SOMEWHERE, there's a place like it. It can't exist only in my mind. A long, wide, dark tunnel with train tracks running through it. To get to the entrance, you would have to hop over the wire fence that somebody knocked down. There are pieces of broken glass and bricks all over the ground. I was little when I first went there, probably about six, but even now I see it so clearly that it couldn't be a dream. The problem is, it couldn't be real, either.

I'm not even sure what I was doing there, but one thing was certain: I didn't belong there. That day, the ground was wet with rain. A shiny, silver train roared into there, so fast, all the cars didn't even seem to separate. Just one long steel stream, in a hurry to get in and out of the tunnel.

People lived there. I passed them as I walked further in, almost getting swallowed by it. They lived in dirty tents and in boxes. Some lived up on the sides, where they used blankets for walls. None of them talked to me, but I had to look away from them. They had no faces. Only eyes that stared at me as I passed them, daring me to come closer.

I know it couldn't have been real, because I wouldn't have stayed there. Still, I remembered walking a little faster, yet more carefully. A few rats ran along the tracks. They were normal-size at first, but then they seemed to be growing until their tails grew as thick as pieces of brown rope, and their teeth were lived curved, white nails.

So it couldn't have been real! It had to have been a dream, or maybe even a movie I had seen as a little kid that had scared me.

But I see it now, too, the way I saw it then, somewhere in the tunnel. Maybe it was the middle, but then when I looked, where was the middle? The tunnel went on forever. High above -- the ceiling was high, who knows how many stories high -- there was the sound of cars passing on a highway.

I felt so alone, looking up at it. It looked like a house growing out of the wall, whatever it was. Made of stone, with stone steps leading up to it and a door, but no windows.

I didn't belong there. I shouldn't have been there. But I started climbing up the steps of it anyway.

It had to be a dream! So why could I hear the door opening up so clearly? I stopped halfway up the steps, frozen in place, holding onto the wall because there was no banister.

A man with a beard appeared in the doorway, but all I can remember is the beard, not really the rest of his face. And his voice, I remember the words, I remember the water dripping down like a cascade from the ceiling....

"Welcome to... yourself," he said, sadly.

At once, I heard a crash. As I threw my head back, I saw part of the ceiling breaking into chunks of cement. A flood of water was coming down, throwing me into deep, deep water, filling that giant tunnel and--

That is where the picture ends.

As I said, it must have been a dream or something, and it stayed in my mind since I was little. Yet it was so real while it was happening, with the sounds and the smells and the dull colors so real. The tunnel in my mind was alive, but I always knew it never really happened, but then I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure, and I never understood it.

Not until much later.