Blood drips from the pearly white walls, pooling on the cold tiled floor. You try to move, but your body is no longer under your control. Panic sets in, erasing everything else. You must escape. You can't escape. The taste of copper stings your tongue, you feel something warm and wet drip from your nose. The blood fills your mouth, blocking your throat. Breathe, breathe, breathe, you think. But you can’t. Choking. Is this what it's like to die? Your vision darkens at the edges, then goes black. Falling, down, down, down. Nothing.

*****

You blink, sitting up. You're in a warehouse, the floor is hard and cold underneath you, and a weak light trickles in through the opaque windows above. It feels like a place that should be quiet; a retreat from the chaos of daily life. Yet something is wrong. You remember - your dream. You need to get out.

You run for a small, wooden door on the other side of the warehouse, only to find that you can't displace the steel bar set across it.

Palms sweating, trying to think clearly through the haze of terror hovering in your mind, you see an elevator on the wall opposite. There are stairs nearer by. But wait - isn’t this only a one story building? Not that it really matters, you just need to get out. Out out out. You run up the stairs two at a time, and arrive on the second floor, panting.

The walls are a pale green here, the floor a smooth linoleum tile, with a dull shine, and a hospital bed in the corner. The sheets are wrinkled, the thin blanket on top folded over - it's been slept in recently, and there's a brown-red stain on the floor nearby. Ignore it. Move on. 

You look frantically for a door, but of course, there isn’t one. You should only be on the second floor, so you run to the window. The drop will be worth it to get away - Get away from what? You still don’t know what you're running from. You don't really want to know. 

You pull back the curtains on the nearest window - damp, velvety things that don’t belong here - and look out. 

Beyond the glass exists a dull plain of whitish-gray, stretching on and on. A snowstorm. You look down, and see the street below. Far below. You count the windows up from the street. One, two, three, four- Again. And again. That can’t be right. There are six windows below. You're on the seventh story of a hospital building. 

No. Nonononono. This isn't possible. You refuse to accept it. A memory tugs at you, something you should remember. Your dream was important. Maybe? Was that it? Or something else?

You push against the walls of your mind, searching for a crack in reality, but there is none. Even if it isn't real, there's nothing you can do about the illusion. You can’t escape your own mind. You're trapped in more ways than one, but still, there could be a way out. 

Set in your decision, you run to a pair of swinging double doors across the room- were they there before? Halfway there, you slip and fall in a wet, sticky substance. You stand, wipe your hands on your pants, and keep moving.

You reach the doors, which swing open into a long, dimly lit hallway. Flickering bulbs swing overhead, and, down the hall, to your left, you hear a laugh. Soft and joyful- or was it cackling with dark humor? You can’t hear it properly above the buzzing in your head. Don’t risk it. You run to the right. There. A stairwell. You don’t know where it will take you, but you run down it. You're on the seventh floor - right? Go down seven then.

You're on what you think is the fourth flight of stairs down, blood - no, sweat. It’s sweat, dripping from your forehead, when you hear a scraping sound below. You can’t identify what it might belong to, but you don’t want to know. Rather than face it, you turn off, intending to find another set of stairs to go down. Charging through the door, you expect to find another hallway. Instead, you find yourself in a prison cell.