It’s a dazzling summer morning. The breeze moves the shining waves of sun with care. Foreign birds fly in the sky with harmony.

A masked man is trailing me through the orange trees of my childhood memories.

The green leaves touch my face and juicy oranges drop over my head. The branches scratch my skin and the pain spreads its path through my veins.

I run and I don’t look back.

The heavy breathing of the faceless man overshadows the happiness of the wind, and the diffuseness of a fading moon enlightens my way. Like in a dream, in a blink of an eye, I grow tall and strong, capable of pushing away branches and trunks and leaving their imposing path. Like the imaginary Deev of legends and tales, I crush trees under my toes, knowing I’d reach the birds, if I want to.

“We’re almost there,” the small man murmurs. He’s now running after me as if he has never been hopeless.

“If you catch me, I’ll wake up,” I shout back.

“If I catch you, you’ll never wake up,” he whispers.

Similar to my previous dreams, a wooden ladder appears at the crossroad between contentment and disaster. It rises in the sky with no beginning, no end. I run towards its delicate steps, while rootless birds look up to me. I rush to reach unseen clouds - to hide inside their momentary shape - but as I take my last step, the old wood crack and the stair falls apart and the screams of anxious birds break the silence of reddening sky. The stairway collapses under my foot, to fail me again, to thrust my being into the hollow of an infinite abyss.

In my descend, I always wonder whether the next time my anonymous stalker - that mysterious little man with a blank face -- would achieve his unreasonable desire by finally catching me, by pulling my hair back, by pushing his sharp nails into my soft throat, to wake me up at last, to save me from this never ending fall.