Dream Diary

Hello all, friends and family especially. I’d like to let you know that it’s common for dreams to “borrow” bodies of people the dreamer knows. If you see a dream character wearing your skin as clothing in this dream diary, don’t hold its actions against me — it is probably not an accurate reflection of my sentiments about you. I am also often out of character here!

These dream stories are mostly faithful to the actual dreams, to the best of my recollection. Some superficial interpretations, extrapolations, and embellishments have been made in order to make the dreams presentable as entertainment.

Nightmares make me feel refreshed and happy to be alive when I wake up. They provide perspective — invaluable counterpoints to the banal grind of life’s real challenges. I love them, I cultivate them, and I curate them. This section may not be appropriate for everyone due to extreme violence, body horror, death, cruelty, Lovecraftian madness, and possibly mild sexual content. But enough hype, on with the show.

Debug Mode

I was in the main hallway of our house, preparing a batch of tomato sauce.

The place was big and clean, and had huge glass windows overlooking the beach. Life had been pretty good lately. There had been a lot of changes and adaptations, but on the whole it was easier, better. No more worries of nations falling apart or people going hungry. I’d even gotten into cooking on my own terms.

But I had to get the damn sauces made right now, so the crews could distribute them to the neighborhood; a real neat labor division, for anyone in the radius who wanted fresh tomato sauce. I loved cooking, but the rigid schedules I knew I would only ever despise.

I absently maneuvered past my father in the hallway and almost dropped the big metal cylinder. A frantic thought passed through my head: I’ll have to make another because I’m going to drop this one, and I had the strange impression that a drop-down menu with a Copy function would have been the absolute best way to remedy the situation. To my surprise I recovered from my stumble with the cylinder still in my hands.

When I looked up at the countertop on the side of the hall, ready to heft the batch of sauce onto its receptacle plate, I found that there was already a cylinder of sauce there.

I had only made one batch of sauce. I put the ingredients in, stirred, cooked… I racked my memory. The tall tub of sauce that was on the counter hadn’t been made, but there it was.

I realized I had copied it. I made another drop-down in my mind, and there it was, plain as day, a Copy function.

I could think something that made something impossible happen.

I hit the Copy function, and then there were two cylinders of sauce on the counter. My arms were going numb now, more from shock’s adrenaline than the weight of the bucket, so I set the third next to them.

I made another drop-down in my mind. There was nothing on it now. Just blank. No Copying. The tub of sauce had to be in my hands for it to work.

A very strange feeling began to creep up on me. I felt compelled to slam the extra sauce buckets into the trash receptacle before anyone could see them and ask me to explain what I was doing, what I was doing to the matter and energy I’d created by impossibility, but I rejected it. I’d been a crazy person all my life, and now I had the chance to show my family I had every right to be crazy.

I didn’t get off to a good start on that.

“Look! Look!” I yelled, eyes wide, backpedaling through the living room with my finger pointing at arm’s length, instantly accusing the utterly inanimate buckets and their basil-flavored contents of abominable witchery.

My father gave me a stale look. It could have been facial sign language in our family for oh no, here we go again. He waved my son over, and they left the room through the screen doors to play on the beach. I beamed a hurt look into the backs of their heads, but I couldn’t bring myself to confront them verbally. The door closed behind them, and Mom turned to face me with a suppressed scowl.

There’s still a chance to change your mind, said some weird impression from my memories. You can stop this. Or you can take another risk. But whatever you do, move fast.

“Be respectful around your father! He’s been through so much,” said Mom, as my father and my son walked out of earshot.

“Look,” I said, as quietly and firmly as I could, and pointed at the counter again.

Both our pairs of eyes followed my accusing finger again, and found three buckets of sauce on the counter. I fought the urge to sprint as I went over to pick one up. With the bucket in my hands, I took a breath and summoned another menu in my mind.

It was blank.

Then it hit me; when the weird voice spoke to me, I had been so afraid, I’d done some other strange thing, and cleared the ability out of instinctual fear.

“Huh… wait. I have to make another! It saved the procedure,” I said, and began throwing cabinets open to find an empty bucket and more ingredients.

Outside, it began raining. I thought it had been clear a moment ago, but this was a whole new climate for me. In fact, we’d moved here because my father and I had missed the rain.

Hurry, said the voice from my memories, fouling my happiness with the rain, giving it the flavor of rotten meat. Unexpectedly rotten, the worst flavor.

“Oh, Lz_erk,” said my mother, “you can’t keep doing this. Don’t you remember what happened last time, when we found you screaming in a ball in the middle of the house?”

Middle of the house? My inner dialogue mocked, ever more eloquent than my stumbling speech; You mean the pit that existed that whole afternoon. The impossible pit under the house that was gone only hours later. It was raining then too, and hard, and the water pooled around my knees and soaked my gloves and jacket while I screamed out my infantile confusion from a muddy gorge right under us. You never did come up with a plausible explanation for why you found me soaking wet when I appeared in the other hall. Never matched how I supposedly got there with the timestamps on the uses of the home’s access points.

I was banging the sauce together as quick as I could, but it had only been a few seconds while I thought, and I barely had an empty pot on the counter. You’re running out of time, “said” the impression from my memories. Panic struck me as I found the layers of meaning in the memories: the dread, the knowledge that something unusual was going to happen, was thickening around me. Like a vat of corn starch and water under attack by flamethrowers.

