This story is rooted in my real life. What you are reading is not pure fiction. To make it flow as a narrative, I allowed my imagination to fill in certain gaps and add depth where words alone felt insufficient. Still, the core of this experience is true. One day, when the time feels right, I will share the story exactly as it happened, without embellishment. For now, this is the closest I can come to expressing something that has lived inside me for a long time.

The Pattern

Every night, I fell asleep into another life.
Not dreams. Lives.
I woke up knowing how to fix machines I had never seen, missing people I had never met, grieving events that never happened to me. The emotions stayed after waking. Joy. Guilt. Fear.
I started writing everything down and that was when I noticed the pattern. The dreams followed continuity. Days passed. Decisions had consequences. Someone else was living forward while I slept.

The Silence

Then one night, it stopped.
No dream. No borrowed memories. Just darkness.
I woke up panicked, like someone had cut off oxygen. Throughout the day, I felt watched from inside my own thoughts. Memories surfaced that I knew were not mine but they were no longer arriving fresh. They felt abandoned.
That night, I heard a voice while half asleep. Not spoken aloud. Remembered.
It said, I cannot reach you anymore.

The Connection

I realized the dreams were never random. They were communications.
I focused before sleep, not on drifting off but on reaching inward. I followed the emotional residue left behind. Fear led to familiarity. Familiarity led to recognition.
I understood the truth then.
The other version of me was the original. I was the offshoot. A safer branch created to survive something they could not.
The dreams stopped because they were dying. And they needed me to remember everything so something of them could continue.

Lessons and Psychological Impact

This story explores identity fragmentation and dissociation. It reflects how the mind creates alternate selves to cope with trauma, loss, or unbearable reality. The dreams represent suppressed memories and unprocessed emotions surfacing indirectly.
The silence symbolizes avoidance. When we stop listening inward, the unresolved parts of us do not disappear. They weaken.
The lesson is that healing requires integration, not escape. Ignoring pain creates distance from oneself, while facing it allows continuity and meaning.

Psychologically, the story mirrors how people inherit emotional burdens from past versions of themselves and how growth begins when we acknowledge, rather than erase, who we were.