Maybe it’s the static you hear first or maybe you become aware of a faint, electronic haze. It’s the dull hum and blurry pixels of screens as one by one hundreds blink awake in the blackness that surrounds you. Some small like a cellphone or others massive like a billboard. They are incoherent at first, projecting nothing but a stuttering flickering mess of black and white until finally the feed starts. From an awkward angle Dr. Lee Rosen’s face looks out at you, frown set, the wrinkles of his forehead deep with determination. He’s recording his message from something small held within his hand. A camera pen. He begins to speak. Loudly. Firmly. And his message echoes in tandem from each screen, building and building in volume until at the last there is a violent shudder and the screens shatter and dissipate back into blackness.

The next time you become aware of yourself you will find yourself dressed in white hospital pajamas. You are behind bars in a sterile looking room of white walls, white sheets, and a small sliver of a window that looks out on a rec yard for your fellow inmates. Guards are posted along the fence and at the doors, and doctors weave their way through, taking notes now and again.

Welcome. You are now yet another inmate in the psych ward of a prison in upstate New York.

Now and again a nurse or a security guard might pass by. If you try and tell them you don’t belong here, that there’s been a mistake, they will most likely pass by as if they didn’t hear you. Or perhaps they will pause only to tell you that it’s all in your head and to remind you that your mandatory session with the resident psychiatrist is in an hour.

If you make the mistake of telling them anything about your life, perhaps in some desperate attempt to make it clear to them that you are definitely not supposed to be here, they will tell you none of the places or people you are talking about ever existed. That they are all figments of your imagination.

Here your only reality is bars.

You might notice at long last that in the cell across from you is the same person you saw on the screens at the start of the dream. He is arguing with a nurse who is threatening him that either he calm down or they will have to sedate him. His knuckles are white as he grips at the bars. The nurse repeats himself, “Sir. You have to calm down or we will be forced to intervene.” In response Rosen slams the heel of his palm against the bars and angrily stalks back to the far corner of his room. But he doesn’t remain there.

Instead he paces. Glaring at anyone who passes by and biting roughly into his lower lip. Now and again he runs his fingers roughly through his hair, digging his nails into his scalp before making an exasperated sound in his throat.

But all of it is pointless. There are still bars and you are both still imprisoned here.