“I copied the sauce,” I said. “I can do it again if I have time, I swear, but I copied it — they appeared out of nowhere. Look at them, why would I make three?”

I looked outside while Mom pondered my statements, and saw that the rain was coming down hard. It was thick pellets, droplets like hailstones, big enough to see in their diagonal downward pounding even at this distance to the windows in the living room. I was worried for my father and my son, but it was obvious now that what I had done was making it rain. Just like last time. The world was going into debug mode.

I shouted, “do you realize what this means?! The world is a simulation!”

“You have to stop this,” said my mother, completely unconcerned with the pounding rain and our absent family members. “Don’t you remember what happened last time? When you were sick. We found the solution, and everything was okay again.”

I stared at her in disbelief as the waves swelled outside.

A Farewell to Arms

I found myself in a room where someone was locked into a torture machine. The machine had two devices like six-fingered metal hands, which interlocked with his hands in a grip too tight for him to struggle out of.

As I tried to find a way to disable the machine, it twisted his arms in slow circles. His hands turned over, palms now up, then around again to the backs of his hands. He began screaming in more than fear, and I heard a faint, muffled popping noise as a straining tendon snapped.

A little glitch passed over the apparent reality, and it occurred to me that something was off about the whole situation. I was now the one in the machine, and I was down a tendon. The two people in the room weren’t having any better luck at disabling it than I had.

I tried straining against the machine for a moment, monitoring the speed at which it was mutilating my arms, then gave up when I saw no change in the device’s progress. I watched in silence with a morbid, detached fascination as the twisting machinery snapped through cartilage and tendons, then finally pulled my skin taut and split it open, revealing the full extent of the rearrangements it had made to my anatomy.

The Metal Thing

They found the thing’s chamber again, just as they had last time, deep in the cave and through the metal door which looked so out of place to me, with its fine lines, age-deadened lights, and purposeful-seeming filigrees. Now I could see the smooth cave walls and the oddity of the protruding metal for myself; I hadn’t been with them the first time it happened.

When they cracked open its strange sarcophagus, the impulse to run away — not out of the cave, but out of the country, to try to get as far as I could before it began its rampage — almost overtook me. I knew it would be in vain, almost as surely as staying with the group and tracking the thing’s actions would be, so I held my composure as best I could, remembering that it could see the smallest expressions and analyze almost any action. I would try to act as trusting as they did.

Golden talons gripped the sides of the sarcophagus, and a metal head of intricate machinery rose into view. There was no clanking or whirring; it was as silent as a creature of flesh, and I alone knew, with good reason. We were all taken aback by its appearance, myself no less, as I’d only seen it before while it inhabited the bodies it would later steal from us.

The thing’s head was almost insectoid, but it’s a poor description. It was a cluster of machinery — intricate sensory organs, antennae and manipulatory cilia, elegantly overlaying parts of obscurer purpose. It looked to me like nothing a human would think of without prompt and inspiration from outside our culture and our knowledge. Perhaps a computer algorithm could define a way to position this creature’s structures, and engineers could generate it from a blueprint, but its form seemed unthinkable.

It left its sarcophagus with a sliding, springing motion which suited its anatomy alone. It appeared dog-like, or even spider-like despite its apparent four limbs.

Then came the promises of cooperation and the expansion of our sciences. It said it would work with us alone, not with authorities it hadn’t met and couldn’t trust. We were to gain empires from its knowledge as it traced a path to advancement for our species, advancement that would improve its own quality of living back to the standards it preferred.

I was too terrified to laugh at the irony. I saw what had happened last time. Its idea of advancement was replacement.

Back at our base camp, a house we’d rented for the expedition, life was horror for me. I pretended to eat the food it was learning to prepare, and I had to push myself mentally into walking past it as easily as the others now did. I could see the scrutiny in the subtle reddish lights of its gaze. It could see all but my thoughts, and it was a short matter of time until it put the pieces together. I had to wait for it to take its first new body before I could destroy it; pitting any weapon I could carry myself against its metal hide would be suicide, and worse, it would take my body then, and no one would be left to suspect foul play.

It hadn’t taken this long last time. I knew what had changed, and of course, it was me. It wasn’t taking a host because it knew I was waiting for it to do so. Again flight seemed the better option, but it was too late to start running now.

I stood in my room, my back to the door, paralyzed with hopelessness as my mind sought escape.

The Temple

I walked across the busy intersection, eying cars and pedestrians for clues about their thoughts. As overwhelming as it can be to see the signs of all the anxieties, distractions, suspicions and contentions around me, it is a way to stay busy.

I neared the far corner to which I was crossing. A man was laying in the street, diagonal from me at perhaps ten feet now, in the other crosswalk. He was conscious, and oblivious or even anticipatory of the risk of injury; as I watched, he brought the barrel of a revolver to the roof of his mouth.

There were several cries of “no” and “don’t do it,” to which I joined in; perhaps the variety of voices of those he was shocking would give him some positive idea of his community.

He looked into my eyes, and for an instant, I could imagine a great sense of peace coming over him. I was terrified he would fire the gun like that, still making eye contact with me while the gases ripped his consciousness apart.

