'Cordyceps'

"Are you the dream or the dreamer?" whispers the wind to the mustard tree.

"When you are awake, you will not realize this [it continues]: that the world which you've built is a high and crumbling tower. Somewhere along the lines of achieving something for yourself, something took over and that was where your own expectations were met, even surpassed. Then, you became a marionette, moving about towards the illusion of things which you thought mattered, and that you were the dreamer, not the dream. You stumbled, choosing paths which were unnatural to you, but it had gone too far, and you could only go on. Stumbling dazed towards what you thought was your intended apex.

I guess that answers it then: you're the dream. You're the husk; the empty seashell that everyone picks up for sea sounds--your inner turbulence, beating relentlessly like waves on a shore, is interesting to the ears. You're a vessel. A void.

Yet, still the envy of many. Your achievements tempt others to do the same. To climb, climb, climb. And from where you are now, this great height, what originally spurred you will be raining down upon them, infecting the poor unsuspecting fools, miles below. They will see it as gold; your obsessions will be theirs.

You will die but what drove you to this will live on in them."

Then, as if in a final act of rebuke, the wind swirls violently around the mustard tree, tears up its branches, scatters every seed...

Somewhere, seconds later, a man jolts from his sleep apologizing profusely, but to no one in particular.

Weigh the above, then
this; whichever is stranger
is the metaphor

( _")