The man opened his eyes, stiff and sweating in dark. He groped anxiously for the half-remembered dream and scanned it for promising material—something sideways or made of an uninvented color, something beautifully violent and anachronistic. Instead it was disturbingly mundane, linear. He scratched his nails hard into his naked thighs.

A knock at the door.

“Coffee?” she asked from the other side. She was always kind in the mornings.

The man opened his mouth and croaked out an affirmative sound, tears spilling over his cheeks. He didn’t dare turn on the light. Nothing compounded his desperation like an eyeful of the subdivision master bedroom and its florid shades of pink. Already, a finger of cheery sunlight was leaking under the bottom of the heavy shades, spoiling the darkness.

His affliction had infused his dreams continuously for months now. The man thought again, for the thousandth time, of the amber vial with the glass dropper wrapped in a sock in the bottom of his gym bag, where he prayed his snooping kids wouldn’t find it. It had worked, the contents of the vial. His head had filled up again with useful complexity, multi-dimensional thoughts and other essential things that had gone missing. Then he got the dose wrong that one day, and his wife hadn’t slept in the same room with him since. But she was still kind in the mornings.

“It’s nearly seven.” Her voice muffled to gentleness by the door. She was the second hand of his life, ruthlessly measuring out every moment.

He kicked off the covers and stumbled into the bathroom and shut the door. He walked into the shower and stood under the water.

The vial was still half full, at least.

He turned the faucet to the left and felt the water run in burning rivulets down his skin. He wanted her to come back to their bed. That was why, ostensibly, he hadn’t touched it since that day he got the dose wrong.

Ostensibly.

He turned the faucet to the right and watched his skin prick up with goosebumps. He remembered it all perfectly—his mind felt open to the whole world simultaneously, and full, full, full of beautiful, purposeful thoughts all bright and shot through with ferocious color and light.

But he raged, apparently. She said he was monstrous, voluminous with a frenzy that had no evident source. Indeed, the house belied his antics; when he came to he was alone on the brocaded heap that was once their sofa. Books shredded, their covers husks. The TV was totally gone. The house was as yet fully recovered from the experience.

She came home three days later and he tried to explain to her that what had happened was the uncontainable result of a fully perspicacious consciousness! He’d used those words, exactly.

She didn’t buy it.

He had it just right for a while: a dropper full on a corner of paper, then a snip of that corner four times throughout the day. The ideas came steadily enough that way; his mind was not the tundra it had been and was now again. He’d be careful. She’d never know. She’d come back to bed.

And his dreams too would quicken again. He’d awake in the mornings not with panicked emptiness but with a surge of purpose.

He stepped from the shower, and dripped across the floor, not pausing to towel off. He would start now. He’d be all the way on by the time he finished that coffee. He flipped the bedroom lights, now bravely inured against the relentlessly pink room. He knelt in the closet, digging through his gym bag, his fingers seeking out the amber vial, groping at formless, empty cloth.