Dream of Another Ridiculous Man

insomnia had plagued him several times in the recent past. but none as torturous as this one. for it was accompanied by dreams. it was on one of those nights that he woke up in a frenzy only to realize he hadn't been sleeping. indeed for the past ten days. when i met him a week later he looked terrible in delirium. and even as he spoke of the dream, speaking in past tense, he never blinked once. it seemed as though he was still living the dream. here, now.
'it was a beautiful evening. the best i had seen for a long long time. the sun was just shy of winking from behind the horizon and everything seemed perfectly in place. i was even happy. almost insanely so. as if in a dream. and oh yes, this was dream. quite certainly it was'
he paused for a moment, a look of perplexity hanging on his face, before he continued, after discarding his momentary musing
'i was a walking back home when i suddenly felt the urge to eat. i wasn't hungry though. and so i stopped by at a bakery and asked for a pastry. and it was then, something happened. the sun vanished and dusk covered my earth. people turned first into silhouttes and then mere shadows. voices grew loud and more and more dissonant. but the sounds drowned in a chaotic hurry when i saw a dog emerging from a dark alleyway and approaching me. and when he reached me and was standing next to me there was absolute quietness. it was not as if the voices had faded away, rather it was as if there had been no sound in the past at all. and it was the most wretched and visually disturbing dog i had ever seen. he had his tongue stuck out and wagging in hopeless desperation. i was convinced that if i kicked and drove him away all the gloominess would dissapear and be replaced by a new dawn. but before i could do that i did the unthinkable.
i looked in his eyes. and a fear almost inexplicable in magnitude overcame me. i was more scared than even the time in my childhood when i had fever and dreamt of a growing ball of dough falling on my face. more scared than the thought of being caught in a cyclone. for he had deep yellowish eyes. it had everything i had imagined sadness to be. a galaxy of melancholy shrunk in a finite blob of white. and i was afraid it would rupture through the yellow lines and a white scum would start seeping out from it. nothing of that sort happened though. something worse did. a thought occured to me. 'what if we were reborn as dogs?' a cold chill run through my spine. i knew it was time to wake up. but i found myself helpless. i was enslaved by my dream, by my own spiteful morbidity.
i always knew i was my own death. the horrible finally happened. i could evn call it funny. only, i didn't feel like laughing. in fact i couldn't. for now i was standing on the other side with my tongue stuck out and wagging in hopeless desperation. it seemed to have grown unusually long and thin. and the pastry that i'd held in my hand uptil now was in someone else's - my kid sister phoebe's.'
this quite shocked me, but i let his possessed self coninue
'then i knew that i never should've done it. that we were born with no purpose. no fate forms our structure and no premonition tampers its constitution. that we were born merely to live and no more. nor less. but it was too late. because now she was kicking me mercilessly driving me away in a fit of rage even as i tried to tell her in what came out more as stifled cough than a bark that it's me phoebe, me, your own brother, the very one who saved all his chocolates for months only so he could share it with you and the one time that he did have it how the overwhelming guilt almost killed him. but when i saw the look of remorseless disdain in her i fathomed the futility of it all. and so once again i found myself retreating from it all, turned a blind eye to all the splendidness of the world to find refuge in the silent corner of my origin, the solitude of the dark alleyway from where i'd emerged.'
for two complete minutes there was silence. then i decided to break it.
'but your sister's name is not phoebe' i said.
he looked at me in confusion and all around the room, startled.
'oh' he chuckled, 'no wonder.'