"Did you have another nightmare" by PQHAÜS

Acrylic on canvas / 16x20 inch / 2026 / PQHAÜS

The darkness isn’t sudden. It’s complete. It fills everything evenly, like a condition rather than an event. There is no moment you can point to and say this is when it began. It simply becomes the environment.

You are still expected to look for light. Not because it promises escape, but because searching has been assigned meaning. Stopping would look like surrender. So when something flickers, small and inconsistent, you treat it seriously. You call it hope because that word has been rehearsed for you.

You reach for it carefully. You build systems around the reaching. Nets, methods, language. As long as your hands are moving, you are considered awake. The effort itself becomes the proof.

At some point, the realization arrives quietly. Maybe this is still the nightmare. Maybe waking up never happened. Maybe consciousness was just another layer added on top of it. The fear no longer jolts you awake. It settles in. It learns your hours. It no longer needs darkness to function.

There was a time when fear locked the body briefly and then released it. A short malfunction. A temporary paralysis that ended the moment you surfaced. Back then, the nightmare had boundaries. It knew when to let go.

Now it behaves differently. Now it loops. The same scene runs again with minor changes, like film threaded too tightly to stop. Each day feels continuous with the last. No clean cut. No clear exit. Just a reel that keeps advancing.

The fireflies appear anyway. Small points of light drifting through the dark, unreliable and brief. You reach for them not because you believe they will save you, but because reaching has become instinct. Because even a borrowed glow can interrupt the dark for a moment.

The nightmare doesn’t stop you. It lets you move. It understands that hope doesn’t need to last to matter. It only needs to flicker long enough to be seen.

The darkness remains. The reel keeps turning. Nothing resolves the way it’s supposed to.

But every so often, the light drifts close enough to touch your hands before it disappears. And for a moment, that feels almost like waking.

Did you have another nightmare.

Maybe. Or maybe this is what surviving the dream looks like.