Dream

By day I am an ordinary man.
Mature, attractive, heterosexual, married. A man who plays his role naturally, who knows the rules and knows perfectly well what image to project. To those around me, there is nothing strange about me. I am exactly who I appear to be.

But the night has its own rules.

When I close my eyes and sleep begins to drag me into its depths, something inside me detaches from reality. Then another man appears. One I do not recognize and yet suspect has always been there, waiting for the darkness.

In that world I have no name, no reputation, no wife, no past.

There is only me… and them.

Men who watch me as if they could see through all my defenses. Cruel, dominant, libertine men, who seem to know my weaknesses better than I do myself. Before them, all the confidence I display during the day crumbles. My will becomes fragile. My pride, useless.

And they know it.

They turn me into what I would never admit to desiring awake: someone subjugated, reduced to their will, trapped in a nightmare as disturbing as it is fascinating. A fantasy of decadence and perversion that seems torn from the darkest pages of the Marquis de Sade, as if my own mind had built a stage on which all my certainties could be destroyed.

The truly unsettling thing is not that they dominate me.

It is that, while I dream, a part of me stops resisting.

And when that part appears, I no longer know where the nightmare ends and desire begins.

Then I wake up.

I am soaked in sweat. My heart pounds against my chest. For a few moments I remain motionless, staring into the darkness, trying to reconstruct what happened.

But the memories return.

Their faces. Their voices. Their gazes. The sensation of having completely lost control.

And that last image that should terrify me more than any other: me, kneeling before them, aware that in that world I had ceased to be the man everyone believes they know.

I tell myself it was only a dream.

An absurd fantasy.

An aberration of the imagination.

But as I catch my breath, a question slowly makes its way through my thoughts:

What if the dream was not inventing something?

What if it was simply revealing it?