There was no shot, but there was something else, completely unexpected. I could feel his mind.

I could see this thin, spectacled man — less thin then than he appeared in the intersection — looking every bit the traditional professor in his tweed jacket and wire rims; he was hiking along a massive balcony of cliffs, cliffs of strange green cylindrical rocks, which resembled haphazard stacks of tarnished bronze coins.

The cliffs formed basins against their vertiginous rims, disobeying hydrodynamic erosion to create cascading pools of water, which fell off far below into lakes from the unthinkable heights above. And the spectacled man traversed these waters and strange outcroppings of messily-piled green circles of rock with great determination.

The intersection was gone. I was him now, I was living his memories.

At the peninsular precipice of the grandest and most inaccessible cliff was a temple whose size was obscured by its situation within the rock. It seemed to be carved into the rocks themselves; what were rough black and green edges to the stacks took on the appearance of manufactured and polished brick to form the temple’s deep green walls.

Within the outer wall was an enclosure, a tremendous, thin layer, as though insulating the inner structures. I attempted to circumnavigate this space between the outer and inner walls, to gain some idea of the temple’s true size, but most of the paths led DOWN into the carved rock, and the outer wall took twists and turns, and multitudes of stairs too long to see their bottoms. Some gaps at intersections were impossible; a stairway would lead down, and twenty feet ahead from its top, the passage would continue horizontally. The jump from the stairs to the ledge at the passage’s original height was at least ten feet — enough to lower oneself down without injury, but not feasibly climbable, especially given the steep, dangerous stairs one would have as runway for a leap.

They were one-way passages, and this was a labyrinth of unprecedented, unimagined scale.

The labyrinth began to fill my mind. I studied the few decorative carvings, attempting to place them as works similar to artwork from the old empires of Asia or South America or… anything at all, but they seemed merely like something too exotic to be categorized by my lacking knowledge. The faces of animals or fantastic creatures inscribed upon the rock at curious little alcoves were like nothing I had seen before, and of some, I could only guess whether they depicted creatures of any sort, or something abstracted from inanimate phenomena.

In my study of the carvings, I had forgotten how I arrived at this junction. The way out was unclear to me. I was now not a cautious explorer taking a quick peek within. I was the labyrinth’s prisoner, but I felt no fear at this thought; I felt that something was right about this instead. I had entered the labyrinth, and now I had a new existence, a new purpose. The strange carvings in their alcoves seemed to agree with me about this; there was something knowing, something telling in their appearances, in their regular intervals in the brick-like structure, and in what might be their faces. They knew — and they would tell me, if I walked.

I began to notice sinks and basins carved into the walls, fed by carefully-measured streams from above. They were not common, or easy to find; they were obviously here to provide the rare treat of sustenance to the most daring and vigilant explorers. I took this as a sign that if I became of one mind with whatever architectural entity lay behind these stony facades, I would find the path to the heart of the maze.

I did not feel irrational or hypnotized. I felt that doing anything other than going deeper into the maze would have been insanity. There was something down here, something someone could find. Something important enough to design a labyrinth that would outlast millennia.

I wondered how it was done in the old times, how explorers ought to prepare. Should I have brought food? But heavy rations would slow me down — there was water here; though I didn’t expect to find a fresh sandwich packed in a plastic baggie lying in an alcove waiting for me, I imagined that fruit trees or mushrooms could have been worked into these masterful designs. Perhaps, if I were worthy, I would find them before exhaustion overcame me… unless the vagaries of the ages had robbed the labyrinth of this possibly essential feature.

Time would tell. There was no thought of return, or of abandoning the exploration. There was no indication of what I sought at the end, or how I would leave even afterward, or what I would do then. The labyrinth filled my thoughts and became my every reason.

[The twist, though I made this part up after I woke up, could be that the explorer with the death wish might have discovered a memetic plague in the labyrinth; a contagious memory spread by telepathy or germs or some other magic, which would explain why he was trying to off himself, and why I was warped into his memories.]

The Most Messed-Up Dream Possible (or, “Hug Me, Then Give Me a Brain Transplant.”)

[Despite the absurdity, this one actually disturbed me for a couple days. I couldn’t close my eyes or find any peaceful moments without  the dream’s emotions coming back to me freshly. It’s one of my favorites, and it exhibits an unusual trick of dream magic — memory control. I hope you enjoy it.]

Under the busy city streets — where Bill Murray was acting the part of a spendthrift executive, squeezing his trendy new candelabrum staff topped with a tree of fake skulls into the alternate universe New York taxi — there was a cave.

A very special cave, a hundred meters tall at its heart, lit in soft oranges and blues from the luminescent microorganisms clinging to the smooth rock of the walls. The calm waters at the natural well, there in the magical core of the cave, birthed beings from the depths of their pure unfathomable emotion, bringing them directly into life.

From that strange well of souls tonight emerged a hominid, smooth and pink, with shining, interested eyes, and skin like bubblegum.

“Alive!” It said, in a cheerful, boyish voice, as it took bouncing, exuberant strides forth into the secluded land of wonders which it was created to explore.

“With legs to walk!” Its singsong voice rang joyous through the warm light of the massive cavern.

