The dream didn't begin. It dropped.
Like a blade into soft earth, reality was torn apart and rebuilt.
Sunny stood inside a room painted with smiles — bright walls, colorful posters, a chalkboard that read "Today We Learn!"
Children sat on small chairs. Their faces were empty. Eyes wide, but dead.
A teacher loomed above them. Not human — a figure carved from commandments and fear, smiling with a face it had stapled on.
"Repeat after me," the teacher hummed.
"We are free."
The children obeyed. Even the smallest one with shaking fingers and bite marks on his skin.
Sunny walked forward.
A boy turned his head toward him — skin pale, throat bruised, lips stitched with invisible thread.
His voice was barely a breath.
"I asked to rest. They said rest is laziness."
"I asked to draw. They said dreams are for failures."
"I asked to cry. They said boys don't do that."
Then the world flickered.
Classroom walls melted into stone. Desks twisted into pews.
The teacher had become a priest. Or maybe it always had been.
It preached now:
"God loves those who obey. God punishes those who ask. Faith is discipline. Discipline is love."
Behind him stood idols — one for each god, each prophet, each name the world had killed for.
And among them, a girl.
She couldn't be older than seven. Her wrists bound in holy cloth, blood trickling from her feet where she'd been made to kneel.
She whispered:
"I asked why women couldn't speak. I asked why God needed me quiet. They said I was possessed."
Sunny's fists trembled.
He screamed, but his voice came out as scripture.
Every word he tried to speak rewrote itself into prayer.
Suddenly, he was among them — the children.
Wires hooked to their temples.
Sermons whispered into their ears in endless loops.
"God is light. School is discipline. Parents are wrong. Your tears are weakness. Obey. Obey. Obey."
One boy shattered his head against the wall.
A girl bit her tongue until she bled.
Then came the quote, etched across the sky like a divine scar:
> "The free man is he who lives under the guidance of reason alone, who is not led by fear or blind desire, but who understands necessity."
— Baruch Spinoza
But the children here were not free.
They had been turned into gears in a holy machine.
The machine turned — grinding hope into ash, youth into silence, and innocence into numbers.
Sunny screamed again.
And this time, his voice broke through the cycle.
"STOP!"
The room collapsed.
He stood in darkness now.
All the children were gone.
Only one remained.
A boy, his eyes like Sunny's own — wide, afraid, exhausted.
He whispered:
"They called me sinner. For asking why."
"They called me ungrateful. For asking to live."
Sunny reached out — but the boy faded.
The nightmare ended with a heartbeat.
A loud, lonely thump.
And silence.