This Is a Dream, Across Every Answer

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
The clock on the wall has thirteen hands, all pointing to now.
The air smells like dry-erase marker and a quiet panic I remember from another life.
Fluorescent tubes hum a sixty-hertz question I never studied for.
The desk is scarred with initials, J.L.B., but they feel like my own.
The wood grain swims into a face and then sinks back.

[Verse 2]
The test paper is cold.
Question 1: Name the window that looks back into the room.
Question 2: Calculate the half-life of your grandfather's voice.
Question 3: Is the dreamer aware that the dream is dreaming them?
My mechanical pencil feels impossibly light.
I look at my hand to check.
I counted seven fingers and tried again and counted nine. The pencil is correct; my hand is not.

[Chorus]
So I press the silver lead to the page.
I write it slow, deliberate, and clear.
Not an answer, but a declaration. A spell.
A key turning in a lock that is also my own ribcage.
Across the empty bubbles and the recursive geometry, I write: This is a dream.

[Bridge]
The teacher at the front, Mr. Silver, the one with no face, stops pacing.
He turns, and a smile appears where his mouth should be.
He walks to my desk. He takes the paper without a word.
He holds it up, not to the light, but to the silence.
And he tears it. Once. Straight down the middle.

[Verse 3]
The tear in the paper does not stop.
It runs across the scarred wood of the desk.
It splits the tiled floor, zig-zags up the cinderblock wall.
The clock cracks. The door becomes two doors, each leading here.
The ceiling rips open, and what falls down isn't plaster.
It's sunlight. And the smell of damp earth.

[Chorus]
I pressed the silver lead to the page.
I wrote it slow, deliberate, and clear.
Not an answer, but a declaration. A spell.
And the walls heard it, the floor understood it, the silence agreed.
This is a dream. And it changed when I told it so.

[Outro]
The desks have melted into soft green mounds of moss.
The teacher is a tall stalk of grass, swaying.
The two halves of my test paper drift on a warm breeze.
Two white butterflies.
They circle my head once, then fly into a sky that used to be a ceiling.