It jounced down the lip of the great well, soles slapping on the numinous yellow-orange cobblestones, toward a low rocky formation, which was encrusted with tan vines bearing large purple flowers.

“And a nose, to smell!”

It leaned to the rocks to catch the fragrance of the flowers on the non-photosynthetic plant, which must have been tuned to some unseen and equally exotic pollinator. The boy-creature’s jejune antics here took on an innocence not shadowed by the pressures and expectations of competitive life or society; this realm seemed to be the hidden bastion of innocent freedom. It seemed to ask no critique, from the impossible observer, which did not come from a mindset similar to its own, asking instead only that we join in the new life’s cheer.

My gift of disembodied sight panned around the curve to show the main body of the cavern trailing away into stranger wonders, still ahead on the gently uneven rolling curves of the cave floor; there were unlikely — or even magical — things ahead, undisturbed by the passage of great time and surely in need of an appreciating observer.

One of these wonders was a pulsating red X, embedded against all reason in the smooth rock of the cave floor.

The boy-creature walked down the huge rocky hall to stand on the anomalous marking.

“And what’s this?”

As his question rang in the air, I realized that the X in the floor was beating to the tune of my own heart, and something in the discovery was horrifying, like cutting into a fresh, unblemished fruit and finding the inside to be a dry and crunchy secret catacomb of garden-devouring pests, dreaming malicious alien thoughts inside their mottled brown cocoons.

My vision panned back as the boy-creature stood on the horrible, comical red X, and there were new “wonders” now hidden behind the young creature as well; an agglomeration of six to ten spiny golden spheres, perhaps eight feet tall, now hovered over the purple flowered vines. I could feel its thoughts. It was a colossal intelligence, and its emotion was an abyss of malevolence and cruelty.

The ground shook with explosive force, and terrible fanfare burst into my mind. A massive, towering leg touched the cavern floor, only a few meters from the happy young creature on the X. The leg was a vaguely purple shade of off-white, like steel or cadaverous flesh, and the curve on top of its great flat foot was just barely visible at the top of my vision, perhaps fifteen feet off the ground.

The second leg entered view; it landed on the red X, squashing the boy-creature against the rock with mountainous force. The leg lifted seconds later, revealing the pink remains — and whatever life left in them still felt awareness — pressed into the uneven rock.

The leg came down again with obvious malicious intent, suggesting that this godlike abomination had been flung from the well with the sole purpose of bringing unexpected, shocking, pervasive pain, and annihilation.

The grim fanfare continued as the monolithic leg stomped on the boy-thing, showing new mutilations in the innocent body each time it raised.

At last, the thing walked onward, pounding the ground with earthquake force, leaving me in my fixed direction of sight to question what was left of the young life, and how awful its last moments must have been.

Then the same cylinder of steely material returned, larger than a tanker truck, and slammed into the rocky X-marked floor of the cave, unmaking the solemnity, imprinting horror over the fresh grief. The titanic length of unyielding material raised and barreled down again, forcing the resilient body of the small life form apart, driving it further into the crannies of the rock with each blow.

After some length of time, it ended, and the dream was temporarily wiped from my memory.

Bill Murray, still looking a spry 30, examined the Mexican restaurant he had just installed in his office building floor. Upper management came down to scold him for his latest insane expense, and again he left the building to talk to the popular occult street priests and compare high class attire. After their conversations, my mind descended to the cave.

The dream repeated from there in its entirety, with slight variations.

My memories came back each time the boy-creature stood on the red X. X marked the spot where the terror returned, with a new feeling of dread and inevitability.

Again I saw the golden orb demon overseeing the brutal annihilation, again I wondered what deadly sensations overflowed in the little body as its spinal and cranial nerves or their analogues were crushed and splayed against the rock, again I wondered if after sight and limb had left the creature, could it still feel the explosive rhythm of the attack?

[I don’t know how long the dream cycled before I woke up — I can only remember two instances. Was Bill Murray’s cameo a reference to Groundhog Day? If so, when did my subconscious decide it was going to torment me with repetition — at the beginning of the dream series, or sometime after?]

Spiders and Snakes With Musical Accompaniment

I dragged myself out of bed with a well-deserved headache. Everything was blurry, as though I didn’t already have my glasses on. My mind was foggy, but that was nothing less than reassuring after last night.

The slow, eerie beats of Phragments and Korinth’s Mysteries of the Greylands followed me to the living room, never diminishing in volume, a static specter over my shoulder, heralding another delightfully grim and hopefully swift interlude between attempts at writing.

I think I crawled across the tiled floor to the kitchen, with no vestige of pride in appearances. I thought I saw a cat chasing something, a thin streamer of green light. I rubbed my eyes and stood up when I reached my kitchen stash of uncaffeinated hangover sodas.

My head almost brushed against the web then; a misty brown gossamer haze suspended against the pantry doors like an ethereal hammock. In the late afternoon light, I could barely discern the only relatively chunkier shapes drifting in its midst; tiny house spiders, and more of them than there were last night.

There was another spider spinning a gauzy shroud over a ketchup bottle on the cutting block. Ever the arachnophile, I picked up the bottle and carefully wiped its web against the flying spider city above. I would have to make a note to haul the whole mess of webs outside after I found and removed whatever megalopolis of even smaller bugs they must have been eating.

