My Archetype

This dream came to me when I was still in elementary school.
As an experiment in image generation, I shared it with ChatGPT as a memory that remained vivid in my mind.

The Dream

When I was in elementary school, there was a park near my house that felt like a small mountain.
It wasn’t a typical Japanese park with sandpits or playground equipment—it was almost entirely a bamboo grove.
It felt like a pocket of forest, standing quietly in the middle of the city.
I would run around and play there every day, even by myself.
The ground of the grove was like a carpet of fallen leaves.
I could find beetles and stag beetles, and I collected lots of chestnuts too.
You don’t find parks like that much anymore.

One day, I had a dream.
In it, I was playing in that same park with four or five of my friends, just like always.

Together, we ventured deeper into the park.
And then, we suddenly came upon a place we didn’t recognize.
In front of us was a narrow stone passageway.
It was so tight that only one adult could pass through at a time, and the walls were tall.
The path bent in an L-shape like a maze or a cave.
The walls were made of roughly piled stones—like a ruin, or a kind of dry stone walling.

We passed through that corridor, and on the other side,
we found a grove of bamboo that looked just like the one from before.
To the left, the land sloped gently upward.
To the right, there was a structure that looked like a Japanese temple.

Then, to our surprise, we looked to the left—
At the base of each and every bamboo stalk stood something…
Something shaped like a person, dressed all in white.
There were so many of them—stretching out in rows, as far as we could see.

As children, they could only seem like ghosts to us.
So we panicked and tried to run back the way we came.
But the L-shaped corridor had turned into a dead end.

In the stone wall ahead, there were several randomly spaced holes—just big enough for children to crawl through.
Everyone scrambled into the holes, trying to escape.
But I was too slow.
By the time I reached them, the holes were gone.

Left with no choice,
I turned back toward the bamboo grove
and crawled under the outer edge of the temple building on the right.

There was nothing else to do but curl up small,
my face pressed to the ground so I couldn’t see anything.

Even so, I could feel them—
those white figures, silently drawing near.

They were surrounding me,
just inches from my face.

This is the end.