Kitabı oxu: «Glitch. Aakee»

© Yerzhan Alimkulov, 2026

ISBN 978-5-0071-1487-5

Created with Ridero smart publishing system

Manuscript

AAKEE

Based on a recurring childhood dream and the dreams that followed

Prologue. The Dream That Never Ended

I was about four years old the first time I saw the cube.

I don’t remember the exact date. I don’t know if it was an ordinary day or if something had happened the night before. But the dream itself has stayed with a clarity that, for a childhood memory, feels almost wrong.

Afterward I would wake up crying. My parents probably assumed I’d had another nightmare. But there were no monsters in my dream, no chase, no death, no darkness. None of the usual ingredients of a bad dream were there.

There was only space.

Dark blue, but not dark. Points of light scattered through it, like stars. There was no floor, no walls, no ceiling — and yet I was standing, unmistakably, on my own two feet.

In front of me was the frame of a cube.

I was inside it.

And at the same time, I was holding that same cube in my own two hands — enormous, open palms turned upward.

I needed to walk out through an opening in the frame.

I understood, even then, that I could simply set the cube down and walk out. That option existed in my head even as a child.

But I didn’t want to leave it behind.

I needed to walk out with it.

And that was exactly what I couldn’t do.

I would approach the opening, but my hands wouldn’t fit through it while holding the cube. The space on the other side looked exactly like the space I was already standing in.

I didn’t want to arrive somewhere. I wanted to make the crossing itself.

I wanted to carry the cube out of the cube.

And I couldn’t.

Twenty years later, the dream came back.

Thirty years later — again.

Each time, almost identical.

That was when I first wondered: what if the cube itself isn’t the point?

What if the point is that I keep trying to cross into a different state without leaving behind, in the old world, the part of myself I think I need to keep?

This book is an attempt to work that question out.

Part I. THE CUBE

The cube was never a prison. It had no walls holding me in. I could have walked out almost any way I wanted. So the word “trapped” is too simple here. I was physically free. What I lacked was freedom of intention.

What held my attention was the opening. For some reason I accepted it as the only real way out, even though nothing around me demanded that I think so. That’s one of the dream’s first puzzles: why does a child’s mind accept an arbitrary rule as absolute?

Maybe the dream wasn’t telling me anything about the outside world. Maybe it was building a problem. The space wasn’t a backdrop — it was the task itself.

A Space Without Up or Down

I call it “space” only because I don’t have a better word for it today. I didn’t actually see planets, galaxies, or nebulae. What I saw was an infinity with no coordinates.

There was no fear in that space. That matters. The unknown wasn’t an enemy. It was simply the natural condition of things.

If the dream was trying to tell me something, it wasn’t “fear the unknown.” It was closer to: “you can stand firm inside the unknown too.”

Maybe that’s why I still resist the easy explanation that the cosmos in the dream was just a symbol of loneliness. I never felt lonely there. I felt space.