I turned to follow the music back to my lair, to find a way to puzzle out what should happen in the next chapter, and the full extent of the unblurried webbing hit me. The spiders had formed a faintly visible loft which stretched from window height to the ceiling at the corner where it met the higher wall. It spanned the kitchen and most of the living room, like the ghost of a threadbare sheet, hung out to dry and billowing in the wind.

I saw the streamer of green-yellow light again, as it darted from behind a cardboard box toward a pair of gardening gloves on the floor. It was a baby snake, no bigger around than a chopstick, and considerably shorter.

Relieved to see it wasn’t already bleeding or mangled from feline depredations, I set about catching it with my hands. A family member walked by me then, and the snake appeared again, as if blown by a gale force wind only it could feel. It reared up, the mighty serpent Jormungand compressed into the cutest little ribbon of a body, and hissed with unlikely volume for its size.

I grabbed at it, missing as it flowed back under the gloves. My hands found it then, pinning it gently to the floor by the glove material. I scooped it up, struggling to keep it from flowing like water between my fingers. Its head was larger than its body now, I noticed, nearly the size of a flattened walnut; it was growing, froglike, the tail now a diminutive tentacular afterthought of an appendage.

The snake’s head was large enough now that I could hold it firmly in one hand. I was becoming concerned about its possible bite; though it had looked anything but harmful on the floor, it was rapidly becoming weird. Its greenish head held red eyes, and elongated black pupils within which stared away from me with no trace of what we recognize as intelligence, no emotion to connect to, only a spreading, growing, unfathomable alienness.

I felt something sharp slip through my fingers, almost catching my skin. It was as though a stinger had emerged from the underside of the snake’s head, and only by some miracle missed me.

This isn’t a snake at all, I thought.

Then I noticed the thing’s tail in clearer detail. What had before seemed to be a normal, gently curved tapering end, was a vicious hollow enamel barb, which slammed into my bare stomach before I could think to move my hands away.

Everything went gray, and the air went out of me as I fell to my knees. I never even felt my face hit the tiles of the floor.

Brain Cancer Sounds Like a Shitty Deal

I wished them luck as they left. We all did.

We felt bad, sitting around having fun, like everything was fine and this was a normal night. Any one of us would have volunteered to drive instead, but she knew the best route and had the best alibi.

They wouldn’t even be able to call and say they made it out, but they’d probably get through — we’d phoned in all the distractions we could without arousing suspicion — and if they didn’t, it was all over for all of us. One word about who we were smuggling through the roadblocks would destroy all our lives, so we might as well live it up.

The next day I was in the gaping pavilion of the medical center. Morning sunlight came in through the wide open end, giving the impression of a massive artificial cavern. The brick and cement patterns and the stony columns which held up the vaulted roof absorbed my attention while I waited for the call. It felt strange to be in an area that dealt with paperwork and identity and legality. I felt out of place, but confident. We had done the right thing, and now we needed to take another risk; interacting with the daylight world again for my sake.

My father and his friend fiddled with the buttons at the phone on the receptionist’s podium; they meant to get the news first, to make me less nervous. It doesn’t matter, I thought: I’m bored, but they can do whatever makes them feel better.

They put the call on speaker, and the voice of a radiologist came through. He sounded informal, and maybe even younger than me. I wondered if he knew my father or his friend.

“Yeah. A tumor,” he said, confirming what he’d told them before they’d found the speaker button. “Scary big.”

I smirked and choked on a chuckle. I could feel it then, the heavy, cold squatter lurking inside my cranium. I wondered if the malformed tissue could think, wondered if it was a part of me. Maybe was even helping me form these thoughts. Maybe its selfish advance had crushed the parts that should have inhibited my stoicism, making me the bored actor, the underestimated vicious plotter, the mousy little monster I am.

I tried to find the words, the snarky apathy, to argue against surgery. It would be fun to see how convincing I could make them be in their rebuttals — after all, how long did I really have anyway? But the resentful, irreverent remarks didn’t come to me as quickly as they should have. Something about the radiologist’s lack of professionalism was nagging me.

“There’s something else,” came the voice from the intercom, “we looked everywhere, and we still haven’t found her yet. But it won’t be long.” My father gave me a confused look as my heart sank into the horror I should rightly have felt before. It was all over now.

[What the hell are you doing up there, brain?]

The Jungle Drug

[This is another favorite. I love when I can step outside my head and my life to play a new and complex character in a dream, one with its own memories and life. This is the purest recreation, and perhaps a glimpse of what our descendants may enjoy in the ideal future of entertainment.]

I felt sick again, so I must have been awake. People were talking. I was at some other group session, some other lecture — the real torment of our incarceration.

The huge auditorium was full of some voice that droned on about immorality in some other high society figure.

I can’t believe anyone cares, I thought. Just then, the crowd broke into a short cheer. The microphone went silent. I dozed as those nearest me spoke in thankfully quieter volumes.

One phrase, from just a foot or two to my left, caught my attention and woke me up swiftly; “… put me in here for the rest of my life, because I had no money!” The voice, as always, held a tone of accusation. He’d been wronged, and everyone had to know it. I knew what the reply would be, and who would give it — someone I liked much less.

