I failed every single class from middle school to high school, but I could play the guitar, and that was my poor excuse for being both a shitty student and a shitty human being in general.

Those were my pseudo-rebellious punk years when acting like an idiot and vandalising everything seemed to be part of a personal statement against the status quo. In reality, it was just how the mediocre, introverted, geeky me—who was every day playing Magic: The Gathering and video games in the school's library with the same four introverted, geeky friends—tried to avoid the fact of being the only student who was failing even at the simplest things in life.

I kept smashing things and trespassing properties during the day only to stay awake at night writing sad melodies with the help of my guitar, thinking of them as soundtracks for the stories I dreamt but didn't know how to write—or how to fucking end. 

Eventually, I began to develop depression and anxiety, and when I tried to sleep, I started to experience sleep paralysis—so I was all the time waking up in the middle of the night violently gasping, scaring the shit out of my family.

Time passed and a moment came when I realised (thanks to some test results) that the depression, the anxiety and other disorders were something frequent in my family's DNA, and more specifically from my mother's side. It turned out she was an awful human being because she'd lived with a bipolar disorder maybe throughout her entire life.

After those tests, my dad decided to do something about my behaviour first the way he knew best: by enrolling me into a prestigious music school where I started taking classes in the afternoon. He thought I needed to focus on the things that I really enjoyed to use my time better and to stop thinking about my disorders. Then, he decided to use my new school to threaten me—"You either stop rioting on the streets and slacking at school, or you don't get to continue with the music school." 

I mean, I didn't even ask him to enrol me in the first place, but shit you not it worked. The problem was that now I had to study and practice even more because I was attending two different schools, which translated to even less sleeping time for me.

Because of my sleepless nights, I started to experience a lot of déjà vus during the day. Everything started to get messier each day that passed, and it got worse when my brain decided from time to time to surrender to the fatigue and instantly shut down without any warning. Every time that happened, my dreams felt just like real life—everything from waking up in the morning, then doing all I had to do at school, at home, and finishing with going to bed at night. And so many days and even weeks would pass in hours of sleep, sometimes with me actually realising that I was indeed trapped inside my head, but just to wake up inside another dream.

That thing about going from dream to dream to dream and so on scared the shit out of me when I thought about the possibility of getting stuck like that—comatose, in a never-ending slumber. That's why I taught myself to find crucial elements around me to realise if everything was just a product of my sleeping brain.

For example, I started to notice that in deeper layers of dreams, for some reason it was impossible for me to balance (or to maintain in a vertical position) small disc-shaped objects like coins or rings—they’d just uncontrollably shake like some sort of glitch in the matrix, and that image would wake me up, scared and sweating. Thanks to this discovery, I was all the time carrying with me a metallic blue Pokémon coin made out of nickel with a Suicune minted in it, that I got when buying one of the Pokémon Trading Card Game decks at the time. I used that coin for many years, mostly when someone else would "snap me back to reality," telling me that I was getting too lost in my thoughts—that I was just there immovable and unblinking. If that happened, the only thing I had to do was trying to balance my coin on a flat surface, and I'd wake up if that thing started to move like having an epileptic attack.

I was just thirteen years old when all of this started to happen. I was already clinically depressed, suffering anxiety episodes at night, feeling paralysed when sleeping, and completely confused during the day because of my second life inside those really long, multilayered dreams, with every non-oneiric moment feeling like a simple déjà vu.

My perception of life shattered entirely.

And I knew I was going to die... 

I could feel it. I thought it was going to be from a stroke or something related to my brain—but just like me, I died in the most pathetic way possible. I mean, thanks to that I became aware of this immortality thing, or more like I realised it had always been there—veiled, just like my mom's bipolarity.