• He was smoking a cigarette, telling me about life in death because I had asked him if he believed in believing, “All matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration—we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There's no such thing as death. Life is but a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves. We are figments of our own and each other’s fantasies.” He told me, puffing out smoke and blowing it in perfect rings out and about my face. “When we ‘die’ we just wake up from a long dream, and you know how I know that?”

    I didn’t want to respond him because it looked like he had answer in mind and I didn’t think mine would be what he was looking for. I didn’t understand the world abstractly, and I was much more nearsighted than him.

    I saw him through the shadows and he was smiling, in a crooked way. In his eyes there were voids, swallowing their surroundings and digesting them with mouths of their own—digesting and gaining wisdom with each judging glance at his surroundings. Or was the world swallowing him? He didn’t look like himself; his face kept shifting and changing with the shadows, like he was in a fun-house mirror. I thought I was seeing him for the first time for what he was but I was really just seeing myself in him for once. The thought made me nauseous and I looked away, not wanting to see the wrong in myself any longer.

    “Because we dream in black and white and all I’ve seen here is just that. Color is too complex for our brains to conceive in a dream… this must be a dream.” At that he laughed, and I found myself looking at him again, in awe, watching the darkness play on his white face, which twisted and shifted in the shadows of the undeveloped darkness. “We live in a monochromatic world, confined to our own imagination and memory, in a dream. In life, all we see are others’ lies and the great expanse of shared reality.

    “Every lie and every reality is a different color, a shard of some bigger rainbow of lies. But you know, no dream lies, there are no colors. There is no one else but yourself and what you know. I believe in dreams, and so do you, because we believe in ourselves, because that’s all we can believe.

    “But I’m getting sick of the truth. I want to see colors, I want to see lies, I want to believe in deception, because there is beauty in it, and there is knowledge in it. I don’t want to reflect myself, I want to cast shadows.

    “We live and we dream. I’ve dreamt all my life and lived in my dreams and now all I want to do is see the world. I’ve not got much longer on this Earth, and I want to try something new, but I might as well make the best of what I’m offered, and stop hiding in my own thoughts, using my dreams as a smokescreen or a monochromatic mirror to conceal myself behind.” Smoke seeped out of his pores, strangling me with spider-like, pale fingers, and he continued to laugh, as if amused by a joke that would have to be experienced to be understood. He understood, he always understood.

    He took a long drag and extinguished the dwindling embers on his faded grey jeans, burning the worn denim that had seen so many cinders before. Light died with it, and so did he, the words ‘I will imagine my own life and yours, now with color’ on his pallid lips and a gun I had seen too many times before in his hand.

    I woke up coughing, with a bang, seeing red.

    He was sitting in front of me telling me I must have had a nightmare, and I asked him if it was not so much a nightmare, but a shade of reality. He said that since dreams were a reflection of reality without the color, you could see what was a lie and what was real, and maybe I was seeing a lie and I just didn’t know it. He said that the trick to living was knowing the difference between the two—one had venom and the other was benign, and you just had to know what to believe in believing.

    Still perplexed, I asked him what he believed in believing. He remembered a dream he had about living through dying, and that he believed in that because dreams don’t lie if you know it for what it is, dreams are all laid out in black and white, and he knew what was real and what was fake. He was contradicting himself but I guess it made sense to him because he was laughing again, because he understood it.

    He lit a cigarette; I saw red embers.