“No, you were put here because you ate some guy’s sku–”

I overlapped my voice with his, drowning him out: “Because he had no money!”

I cast a glare to the antagonist, as if to say, don’t break his delusions while I’m sitting next to him, but it was futile.

I crawled off under a table on my arms, as my legs were refusing to move again. No matter; they’d be back soon, and no one who knew who I was would disturb me. As I crawled, I looked back to the deluded fellow. He was giving me an injured look — no one ever believed what he believed; was I playing some cruel joke on him?

I liked him. He was calm and polite, and I felt like crap for getting involved in his head. We all have sore spots, and his were undeserved, no matter how crazy and dangerous he was.

“Sorry mate. You can believe whatever you want to believe, just let me crawl under this table first,” I told him. No sense getting myself killed over their inane bickerings. I curled up there and, after the crazy one decided he should do what I did and came to sleep under the table as well, I slept again.

I woke up in the warehouse. We had privacy here, and our possessions. Some more than others.

I walked past the cracked windows, ignoring the harsh spotlights from the guard towers outside and smiling absently at the rubbery decals on the windows, which documented the strange insects we had found. Their translucent colorations were evident even now at night, in the glow of the spotlights surrounding the warehouse. Here was the mosquito-thing, and here the dragonfly-thing… Yes, they’ve done a fine job of learning to make the camps into homes. They even moved the bugs.

It was time to get back to work. I wouldn’t be healthy forever, and the fog over my thoughts was proof I needed to hurry. But everything was coming along swimmingly.

The ant on the tissue paper near my bed had transformed into something unexpected; last night, it was curled into a ball, cleaning one antenna in endless repetition. I had expected it to die.

Now, its mass had increased as much as fivefold. It unfurled as I watched it, as if it had saved the spectacle for my eyes. It was growing a long, thick tail, which ended in a tufted, brushy mass of antennae, each topped with a tiny white dot. I’d have to keep an eye on it.

I uncovered my prize possession, and was disappointed to see it hadn’t made such remarkable progress. It hadn’t visibly grown, but that was okay. It had young now.

Both of them, mother and child, were sinewy white figures with thick, wrinkly hides, which felt only slightly smoother and softer than bark. Each of the figures had two legs, two arms, and a tall, featureless blocklike head, punctuated only by a wide, thin, jagged mouth. The guardian was nearly twice the queen’s size already — big enough I would need to cradle him in two hands if I chose to pick him up. Soon he wouldn’t appear so harmless and inanimate. Soon, he would be strong enough to rend bones. I would be free, and the other powerful figures in our captive society would follow my lead.

I chewed the paste, preparing to outline another figure. It was wonderful. I was intoxicated with pride for my creations.

I heard a thick, wet, splattering noise, and a hiss. I grinned broadly, accidentally swallowing a bit of the paste.

She’s marked him already!

My head jerked back to their hiding place, and there it was: a viscous mass of foamy white saliva, sitting on the guardian’s temple, spreading pheromone signatures, activating receptors in his skin, cementing the chemical bond between them. The liquid mass on the guardian’s blank forehead bubbled and sizzled softly.

Saliva welled up in my own mouth, and I spat. Let it be a homage to the guardian’s formal acceptance into the family, I thought. As the droplet hit the dirt of the warehouse floor, it revealed itself to be foamy, and day-glo orange.

What?! No! No, no!

I forgot something! Why hadn’t I followed my notes more carefully? Why had I given in to complacence and the illusion of safety? Had I just chewed the raw root by mistake?

I couldn’t recall. My mind was enveloped in mist. I could feel the energy rising up within me, threatening to block out my thoughts. I felt excellent. I felt perfect. And I would probably die horribly in a matter of minutes.

I spat again. Orange and frothy. Again; oranger, frothier. Again; pinkish.

I thought back to the studies, the training, the articles. There weren’t many studies on its toxicity, were there? It was hard to even get a lethal dose established. But that was for administration of the end product, not the raw substance I’d just ingested, the one that turned tissues into factories for the drug.

I dashed past the dimly lit cubicles of the shanty town we had established inside the converted warehouse, toward the rundown bathroom. Spittle flew from my mouth with each breath as I ran, leaving a florescent trail behind me. The larger drops left darker patches, for the same reason a bottle of a concentrated bright dye can appear black.

My body seemed to scream in joy at me as I ran.

I’m healthy again! I’m perfect! I’m an Olympian! A god!

I rushed to the toilet and gripped it in a loving embrace with my left arm. The cool porcelain felt good against my flushed skin. I threw the water from the bowl up against my mouth, in a frenzy to clean the powerful raw substance out of me. More water came away from my mouth than I had splashed up into it, and all of the water was purple. I repeated this two or three more times, hoping against all reason for the water to come away clear and clean.

Then I vomited. Hard.

A purple waterfall emerged from my mouth. The water in the bowl swirled, and turned a deep hue. The spatter on the porcelain was yellow, like the oil left behind on a bowl of chicken soup, but the water was now black as night, with softer swirls of purple. It was entrancing.

There’s never been a human fatality from the drug itself. There’s never even been one, I thought, as I rocked backward uncontrollably with the violent force of the air entering my lungs, my arms holding me to the bowl in a death grip. My abdomen clenched, and another purple waterfall blasted through my mouth, holding my lips open wide. I choked and gasped, and the air tasted as fresh and sweet as a fantasy, as a miracle.

