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It would have been fair to say that the dream scenario had infringed upon my waking hours and any confidence I had about reality was slowly withdrawing. I felt no fear, only frustration because I knew this was being done outside my control. There were times during this period that I would doubt or forget obvious things and be unable to decipher the real from the unreal, almost like Alzheimer’s disease. My belief system was being toyed with and at times it became very clear why. There were mornings where I would awake believing that this whole revelation was just a huge misunderstanding and I should just forget about it. I must admit, I felt a certain comfort in that belief, but knew deep down it wasn’t mine. These conflicting feelings would cause me to swing to extreme opinions ranging from sceptic to believer. During the doubting moods I knew the Programmers were winning, yet there would always be that glimpse of truth in the background that insisted something was going on. The conflict continued. There were times when the presences of others were more prominent--the moments between wake and sleep. On the rare occasion where I might drift off such as on train or car journeys, the dozing state would take off with a distant voice summoning me. It wasn’t an unpleasant summoning, more like a parent trying to get the attention of a distracted child. Occasionally my mind would process a face to this voice and when I think of it, I could get a focused picture if I wanted to. I have never been hypnotised but the lucidity I experienced in this halfway state seemed to be the nearest I would come. In fact, the elaborate detail I picked up during my dozing moments was sharper than my conscious perceptions. The face I saw when I chose to examine the voice’s source was a familiar hooded being. It wore the brown monk’s habit that made it resemble one of those robed dwarf creatures in the first Star Wars film. When I chose to home in on the face under the hood, I gained an intricate picture, of which I could have produced a useful portrait of had I been given a pencil. Although Inever considered this being to be evil, the face that I glimpsed certainly wasn’t pleasant. In fact it was so wrinkled and debauched that had I put an age to it | would have gone well beyond a human life expectancy. It was how I would imagine a corpse to have looked months after its decease and its off white colour certainly gave that impression. The wrinkles hardly allowed the eyes to be visible but what I saw were weathered slits that must have seen centuries go by. I often wonder if it was a living corpse ina shroud I was looking at. Had I have witnessed this person in any other state I would have been undoubtedly scared. The twilight consciousness is an effective, fascinating place to be in and I can see why the Programmers have 33