An induced, lucid dream was not freedom but intrusion. It was when sleep no longer belonged to them, when the walls of their mind were prised open and a foreign hand painted across them.
They might believe they were in control — aware and awake within the dream — but every route they walked and everything they met had been placed there deliberately, like pieces on a board.
They could taste fire, recall wounds that had never happened, even hear confessions they had never given, all while convinced those memories had risen from their own minds.
The danger lay in the thin line between awareness and manipulation.
To wake from such a dream was to wonder which thoughts were truly theirs and which had been planted to take root long after.
So, to sum it all up, the island was not a shifting mass. Their minds were being tampered with, and while they thought themselves ahead of the zealots, they had been under their thumb the whole time.