I could have called for help; I thought I could still make it to the phone. But then they would find my projects, and everything would be ruined. The guardian and the queen would be burned and buried. In any case, there was no antidote for this. No one yet was even aware one could ever be needed — excluding myself, I supposed.

I felt watery. I felt like I had just quenched the thirst of a lifetime. My stomach ached with liquid fullness. Yes, I was going to die; under normal circumstances, the dehydration should already have been painful.

I vomited again, dumping a fortune of the superdrug into the toilet bowl. The water was solid black, and I wondered how I could flush it after I died, to hide the evidence of the jungle drug.

At least I won’t feel it until the end, I thought to myself. It won’t hurt until after the gastric tissue is dessicated and begins to break up, or hypovolemia sets in. I was thankful the others left me alone during my incidents of sickness, despite the lack of a bathroom door or stall door. I wouldn’t want to share my last moments with them.

The Nexus

[I enjoyed the architectural impossibilities of this dream very much. It’s one thing to read about Lovecraftian spatial impossibilities, and another entirely to experience them.]

I was in a round rectangular room. Aside from the many doors, it was featureless and white.

There was no mystery about the flat ceiling, about ten feet up from the flat floor. I could see the corners in the walls when I walked up to them, all four of them were certainly there, but when I stood near the middle, they disappeared, and the room was ovoid, with rounded corners and no right angles at all.

I turned around, trying to get my bearings. There were twelve doors, equally spaced, around the room’s periphery. Everything was lit in a soft white light, perhaps from a large skylight above.

Well, I’m in a room of doors. I must have came through one, and I must have to leave through another, I thought. But there was something unnerving about the room, something insubstantially wrong beyond its shifting dimensions.

The doors were identical, so I chose the one I faced. I walked to it and grasped the knob. I’d just take a peek outside, and that couldn’t possibly hurt me.

“It’s a void,” said a deep voice next to me. He was a traveler, complete with an unremarkable brown suit and a thin-brimmed fedora. He was youngish, maybe not much older than me, but his face was scarred and worn, and his eyes were distant.

I could see it then in my imagination, as clearly as if I were there. There was a blue sky, with no gradients of light to indicate a star, and no ground to reveal a planet. Just a cloudless nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere filtering blue light from a paradoxic sourceless source, dumping it down below into a well of gravity without any visible matter. What was that ocean below? Was it water? Was the air pressure the same on the other side of the door; would I be sucked out into the void? How far would I fall?

A central wall had emerged from the floor behind me, filling much of the interior of the large room. It was white and featureless, and it had four corners which I could easily see, but when I looked away from them, it was round. I had a memory that it had always been there, although I remembered that it hadn’t been there earlier.

I moved to another door, wary of the traveler and his suggestion. I didn’t trust him, but I have a phobia of large spaces, and prefer not to needlessly expose myself to them. Maybe he would have some more helpful advice about the next door.

The traveler was nowhere in sight now. Questions raced through my mind. How long had I thought about the void? Was time linear in this place? How did I get here?

I walked along the area between the inner wall and the doors, looking for some clue toward safe egress. I couldn’t tell how far I had walked, or if I was making any progress. The room’s dimensions were deceptive; judging by the corners, the room was impossible to measure because the straight halls could have only one corner in sight at a time, and the visible portion of the outer wall contained more doors than it should have. Were there more doors now? Less? I had forgotten to count them as I passed them.

Blindly choosing a door seemed dangerously foolish now, so I would wait to see which one another visitor chose, and follow. I spent the next few seconds walking the hall(s), frequently looking back lest I miss another traveler.

The lights dimmed swiftly to a very subdued level, and the central wall became transparent, then folded into the floor in a soundless instant flurry of toothy triangular panes, disappearing completely. I heard creaking and ripping; the walls were blistering, then tearing open under the deforming pressures, like tender roasted flesh receiving a merciless Indian burn.

The white paint yellowed and browned between the blisters on its surface. Masses between the skin-like patches of paint revealed themselves in the dim light to be reddish agglomerations of organs and tissues.

The doors warped in their frames as the room lost its subtle facsimile of normal structural dimensions. Some of the doors burst from their hinges and tumbled into whatever dark expanses lay beyond their frames, others jammed tightly at diagonal angles, splintering at unlikely angles into vicious wooden cactus-like hazards.

With the central wall now absent, I could squint through the darkness to see what had been forming within it; an array of strange devices that seemed half-biological, or perhaps were fused with the fleshy masses of living things that had come in contact with them. Some of the inanimate parts of the devices resembled familiar items; a guillotine, a slanted drafting table with numerous mechanical parts affixed to its surface, and something like a human-sized cage, but with bars facing outward and inward at angles unsurvivable for an occupant. All were coated with the same indecipherable chaos of meat, veins, and organs, fused together into a living machine. They pulsed in the dim light to the beat of many unseen hearts.

