Verre

I got up because I couldn't sleep, and I went out to the balcony. I was several stories up, and the balcony looked out over a grassy lawn, on the far side of which lights twinkled from the windows of other apartment buildings. To my left, I could see more lights from the night skyline of the city.

I was surprised at how dark the sky still was, though full of brilliant stars. Wasn't it almost morning? I remembered that I had gotten up for a while and didn't go back to bed until the sky was starting to lighten. (That part was true.) Shouldn't the sun be rising by now? For some reason I felt strangely tempted to jump off the balcony to see if I could fly, which made me wonder if I might actually be dreaming. But I realized that would be a terrible test, because if I was wrong, well...

I didn't think it could be possible that I was dreaming, because I was sure that ever since I had gone back to bed, I had lain there unable to sleep. How could I be dreaming if I hadn't gone to sleep first? I'd better do a test anyway, just to be sure. I reached out my left hand and tried to invoke a ball of glowing white light in the air above it. Nothing happened. Oh well, I must be awake after all... was my last thought before I woke up. In retrospect, it was a terrible choice of RC, but the only one that occurred to me at the time.

Waking up was confusing at first—hadn't I just been suffering from insomnia? But if I had been dreaming all along (and only now did I notice the profound discrepancies with WL: that I have no such balcony, and moreover live in a completely different kind of building with a completely different kind of view), then I must have been asleep the whole time, only dreaming of insomnia.