After a long day of school, a part-time job, and Trigonometry homework, I laid down in bed to rest. I went on TikTok to scroll for some entertainment before I put my phone to charge and went to rest. Most videos are the same; People talking about their boring lives, a police officer committing murder, a Chinese spy balloon in the sky, but there was one specific genre that always made me instantly scroll away. Reddit stories that are horribly captioned over gameplay clips.
They are truly the most mind numbing forms of content on the app, purely designed to engage viewer time and comment activity. After six consecutive videos, just like every other reddit story video, I put my phone on my desk and plugged it in. I closed my eyes and tried to think of nothing. Nothing. That’s all I thought of when I fell asleep, but my brain has whirred up a nightmare that it will not let me wake up from. I slowly opened my eyes and looked up at the night sky; It was dark, but the sky was littered with stars. I lived in an urban setting, so this startled me. I had never seen this many stars in the sky.
I slowly stood up and took in my surroundings. I was on a train track. Three tracks parallel to each-other sat on a sandy strip of land that seemed to stretch to infinity in both directions. On each side of the track were buildings so condensed that there weren’t even alleyways between them. Each track was completely empty, no trains in sight. I stared down the hypnotizing infinity of the tracks and realized I had to be dreaming. One, two, three, four, five. I counted my fingers, they were all there. I had learned of techniques of lucid dreaming, I’d often try to lucid dream before but nothing ever worked. I immediately burst with hope, trying to control my surroundings. Nothing worked.
No matter how hard I tried to fly, or explode something, or even just wake up, nothing happened. This setting looked oddly familiar to me, but I couldn’t quite place my finger on it. After maybe 10 minutes of waiting, which honestly felt like an eternity, the sky lit up. The sun immediately appeared in the sky, forcing me to shield my eyes from it’s brightness. There was no sunrise, it was just there. I felt the tracks start to vibrate. Music began to play, soft, calming music, that sounded very familiar to me. I had heard this music just minutes…or hours…before I woke up here. It was on my phone. Suddenly, a monochrome robot voice boomed from the sky. “After a long day of school, a part-time job, and Trigonometry homework, I laid down in bed to rest.” I shielded my ears from the sheer volume from the voice, but it didn’t matter.
It continued, “I went on TikTok to scroll for some entertainment before I put my phone to charge and went to rest.” I immediately realized what was happening. This dream was the last memory I had before falling asleep, a mind numbing social media video from my phone had manifested into this hellscape of a dream. My thoughts were cut off by the blaring horn of a train. Right in front of me, a bright light was rushing towards me, a train. I jumped to my left, narrowly dodging it, but I could hear more coming. I ran.
I ran as fast as I could, but it didn’t seem to matter. The trains kept coming, the music kept playing, the monochrome description of my life…even to the position I’m in right now…continued to play. Wake up, wake up, wake up, I racked my brain for anything about waking yourself up from a dream, but nothing changed. The voice had began to narrate events that hadn’t even occurred to me yet. Something it said interested me: “I finally found it. After hours of running on this goddamn track I saw the red door. I ran for it, but a train was closing in behind me, just like the voice had told me hours ago. I narrowly opened the door and dove in. The phone was sitting on the table in there, my salvation.”
I immediately began scanning my surroundings for a ‘Red Door,’ but nothing matching that description was anywhere near me. Only monotone yellow concrete houses, with windows glowing a light with no diminishable source. I kept running. Exhaustion kicked in, I got tired, if this was a dream then why would I get tired? More importantly, if this is a dream….could I just let one of the trains hit me, and then I’d wake up? It did make sense, but I’d rather not test it. The monochrome voice continued to repeat the same story on loop, my story.
Minutes turned to hours. I couldn’t take it anymore. The concept of letting a train hit me became ever-promising. Just when I lost hope, I saw a tiny dot of red in the distance. Amongst the insanity of those concrete houses, I finally found it. After hours of running on this goddamn track I saw the red door. I ran for it, but a train was closing in behind me, just like the voice had told me hours ago. I narrowly opened the door and dove in. The phone was sitting on the table in there, my salvation. I picked it up, just as I was foretold many… many times. I opened the only app in the phone and made an account. I went to the place where I knew these bot accounts got their stories from, and I began to type.
TikTok Reddit videos are ruining my mind.