandoning it all before he could have the chance to make anything of it.

You walk up to the handrail, and look back to the small room you were in just now. It's a tall but narrow apartment complex--or so it seems. It's hard to a.s.sess its height from where you're standing, and there is no other building in sight. In fact, there is nothing around at all.

A thick, mushy cloud hangs in the sky, near-impenetrable to the s.h.i.+ning glow of the moon. You finally seem to realize that this is not "outside". "Outside" is supposed to be bright and free, a world with so many things to look forward to... But this veranda looks like the mental scenery one would have when depressed. The clouds and the handrail create an enigmatic feeling of hopelessness, as if everything was detached from the outside world, closed off.

A sudden suffocating sensation rises up in your throat, and to get away from it, you run back into the room.

You have your eyes half closed, as if you were extremely bothered about there being a meaning to the room or not, or as if simply bored by it all.
The carpet has this strange, vivid design, like pieces of human flesh that had been torn and rest.i.tched together. You stare at that cheerful face on the carpet that appears to you to be sneering, as if you'd expected it to start a conversation. But of course, nothing happens.

Everything is full of nothingness.

An awfully old fas.h.i.+oned Braun tube TV. A game machine that could not even be used to idly waste one's time, with only one, extremely simple game. Cus.h.i.+ons, scattered thoughtlessly across the floor, though there were never any guests who would use them. A shelf with neatly-arranged books, just your height. Did you line them up yourself? But the dust is piling up, and the t.i.tles are blurred out and cannot be read.

A diary, placed over a simple desk that looks like it could just as well be part of an interrogation room.

And that awfully fascinating soft bed.

You wander towards the bed, but you find the door of the room on your way. Your movements are dull. It's as if you were afraid of something. You approach the door with difficulty, and touch it with your hand. Immediately you are overtaken with nausea, and you hang your head low, hopelessly shaking it.
You can't get out--or maybe you don't want to?

You head to the bed, your only remaining escape. There is nothing else to do in this lonely, boring room. So maybe, at least, you can find some freedom in the world of dreams. You crawl into the bed with the same clothes on your body, and pull the blankets up over your head.
Like this, you could s.h.i.+eld your eyes from everything.

--You fall asleep in just three seconds.