In my dream, I found myself in an old, rambling, run-down Victorian house on a large, dark, windy field on top of a hill. There were other people living there, sometimes moving from room to room, but they all seemed to be inwardly-focused and isolated from each other.

As I moved around the house to see what it looked like, I discovered that certain outside windows were covered by sheets. I asked someone why they were covered, and they said that those windows looked out onto spaces where reality was broken.

The breaks seemed to be a very local phenomenon, because on some walls, one window would be covered and the others would not be.

I moved one of the sheets aside to look out a covered window, and indeed, I seemed to be seeing a space where the laws of physics no longer applied. It was hard to look at, and hard to interpret what I was seeing, sort of like something seen flittingly out of the corner of your eye. As I tried and failed to focus on the changing colors and the slowly moving cracks in space, I felt myself being drawn into it. It was taking over my perceptions and I was becoming unbalanced and disoriented, and I quickly let the sheet fall back against the window.

“If you look at that too long, you will go mad,” the person said. “And those areas outside the house are growing.”

“How do you get food?”, I asked.

“Some people are trying to make contact with the outside world. See that couple out there?” He pointed through an undraped window at an object about fifty yards away from the house. I looked into the twilight and, under a sky with low dark clouds scudding overhead, saw a structure that seemed to somehow be both a tent and a boat rocking in a stormy sea. “They’ve been moving farther away, further out, but sometimes the zones of instability sweep across them before retreating. Others have tried this before. And then this happens.” He pointed to a person in a room behind us. They were lying on a bed, catatonic, with their eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling and not moving.

I somehow felt myself attracted to the phenomenon, but still knew that it was more powerful than I. I thought it would be worthwhile and interesting to try to explore it, if I could avoid becoming completely untethered and lost in those spaces, unable to find my way back to this present reality.

And then my phone rang and woke me up.