Faded Dreams

I'm walking through a gallery of faded dreams
Dust on the glass where the brightest visions used to gleam
Every frame started glowing like a freshly lit scene
Now they whisper from the walls of a gallery of faded dreams

All my life I heard the chorus like a judge behind the scenes
"Why don't you try harder? Why you never follow through on things?"
Teachers with their folded arms and disappointed sighs
Looking down their glasses like they'd already read my lies
But they never saw the hours that I burned inside my brain
Running circuits far past safe just to keep up in the lane
Pouring out a hundred ten till the system starts to steam
Still they say I never tried, still they say I never mean

I pride myself on truth like a blade I always keep
Even when the words I speak cut the comfort from the peace
So to hear them say I'm lying while I'm fighting just to cope
Hits like lightning through a system running ragged on its rope
As a kid I'd whisper softly at the ending of bad days
"Something's broken deep inside you… something wired the wrong way"
Like my brain ran USB 2 while the world ran number three
Glitching signals in a language other people couldn't see

So I chased a hundred answers like a pilgrim with a chart
Asking doctors endless questions just to map my mind apart
Coding tiny neural networks on a humming BBC
32K dreaming big of what a brain network could be
Trying to imagine how a thousand signals blend
How the sparks of thought appear when silent circuits start to send
So I chased the thought to college where the old debates convene
Psychology and philosophy searching what it means

Found a thousand clever questions in the halls of human thought
Every answer wrapped in caution like a truth that can't be caught
Plato whispering in riddles, Freud with half a lantern lit
Every page another mirror where my shadow wouldn't fit
Learned some party tricks from stories when the late night debates spin
Asch and Milgram, Zimbardo, little glimpses into sin
But the deeper that I looked the less the answers seemed to start
Just a maze of clever questions and a fractured kind of art

Then the storm arrived for real when the structures started falling
Business gone to rubble, family tensions slowly calling
Depression like a winter pressing heavy on the day
Till the simple act of standing felt impossibly far away
Depression wasn't root, just the echo of the strain
Of a world that calls you lazy while you're sprinting in the rain
So when someone snaps because I'm late a little time
I think "you lost fifteen minutes—I lost forty years of mine"

Still walking through a gallery of faded dreams
Dust on the glass where the brightest visions used to gleam
Every frame a plane that slipped between the seams
My whole life in a gallery of faded dreams