I could see one ambulatory form, on the other side of the area that had been the center wall. It looked like a glitch in reality, made out of the appearance of the brown-suited traveler. Parts of him were not connected to each other, and the holes between his parts moved and shifted in ways that defied my eyes’ attempts at explanation. Other colors had seeped into the palette of him, and other phenomena too; there were metal bars connecting his structures where bones should be, wires where nothing should be, and thin sprays of green sparks where his jumbled limbs touched each other.

He seemed to be unable to move correctly. The parts composing his legs — biological, mechanical, meaningless wood and metal shafts, ectoplasmic, alien — seemed stuck in the floor and in the contraption in the center console near him; then they spontaneously unstuck, and jammed against his arm, which now had three too many joints, one of which was made of flat green rectangles which were connected by shadows cast upon the air.

It’s time to take one of the doors, I thought, but then something else came to me; I could stay here!

Lucidity

[I had this dream near to a decade ago, and I don’t think any detail from it has ever left my memory. It’s the most terrifying dream I’ve ever had, and its eventual interpretation meant a lot to me.]

I appeared in a large gray building — a warehouse or a factory. I had no idea how I got there; it was like I woke up standing there. There was a faint beam of sunlight coming in through one of the partially blocked windows, but otherwise the building was as dark as a tomb, and empty, aside from the dusty clusters of pipes that ran through its periphery.

I could see to the other side of the building, where one dark doorway was in view. As soon as my eyes hit the doorway, my brother walked through it, into the huge main room, and he began walking in my direction. He didn’t see me, though I was standing right in his view; his eyes never even flicked over me.

I had a feeling that something was horribly wrong, more wrong than just walking into this room and forgetting why I’d came here. My brother has had episodes of sleepwalking before; maybe I could wake him up, and he could explain where we were. I yelled his name; he didn’t notice, which he would have if he was sleepwalking. I thought maybe he was in a very bad mood; I yelled “RESPOND!” to try to get any sort of autonomous nervous reaction, just a flinch would do; I got nothing.

A chill went up my spine and my nerves tingled like I’d been hit with an electric current. This was all very wrong; was I dreaming? No, my dreams are always hazy; I’ve had lucid dreams, and I’ve never in my life questioned if a dream was real and then mistaken it for reality. I could feel the air currents on my skin, I could feel the weight of my clothes and smell the building’s musty air. My mind was perfectly sharp, and I was scared and confused. Everything here was crisp and crystal clear; there was no evidence that this was a dream.

My brother split into two people. He just took a step in two directions at once, like he was stepping out from behind himself — seamless, like a magic trick with mirrors. The strangeness of it hit me hard, and I staggered. They were both him, and neither looked at me. They were getting closer now, at a lazy pace; maybe twenty feet away.

Impossible things were happening. My mind wanted to curl up into a fetal ball. I wanted to shut my eyes, plug my ears, and cry like a baby until I got back to a world that made sense. But my legs were frozen in fear, so going to the floor was not an option.

I must be dreaming, I thought. Some new kind of dream, something LIKE a dream — maybe I’m sick, or I’ve been drugged, or something very weird happened to me. Maybe I’m crazy, or schizophrenic…

The images — I knew now that this wasn’t my brother, but something wearing the idea of a body which my mind could interpret — walked back into each other, but they weren’t anyone I recognized now; it was something invisible which could still be seen.

I don’t know how to describe that. It’s like looking at something you think you saw out of the corner of your eye, something that you mistake for something else, until you turn your head and realize, oh, that’s always been there, it’s nothing weird, but this looked so fundamentally wrong even while I stared right at it.

It had the shape of a person, but I couldn’t see it. It was like a jumble of ideas about vision; it was the idea of the glossy rainbow hues on a soap bubble, the idea of a mirror-like reflective coating, the idea of a transparent ghostly image, the idea of seeing something out of the focal length of my vision. I came to believe at that moment that “seeing a ghost” wasn’t something you could shrug off, or capture on a camera; it was a mind-twisting, soul-wounding experience, not based on photons captured in the eye at all — it was sight within a blind spot, a forceful restructuring of the neural methods of vision and comprehension — the sort of thing that could drive you into madness and catatonia.

The thing was almost toe-to-toe with me when it had merged back into a single entity. After giving me my moment of horrific contemplation, it leaned in to speak to me. I could, and could not all at once, see its invisible eyes staring into mine.

“You are dead,” it said — in my own voice.

Some of the fear was pushed out of my mind, like a cup overflowing: it was replaced with a hurt and insulted sadness. Who was this creature to walk up to me and tell me that I was dead, stealing and slandering my own voice to do it?!

I glared at the thing, with eyes that stung with the nipped buds of angry tears, and took a deep breath to steady myself for my reply.

“I can feel myself breathe,” I started, clenching my fists. “I can feel my heart beating.”

I certainly could. This thing was about to make itself understood, or I would demonstrate how persistent and creative a mere corporeal being like myself could be while under psychological attack by a monster.

“I’ve never felt more alive!” I spat the words at it while leaning in, as if to ask, was that all it could do to me?

“No,” it said, almost with sadness… or regret.

I saw then that the invisible face in front of me was my own.

“I have touched you.”

“And you are dead.”

In my dreams I see, the crying face of mankind
In my life, I swear, the light is brighter this time
In my dreams I feel, the screaming soul of the time
In my life, I swear, I never crossed this tide

                                                          T3rr0r 3rr0r – In My Dreams